Press 1 for Spanglish

Monday, March 31, 2008 by Dick.

I paid $3 to wash my truck in a $2.50 carwash over the weekend. That irritated me because I needed an extra few minutes to finish rinsing the thing and the Car Wash sign said “Add quarters for extra time.”

Of course, when I added the two extra quarters for extra time, it simply swallowed them and blinked at me.

Where are the illegal aliens when you need them? I would gladly pay $3 to some illegals to wash my truck. I went searching for some and got 3,170,000 hits in Google alone. Outraged Patriots leads that list.

Thirteen motel owners in Mesa, Arizona, were sentenced last week for catering to human smugglers and conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens. UPI reported that a US task force raided several Latino commercial establishments and arrested 49 people alleged to be illegal aliens who worked for a security company.

Huh. My great-x8-grandfather, Richard Barnard (ber-NARD), was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, and sailed for the New World about 1642. Richard accompanied William Penn to the fertile southeastern counties of Pennsylvania (1). I guess that means that to the Lenni Lenape, my great x 8 grandfather was an illegal alien. Good thing the Lenni Lenape had less Homeland Security than we have today. And that conquerors don’t have to learn the Algonquian language known as Lenape (now “Delaware”).

I can think of a few reasons we don’t want people coming here from other countries to do the work we apparently don’t want to do. After all, they might change the way we live, change the foods we eat, change the way we manufacture things, and teach our wimmens a thing or two about love.

I’m all for it. After all, I come from alien stock. Just ask my kids. So do you, and you, and you. That fresh blood is one part of what makes this country great. I say we should spend our security efforts filtering out the peeps who want to rob and rape and maim and kill us and then invite the others in for a good party.

As long as we quit telling them they don’t have to learn English.

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Want more detail? I wrote the op-ed Norman - French - English - Italian - Dutch - American for the Burlington Free Press about a dozen years ago. You can read it here.

Posted in Society, Politics & News, PC, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 1 Comment »

XM Merger With Sirius Approved

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by Dick.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division said yesterday that the buyout of XM Satellite Radio by Sirius would not hurt competition or consumers.

OK, OK. I get it.

Of course creating a de facto monopoly in satellite services won’t hurt satellite services competitors. There are no satellite services competitors.

<sigh>

Posted in Quickies, Politics & News | 3 Comments »

Turning Tricks

Monday, March 24, 2008 by Dick.

In real life, I am an engineer. I do own a business. I do write a weekly newspaper column and all the rest. And I do work as a photographer. But underneath it all, I am an engineer.

It is more than just education or training; it is a state of mind.

A friend–I’ll call him Ralph because that’s his name, or not–is heavily into astrophotography. He emailed that he had just found a digital camera to lust after for his night shots. It apparently has intervalography functionality, a bruckjurnometer, and I think, the much desired high hepjabossity index. He says it has to plug in to his computer to work but the images go straight to the hard drive.

He sometimes runs one of his existing digital cameras from the computer; another friend–I’ll call him Clyde because that’s his name, or not, too–also does that, so I asked Ralph if he doesn’t think he has enough tricks now to turn pro.

Clyde runs big, ghastly expensive CCDs, Ralph told me. Clyde is in essence a pro, especially since he discovered a supernova.

Ralph says he (Ralph) wants to stay a prosumer which he defines as “really good at being mediocre.”

Why, I wondered?

Seriously.

He has the level of expertise. He has the interest. He has probably made at least the same order of magnitude of investment. He’s data-driven, for heaven’s sake. It seems like the reasonable next step.

“Nah,” he said. The real pros take the photos you see on magazine covers, in National Geographic, and so on. They are very very good. And their gear is very very expensive.

Unfortunately, that could be my competition, too, the cover shooters. Fortunately, the entry bar is still low enough in daylight photography that a gifted amateur with decent equipment can sell pretty well. After all, Ansel Adams’ first camera was a Kodak Brownie box; he also tested the Polaroid and promoted its use to his associates.

Still, Ralph has “no wish to devote that much energy on something with so little potential for tangible reward.”

“I am an engineer,” he said, “not an artist.”

I am both.

The relatively low entry bar is also true in some other branches of the arts. Were I a painter with the same ability as I have in photography, I could sell paintings at a price that is reasonable. I can already sell landscape photographs at a price that is reasonable. I can sell words at a price that is, unfortunately, unreasonable, meaning about the same in actual dollars as it was 50 and even 100 years ago. But I can sell them.

At the end of the day, that’s my bottom line.

Posted in Photography, Random Access | 1 Comment »

It’s the Economy, Stupid

Monday, March 17, 2008 by Dick.

The accent may be on the wrong syl LA ble.

A friend mentioned that he had heard that a very large bank was talking to the Fed about liquidity problems. He was nervous that we might be on the brink of something way uglier than most are thinking.

He had probably heard the first rumblings about the Bear Stearns calamity. JP Morgan Chase agreed Sunday night to acquire B-S but the problem in the financial markets is widespread and still growing. The Wall Street Journal has a short history of troubled investment bank sales here: snipurl.com/21y4f

We recovered from the junk-bond market debacles and from the savings and loan scandals and from the insider trading/arbitrage adversity. We will recover from this sub-prime mortgage mess, too. Nonetheless, I am not happy about owning banking stocks right now.

That said, I have two thoughts for my friend.

Really.

Just two.

(1) 99.94% of the ARM crisis has been caused by systemic fraud (as in felonious behavior) on the part of the mortgage sellers and particularly the banks that financed the mortgages, then resold them as “secure” investments to pension funds and the like. The only good news is the Saudis and the Chinese appear to hold at least some of the paper.

(2) There is no real real estate problem no matter what the news says. Lemme repeat that. There is no real real estate problem no matter what the ID10Ts in Congress say.

We own a house. The roof still keeps the rain off, the heat still keeps the cold out, and the rent-a-cat still curls up by the fire. It absolutely does not matter to me today if this house is worth a dollar, a million dollars, or something in between. As it happens, the house is worth more than when we bought it. Yay! It’s also worth less than it was a year ago. Boo! Oh, wait. I didn’t sell it a year ago and I don’t plan to sell it today so its value on the market is of absolutely no consequence to me.

OK, its value on the market is of absolutely no consequence to me except when I pay taxes on its value but that’s a whole nother story.

Now the bad news. In other words, here’s why my friend may be right.

Nobody believes me.

We are so driven by this Chicken Little squawking about the housing sky falling that we really really believe the end is nigh.

And so it will be.

For a while.

Wot to do, wot to do.

Buy.

Warren Buffet is a whole lot smarter about this stuff than I am. His advice is simple. When you find a good property at a bargain price, buy it. Unfortunately, nobody believes him right now, either.

It’s not just the economy. It’s the stupidity of the herd that drives the economy.

Posted in Banking, Business, Sociology, Politics & News, Random Access | 4 Comments »

Do You Worry That Everyone Will Know?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 by Dick.

Do you worry that everyone will know? That’s the message of the Detrol LA ads, that people might find out you have to … pee.

Horror of horrors.

For heaven’s sake, don’t we have enough real stuff to worry about? Like snot on our sleeves or how to pronounce “cocamidopropyl betaine” and “polyquaternium.”

Posted in Quickies | 1 Comment »

Bad for Baby?

Monday, March 10, 2008 by Dick.

No. Bad for Us.

Are common baby lotions bad for babies?

A small study conducted by the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute showed that exposure to phthalates caused reproductive problems in mice.

Lotions made for babies (and grownups) include phthalates to add the fragrance or color that separates a Johnson and Johnson shampoo from a Proctor & Gamble product.

I looked on the back of a baby shampoo bottle and found cocamidopropyl betaine, sorbitan laurate, sodium trideceth sulfate, and even the dreaded polyquaternium. Say, what? The latter would be a quater that marries several iums.

“If it’s difficult to say and it’s not commonly known, it’s probably something we should wonder about,” Dr. Lori Racha of University Pediatrics told the local Channel 3 News.

Dr. Racha says it is too early to know if those products actually harm human babies but she wants us to switch anyway. “If it smells really sweet, it’s probably not something we should be using on our babies,” she said on the news.

Hello?

This is a medical doctor–a pediatrician–who wants us to make a crucial decision based on what she doesn’t know.

I can apply that technique in all facets of my life, can’t I?

The National Institutes of Health’s DailyMed reports that nadolol is a “nonselective beta-adrenergic receptor blocking agent.” It is chemically identified as “1-(tert-butylamino)-3-[(5,6,7,8-tetrahydro-cis-6,7-dihydroxy-1-naphthyl)oxy]-2-propanol.” It even contains microcrystalline cellulose.

Anybody here have any idea what all of that means? Any at all?

Yeah, yeah, I know somebody can answer yes, but Corgard® or nadolol, its generic equivalent, has been prescribed to thousands of people who have absolutely no clue about its chemical makeup, let alone any of the scientific names it has. In those patients it successfully treats their high blood pressure or prevents the chest pain called angina. A beta blocker, nadolol slows the heart rate and relaxes the blood vessels so the heart does not work as hard as it might.

I wonder. Should people with hypertension not take nadolol or its pharmacological stable mates because they cannot pronounce the ingredients?

consumersearch.com reports that experts choose the Graco SnugRide as the best infant car seat. One of the reasons is what Graco calls its “EPS Energy Absorbing Foam Liner.” EPS is the abbreviation for Expanded Polystyrene. Polystyrene is made from an aromatic monomer styrene.

Maybe that’s scary, too. Dr. Racha thinks that chemicals that smell good are bad for our babies. We’d better ban the Graco SnugRide. But, wait. Aroma therapy is all the rage. It’s supposed to be good for us. Or maybe that’s not what the aroma in aromatic means. Who knows?

What is going on here? Does Dr. Racha honestly believe that just because she thinks something might sound bad for us it really really is? When a second grader imagines that a dog ate his homework, he honestly believes that is true. One of the tests of growing up is that we stop blaming the dog.

The problem here is not whether babies should be exposed to phthalates or polystyrene.

The problem here is whether we should be exposed to fear mongering backed up by imaginary science.

Posted in Science (real), Science (not-so-real), PC, Geekery, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | 1 Comment »