Views from the Fence

Down side to being on the centrist side in your group of friends:

• Conservative friends/acquaintances/etc. are screaming bloody murder about Comey's gutlessness
• The HRC-at-any-cost friends/acquaintances/etc are of the blindered mind-set "see: she didn't do anything wrong!"

As per usual, the truth lay somewhere in the middle ...and you're not going to get it just from reading the headlines.

• To my more conservative friends/etc: no, Comey isn't rewriting laws and ignoring the seriousness of HRC's actions.
• To my more HRC-oriented friends/etc: no, Comey didn't say that HRC did nothing sanction-worthy - as much as most of the media outlets might like to make true by allusion.

To both groups, I'd say, "read the full text of Comey's statement". Read the whole thing. Pay attention to the level of detail. Then, if that is not enough, pay attention to the fourth-to-last paragraph:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

That's not Comey saying "there was no crime here". That's not Comey rewriting laws to let HRC off scot-free.That's Comey going to the very edge of what's generally allowed in these types of statements. He's going to that edge to say "if this were a less-privileged offender, there would be real sanctions" and that "there was wrong-doing, but, the expense of prosecuting it versus the likelihood of achieving a meaningful outcome means that I can't recommend undertaking those expenses" (where "expense" is measured both in financial terms and in political-capital).

For me, this goes back to the "trust" issue that even HRC acknowledged (granted, in a way that indicated that she felt it was a problem with voters rather than her own conduct). It goes back to the shadiness - supposedly ghosts of the past - that was evidenced in Bill Clinton's recent decision to pop-in on Lynch's airplane at Sky Harbor. I don't consider myself particularly right- or left- on the political spectrum - I just believe that laws and regulations should apply equally (whether you're a politician, a cop or "little people"). When people act - probably rightly - that rules (in particular the associated consequences) aren't for everyone, it destroys my ability to trust them.

A Noisy Passage

Witnessed an amusing spectacle, as I was leaving work, today.

I'm walking down the long, tiled hallway that leads to the lobby of the office I frequently work in. Behind me, I start to hear, "PLAP! PLAP! PLAP! PLAP! PLAP!". Eventually, a late twenty-something comes "running" past me.

Note: I put running in quotes because he wasn't traveling significantly faster than me, just much more loudly.

As he passes by, I notice that the cause of the "PLAP!" sound is that he is attempting to run in leather-soled business shoes. His lack of speed - for all his clamor - is due to a combination of the shoes not being well-suited to any form of running and the fact that the tile floor gave his leather soles little in the way of meaningful purchase with which to propel himself.

Making matters worse, he was wearing a backpack while running. By itself, the wearing of the backpack would have been of little note. However, it was so loosely secured that with each bounding-stride (seriously: dude had more vertical travel than forward), that it was bouncing and flopping all over the place. As it flopped and bounced, it contributed a fwipping nylon and buckles sound to the rest of his noisy run.

The thing to complete this picture was that he was wearing a poorly-tailored suit. The suit was so loosely-fit that it, too, was bouncing around much like his backpack. I imagine that, had there not been so much other noise in his passage, that the rustling of the suit's synthetic fabrics would have been making their own din.

It was nearly 15:00 and traffic leaving our business campus becomes horrible not much after. I was similarly inclined to get out as quickly as I could (I usually leave at 14:00) to avoid the trial of incipient rush-hour traffic. So, in his defense, I could understand the rush to get out of the building. Still, for all the sound and fury, the effective pace meant he wasn't likely to be avoiding a meaningful amount of traffic.

Why I tell anyone wanting to mail me something "don't send it via USPS"

Wife ordered a box of gothery from some online shop (overseas, I think). Instead of sending it via FedEx or UPS, they sent it via registered mail. Wife got notification that the item was out for delivery, today.

Wife waits all afternoon for the postie to show up. He does, but, "no package." She asks him if he had any packages waiting in his truck and is informed that there was a package that had a bad code on it that was back at the substation - that she could go down and check to see if that was her package.
Wife walks down to the substation. Upon asking where her package was, they informed her that it had been delivered around 14:00. Wife had been sitting out on her sun-chair on the front porch from about 13:30 to nearly 16:00. No package had been delivered. So, she asks _where_ it was delivered to and who signed for the supposed delivery. She's informed that they won't be able to know until the carrier gets back to the station.

As it stands, Amazon already has it in their records to not use any shipping methods that leverage USPS. Thus, no USPS-direct nor things like FedEx SmartPost. They agreed to this notation after the third so-shipped multi-$100 order disappeared without a trace.
All of my bills and important documents are either delivered via email or are sent in concert with an email notification of pending delivery.

Simply put, if things are sent via USPS, there's about a 70% chance that they'll arrive ...or, at least, arrive on time. Usually, when they arrive late, it's because they were mis-delivered and the recipient was nice enough to bring it over or was nice enough to give it back to the postie on his next trip. But mostly, they just disappear, never to be seen again.

Seriously: how fucking hard is it to deliver mail. Is it really so fucking hard to read the entire goddamned address?

They Just Don't Get It (Or: Magical-Thinking Strikes Again)

Earlier this week, I wrote to my state Senators to express my disapproval of the forthcoming Burr-Feinstein encryption bill. Today, I got back a form response ...not that I was expecting a personal response - it's not like I'm a million-dollar donor:

Dear Mr. Jones,
     Thank you for contacting me regarding digital security and encryption policy. I appreciate hearing your views on this complex subject, which involves multiple competing security interests.

     While the debate over government access to encrypted communications has long been a contentious subject, the issue has received increased attention and scrutiny in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and, more recently, the ongoing legal battle between Apple Inc. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over access to the iPhone of one of the alleged perpetrators of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. As these attacks showed us, terrorists have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of technology. Social media platforms have become prominent tools for recruitment and radicalization. And when individuals show interest in terrorists' cause, they move their communications to encrypted applications and other secure platforms to evade detection. This presents an extraordinary security challenge for the United States and our allies, leading to warnings by law enforcement officials that conventional tools to track and apprehend these criminals have become increasingly ineffective.

     Frustratingly, there are no easy answers. The same tools that terrorists and criminals are using to hide their nefarious activities are those that everyday Americans rely on to safely shop online, communicate with friends and family, and run their businesses. On top of that, technological innovation changes rapidly and, frequently, beyond the reach of U.S. law. Thousands of new apps are submitted to mobile apps stores daily, most of them utilizing some level of encryption, and a majority of them are developed overseas. Moreover, the fundamental architecture of the Internet is a decentralized and resilient one.

     In order to better understand the issues we're facing and explore potential solutions, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and I introduced S.2604/H.R. 4651, the Digital Security Commission Act of 2016 on February 29, 2016. This legislation would create a national commission on security and technology challenges in the digital age. The Commission would convene a body of experts representing all of the interests at stake so we can evaluate and improve America's security posture as technology — and our adversaries — evolve.

     Our proposal will convene the brightest minds from the technology sector, the legal world, computer science and cryptography, academia, civil liberties and privacy advocates, law enforcement and intelligence to collaboratively explore the intersection of technology and security.

     This would not be a group of politicians debating one another. Nor would the commission be like other blue-ribbon panels, quickly established but soon forgotten. Rather, it would be charged with generating much-needed data and developing a range of actionable recommendations that can protect privacy and public safety. That is why this commission has been endorsed by a wide range of stakeholders – from the technology sector, to respected academic and legal experts, and distinguished national security figures.

     The threats we face with regards to digital security are real. They will not be met easily or dispensed with quickly. But I have no doubt that we are capable of overcoming these challenges if we convene the brightest minds in our country and work together.

     Again, thank you for contacting me. For further information or to sign up for my newsletter please visit my website at http://www.warner.senate.gov.

Sincerely,
MARK R. WARNER
United States Senator

So, while the form-mail isn't saying "I plan to vote for this (Burr-Feinstein) important bill", the text really isn't any less disturbing.

The "best minds" thing, by itself is disturbing. The "best minds" have already very publicly told you that what's being asked for isn't possible. Or, more specifically/technically-correct - it's not possible to both make encrypted data accessible to law enforcement without also making it as easily accessible to entities seeking illegal access. But never mind that, they're apparently just not trying hard enough! Technology is fucking magic and if one bit of magic is possible, any given bit of magic is possible if we just wish hard enough.

Even better is the farce of "we'll get a group of all the stakeholders together to work on this." There have been many such "gatherings of stakeholders to solve a difficult problem" exercises. Usually, the way it works out is that the differences between the stakeholders are irreconcilable. Then, the process either completely falls apart or the stakeholders who just aren't trying hard enough are dropped from the process or otherwise ignored. Only one outcome is acceptable - soundness of that outcome be damned.

So, with all due respect, Mr. Warner (or whichever drone you had compose this steaming pile of response), you're a completely clueless fucking tool. You are not worthy of being in a position to make decisions that affect the security of my personal data. You are not worthy of being voted for.

You Gotta Be Kidding Me

Heh... Tesla sends me an email saying that, if I want to ensure that I can get my hands on one of the new Model IIIs, I need to put a deposit on one, now.


Car is going to be unveiled tonight. Frankly, I don't buy - or pay to reserve a chance to buy - anything that I haven't seen yet. The fact that they're only expecting deliveries to start late next year - and then, only if I'm in California - and that signing up in the first half of 2016 is likely to maybe get me a car sometime in the second half of 2018... I gotta think, "sorry, no."


Even if I were someone who buys based just on a label, a lot can happen in a 2+ year period. You'd have to be a special kind of special to do that. I mean, I sorta understand it for the people who were looking to buy $100K+ cars - because, you're clearly buying an optional vehicle rather than a daily driver - but a car that's supposed to be priced in the daily-driver range? No. Just, no.

The Quiet House

When I was a kid, we had cats and dogs in our house. The order of things was that the dogs were noisy and the cats were comparatively quiet. The dogs alerted at the slightest provocation - wind, cars, bird shadows... you get the idea. On the other hand, my cats were fairly quiet: the first on only mewed when you were getting his breakfast ready or hissed when the clumsy dog stepped on him too hard; the pair I had as a teenager were a bit chattier - doing the usual mewing for food and could sometimes be coaxed to "talk back" if you mewed at them first (the one would also "click" when stalking bugs or spying birds and squirrels outside).

In my 20s, I'd had a couple rabbits. In general, they are very quiet animals. My second rabbit, Bambam, earned his name, however, as he had a tendency to stamp his back foot when he wanted attention. In his indoor hutch, this created a very noisy rattling. When he was roaming the house, it sounded like a shotgun going off.

After cancer took my second rabbit, towards the end of my 20s, I opted to get a cat. I found a local woman who had a litter of pet-quality Bengals she was selling off. I'd really only intended to buy one - the female named Bella - especially given the (then) astounding price of $550 (for one cat!). But, I realized that I actually wanted two of them. There were only four kittens in the litter, and two of them were spoken for. The only one remaining was the litter's runt - a male who quickly earned the name Grumbles (I can't even remember what name he came with: perhaps it's in his veterinary packet, somewhere?). Because he was the runt, she cut me a deal on him and only asked for $350.

As seems to often be the case, the runt grew to be the biggest of the litter. In his prime, Grumbles was a shade under 16lbs. Bella only clocked in at a shade over 10lbs. Neither cat was fat as both pretty much ate only enough to sate their hunger. I could have opted to simply free-feed them and they wouldn't have gotten overweight. So, those weights were very lean-weights. Being relatively short-haired, their muscle-definition and abdominal tucks were very evident.

At any rate, as Bengals, they lived up to many of the breed's peculiarities. They were very people-focussed: Grumbles followed me around the house in a way that you might normally expect of a dog. They also loved playing in water: this meant water bowls always had to have big mats around them and that I had to be very careful to latch the bathroom door while showering if I didn't want to have to towel off two cats (though,mostly Grumbles) after my shower. They were also very talkative. They didn't need to be prompted to converse. Wake up in the morning and you'd be greeted with meowing. Come home from work, be greeted with meowing. Leave the room not allow them to come with you and there'd be chastisement when you came back. And, if you just wanted to converse, you could go back and forth with them for a half hour or more - they never seemed to tire of conversing.

What's more, when the two of them did their twice-per-day exercise sessions (fighting), it would be a half hour of mad scrambling about the house, chasing each other. The thundering noise of these chases were punctuated by hissing, spitting and yowling by Bella (and the occasional "THUNK" as she'd run headlong into an obstacle that she'd misjudged in her flight-path). Grumbles, on the other hand, fought in eerie silence with an devilish look on his face that was a combination of anger and joy (and a whole lot of "fuck you").

In 2003, a few months before we married, Donna wanted a dog. So, after much searching, we got one (Lana: a Boxer/American Bulldog mix). The following summer, I discovered that I wanted a dog, too. PetFinder was quick to find me a good match (Puckett: an American Bulldog/Bull Terrier mix). Both were rather much quieter than any of my childhood dogs.Both really only alerted if they were certain you hadn't seen the potential danger. Lana could be convinced to "sing". Puckett would bark a bit when we rough-housed. But, other than that, they were quiet. The cats were as noisy as ever.

We lost Lana in December of 2010 and Puckett the spring immediately following. Both were lost to cancer.

A few weeks after Lana's death, we found a little, brown staffie (Cira) to fill the hole that Lana's passing had left in our home. When Puckett passed, it took several months to find a dog that: a) wasn't prone to chasing cats; b) was compatible with Cira; and, C) that said "take me home" to me. That dog was Lady - a blue-eyed, Pitbull/Boxer mix (apparently, I have a thing for blue-eyed bulldogs). Compared to the prior pair of bullies, these two are noisy. Not nearly so noisy as my childhood dogs, just in comparison to their immediate predecessors. Cira will quietly "moof" or whine when she wants you to invite her up on the couch or throw a blanket over her. Lady will talk - if you prompt her - and will bark madly if there's someone at the door.

Still, the cats were, on average, far more vocal than the dogs - especially when you measure it in interactive vocalizations.

Even knowing how vocal - how much company - my cats were, the house seems sooo quiet without them. No longer do I come down to a cacophony of "good morning" mews as I rush to get ready and out the door for work. No longer does Grumbles follow me into the bathroom to chat at me while I take my biology-break. No longer do I have anyone glaring and mewing at me to clear the laptop out of their way so they can lay in my lap.

How much of an impact was this vocalization? For the past several years, my wife had been lobbying to get a third dog. With two dogs and two cats in a small house, I'd demured. I'd told her, "maybe after the cats have passed, we can think about fostering". Donna also made frequent mention of how much she disliked having to clean up after the cats - litter box, water splashed out of their bowl, the drifts of fur, etc. Suddenly absent the cats, Donna is finding that she misses them. She misses their talking. She misses their company. And, today, she brings up the topic of adopting a homeless bengal or two (after the day before reminding me that, with our small cars, three, fifty-pound dogs might make holiday travels problematic).

Umm... "I thought you didn't like living with cats".

To be honest, if every cat were like Bella and Grumbles, I think you'd probably have a lot less people wondering "why do people have cats as pets". And I think that less because of my own feelings about them, than the fact that my wife is having to fight the urge to try to fill the hole they've left and seriously thinking about cat(s) rather than a dog.

End Times (Again)

Not that I want her to feel bad, but the problem with pets with a terminal diagnosis is they often "rally" during their decline-trajectory. So, in the days leading up to the appointment with the euthanizer, you're periodically left to wonder, "wait: did I jump the gun on this? Do I need to delay?"

Last night, while she was pretty low on energy, when I took her over to the food dish, she ate well. This morning, I came down, and, for the first time in days, she was off the couch. She was actually down at the water dish, drinking. There was no pee smell on the towel she'd been sleeping on. The secondary (low-sided) litter pan had been used for urination (and the absorbant was pretty much soaked).

I guess I'll see how she's acting when I come home from the work: if she's still in a rally, I'll call the vet who's scheduled to come, tomorrow, and ask her opinion on the matter.

Bah. I don't want to send her off, prematurely, but I don't want the rally to end, be in worse shape than she was before, and have to seek out an emergency euthanization.

I'd made a similar mistake with Puckett. We'd scheduled him for an appointment, based on diagnosis and earlier trends. Difference was, I'd scheduled further out. Then, a few days before he was due to go to that appointment, he crashed. We'd gone for a walk to enjoy the weather. He'd been especially energetic on that walk. However, when we came back and I went to feed him a chunk of cheese slathered in peanutbutter, he refused and gave me kind of an "I'm ready, now" look. I knew that if we waited for the appointment, he'd have been "beyond ready".

I don't really want that for Bella - especially given that I can't even really make the gamble worthwhile (she doesn't do treats).

:(

My Brain Hurts

Customer Rep: "We urgently need your help to fix this problem we're having. Stuff is on fire!"

Me: "Ok, cool. I can give you some time this week and next."

Customer Rep: "Alright. As soon as you can, please come on site and help us"

Me: Arrive on-site. Listen to customer's problem report. "How long has this issue been going on?"

Customer Rep: "The customer alerted us of the problem last month. We've been trying to fix it since then, but things are only  getting worse as time goes by".

Me: (brain showing first signs of imploding) "...aaaand when did your customer first notice this critical problem?"

Customer Rep: "Maybe a few weeks or a month before they reported it to us?"

Me: "...and this is a critical problem?"

Customer Rep: "Yes: the customer can't do any of the things they need to do and the stuff that was working the last time you were here no longer works."

Me: "Did anyone open a support case with the vendor?"

Customer Rep: "We wanted to wait for you to help us. However, we do have some vendor consultants coming in, next week."

Me: "Aaaalright... Just so we can get the most out those consultants, I need you to open a case so we can get appropriate notes put in and appropriate backline experts looking at the problem so that the guys coming onsite don't have their time wasted."

Time passes

Me: "Can you give me the number of the case you opened? I want to put it in my notes"

Customer Rep: "No. We didn't open one. We figured we'd open one next week when the rep got on site if he said he needed one."

Me: "...Open the case, now, please. It takes the vendor time to identify appropriate resources and we need to ensure those resources lined up ahead of time. Give me the case ID when you're done."

More time passes. I have time to begin preliminary investigations prior to vendor's arrival. I make an initial set of recommendations to help address some of the issues reported.

Customer replies (through customer rep), "we don't want to make those kinds of changes."

More time passes, and the vendor comes on-site. By this time, I've done a lot more digging and have identified a set of more concrete symptoms and potential causes and cures. Consult with the vendor's on-stie and backline engineers. Some of the observed issues can be addressed via a very recently-released emergency-patch.

Me: "Vendor has supplied a patch that will address some of your customer's problems. We'l need to take the service offline, for a bit, to apply the patch."

Customer Rep: "Ok, cool. Lemme go ask the customer for a downtime to apply the patch."

Me: "Aaaalright. I coulda sworn you told me that this thing was useless to your customer in its current state?"

Customer Rep: "Well, he's able to do some stuff on it, it's just taking a really long time to do those things and we had to turn off a whole bunch of other things. I know that the customer will want his active tasks to complete before we take the whole shebang offline".

Me: "You do remember me telling you that I saw your customer's scheduled tasks kick back off, every day, at X o'clock, right? You really need to get the patch applied and verified well before that time ...and there's less than two hours till X o'clock."

Customer Rep: "Customer said we can't do anything until his task finishes."

Me: "Remember me telling you about the new task kickoffs? Looking back in their task-tracker's history, those currently running tasks are going to overlap the soon-to-be-started tasks. And the soon-to-be-started tasks will overlap with the next day's tasks: there's not going to be a window during which nothing is happening. We need to take an outage to apply these patches if you ever want to start getting this software back to a working state."

My brain hasn't completely imploded, yet, but I feel this expression crawling across my face every time I have to deal with customers like this one.

First: if something's been going on for days, weeks or months, it's not an emergency

Second: if fixing your problem is less important than continuing to limp along in your "broken" state while you wait for always-overlapping tasks to finish, then your problem really isn't an emergency.

Third: if someone suggests adjustments that can improve performance without causing a downtime, yet you refuse to make those adjustments, your problem really isn't an emergency.

There Isn't a Dilemma

I love articles like this one that I found on Salon via a Stumble. When you have statments like:

Death is serious business that, for farm animals, denies them a future they’d otherwise have had

The author is ignoring that - were these animals not being raised for food-production - they would, at best, simply not exist. That is, there's no future have denied them. If you want to think that these animals were destined to exist - raised for food or otherwise - you ignore that such existence would be wholly wild. They'd be dying of starvation, illness, misadventure or predation.

Is it nice to think that food-animals raised with non-industrial techniques lead a better life before they end up on my plate? Sure. Is that the only reason for caring about where your food comes from? No. Note even close.

So, for me, there is no dilemma. The reason for non-industrial techniques is that the resultant product is generally a better product. I don't have to worry about the chemicals typically found in industrial food products. The food is I get is generally a better eating-experience.

Similarly, I have reduced worry of add-on ill-effects. I also don't need to worry that industrial techniques are going to create super-resistant, cross-species illnesses. I don't have to worry about shocks and shortages caused by explosions of illnesses in closely-confined stock (or the propensity for large stocks to have the kind of reduced genetic diversity that makes them more easily targeted by a single strain of illness). The impacts of other industrial products are also spread out to a degree that they're more-easily absorbed by the environment rather than overwhelming it.

Then again, what I've found in talking to people, is that the outlook of people who grew up like I did had a very different formative basis. I, and many of my peers, grew up outside of cities. Even if you weren't a farm-kid, you were close enough to where food was produced to have been exposed to what went into it.

To me, the only "ethical dilemma" that exists is that more people don't know where their food comes from. To most people, their exposure to the food-production process is what they see in the local supermarket. In an ideal world, everyone would have the opportunity to see how their food starts and how it finally ends up in the supermarket and on their plate.

Panic At The Benefits Site

Bit of a panic moment, this morning. Got an email from my former employer's benefits plan administrator telling me "because your ESOP plan had less than the required minimum balance to be retained under the current program, your plan will be cashed out, taxes assessed and a check sent". This struck me as odd, because the only plan I was aware of that was managed by the brokerage was my 401(k), which, if it was below the minimum balance, would have meant that a not-inconsiderable chunk of money had somehow managed to go "poof".

The initial panic wasn't helped by the fact that, the link that the plan-administrator sent to me to view my plan info was erroring out in a way that could have been interpreted as my account having been deactivated.

Decided, "calm down. Go run your morning errands. Try the site again in a couple hours and see if it was just a transient problem and not something more serious."

Get home and try the link again. Same damned error. Opt to try logging in using a different method. The different method worked. Found all my funds still present ...plus an ESOP that I hadn't specifically known about.

And, no, the email wasn't bogus, just broken. I'd checked the headers before clicking the links ...and the fact that it was sent to an address set up specifically for use by the plan-administrator meant that, if it was a phish, they'd have had to have already compromised the administrator's site to get my address. Lastly, the site's URL and SSL certificate were all good. All those details in place, were it an exploit, they likely would have had a better effort-ROI by just extracting data directly from the site-owner than trying to phish me.

Cloud, The Vogon Way

Me: "I'd like to be able to send account-validation emails to people who register to my bug-tracking system".
 
AWS Dox: "Sure... but if you mail direct, most sites will treat your email as spam"
 
Me: "Ok... How do I get around that"

AWS Dox: "Well, you can relay through SES"

Me: "Cool. Lemme go set that up."

AWS-SES: "Rejected!"

Me: "Your SMTP message is a bit vague - are you rejecting the relay because of the sender or the recipient?"

AWS-SES: "REJECTED"

AWS Dox: "To relay with SES you have to validate senders - or sender-domains - and recipients"

Me: "Ok... The SES console says my domain is validated and that any sender in the domain should be good."

AWS-SES: "REJECTED"

Me: "Guess that means the rejection message applied to the recipients. Lemme verify a recipient ...even though that makes SES crap as a smart-relay"

AWS-SES: "REJECTED!"

Me: "Fuck... I only validated the recipient in one region and the rejecting relay is in another. Lemme verify my recipient in _multiple_ regions, then ...You do realize this makes SES a real horror-show for smart-relay services, right?"

AWS-SES: "REJECTED"

Me: "What the actual fuck??" (dig through shitty AWS dox some more) "Srsly? I gotta validate my domain in each region I want to relay through SES??"

I swear: Vogons had to have consulted on the design of some of AWS's service-components.

There Are No Easy Answers

So, the latest "easy answer" (to the U.S.'s gun promlem) that seems to be washing across the various social sites I visit is the idea of "require insurance for gun ownership and you'll make guns too expensive to carry!". On the face, it sounds good. I mean, car insurance isn't cheap for most people and medical insurance is stupidly expensive. So, why wouldn't gun insurance be expensive, too?

Problem is, the cost of insurance isn't high just as a matter of course. Insurance costs for many things can actually be extremely low. What drives insurance prices is generally how much it costs for an insurer to provide coverage to a risk-pool. This includes things like administrative costs, but the real drivers of costs are the annual payouts to be covered. Those payouts are driven by two main things: the costs of claims and the likelihoods of having to pay out those claims.

Car and medical insurance are both expensive - particularly medical - because the likelihood of having to pay a claim and the size of the claims are both high.

If you've ever been in even a fender bender and looked at just the cost of body-work, even trivial incidents can be stupid expensive. Throw in personal injury claims and then take the number of claimable incidents that happen over a given amount of time, and you come up with fairly high risk-exposure for an insurer.

Similarly, if you've ever been the customer of an ER for something minor and then looked at your EoB, you've noticed that even "small" emergencies are stupidly-expensive.

With both automobile and medical insurance, insurance rates are highly variable. Some peoples rates are punishingly-high while others' may border on trivial. Why? Actuarial tables and claim-history. Insurers look at your age, your health, your personal habits, where you live and other indicators of risk (likelihood of payouts and likely sizes of payouts). Those factors are evaluated and you're put into risk-pools of people with similar evaluations. The insurer then has to determine, "give a pool of size X with a likely annual payout of Y for that pool, how much do I need to charge each of that pool's members to be able to turn a profit". Insurers can further decide "do I make my profit by providing coverage to a small number of subscribers that I get fat margins on or do I make my profit by providing coverage for a larger number of subscribers but where each subscriber earns me a lower margin". In non-competitive markets, insurers tend towards the former. In competitive markets, the temptation to do the latter is higher (gain customers by undercutting your competition).

Thus, even if one were to pass legislation saying "gun owners must be insured" (and courts don't ultimately see such legislation as infringing on exercise of a constitutional right), it's entirely reasonable to assume that not all insurance will be prohibitively expensive. Indeed, if such mandated insurance were to prove prohibitively expensive, it would increase the likelihood of courts deeming an insurance mandate an infringement on exercise of a constitutional right. You  have to figure that, unless there's artificial restraint of competition, there'll be at least one or two insurers that would do the math and figure out that they can make serious bank by providing low-margin/high-volume insurance policies.

Fix-em' Up

Good article:

Fix-em' Up

The reason I bought an HP Zbook instead of the HP Omen was that the ZBook is user-serviceable.

I'd made my previous EliteBook last for five and a half years because I could get replacement keyboards, wifi cards and upgrade-parts either from the vendor, Amazon or eBay.

The Omen was _not_ user serviceable. I couldn't even do something as simple as swapping out the damned hard drive without an HP repair kit, since the only way to open it was to sever some glued-on parts, first.

And what were factors in recent phone purchases? The ability to swap out batteries and SD cards.

Planned obsolescence is semi-fine for a toaster or a hairdryer. But the further north of $100 you go, the less acceptable it is to not be user-serviceable.

Regal Really Cares

Today, I received a reply to a message that I sent through Regal Cinema's web-based contact form. This is a form that asks you for contact information - including asking for your name. I wrote to them to complain about their plans to implement bag-checking:

Dear Ms. Patron:

Thank you for contacting our office regarding Regal's policy to inspect backpacks and bags of any kind prior to entry into our auditoriums. We certainly appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Security issues have become a daily part of our lives in America. Regal Entertainment Group wants our customers and staff to feel comfortable and safe when visiting or working in our theatres. To ensure the safety of our guests and employees, backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to admission. We acknowledge that this procedure can cause some inconvenience and that it is not without flaws, but hope these are minor in comparison to increased safety

Again, thank you. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us over this matter. We value your patronage and hope to see you in a Regal Entertainment Group theatre soon.

Sincerely,
Customer Relations Department
Operational Services
Regal Entertainment Group

My first reactions were: "Ms"?? "Patron". That's like "wow". Talk about making a customer feel like you're taking the time to give them special attention. The above was sent with a From/Reply-To address of "Jamie.Stafford@regalcinemas.com". So, at least I know the robot's name, eh?

I sent a reply to "Jamie". I did not make the assumpiont that "Jamie" is a Mr. or a Ms - more likely an "it" is it appears Regal bothered to pick a gender neutral name for their bot. I'm assuming it will never be read by a human, but it felt good to write it:

Thank you for your form letter. Its utter lack of personal response speaks volumes about your business practices and is a testament of your concern for your customers. I'm reasonably certain that nothing in my initial contact email provided indication that you should address me as "Ms.". Addressing me as "Patron" - when your web form asks for a name - means you can't even be bothered to do a simple mail merge. Your missive gave me the same kind of warm-fuzzies that receiving a letter addressed to "occupant" does. Way to really set a high bar on customer relations.

Having seen your bag inspection in practice, this weekend, I'd be embarrassed if I were associated with Regal Cinemas. If you're going to engage in this kind of farcical security-theatre, you should probably train your staff to at least not half-ass it. Asking my wife to open her purse and then just sorta glancing inside it is really pointless. While I'm not asking you to have your staff pawing through our bags, at least do something that indicates you're committed to the farce. If you're going to inconvenience me, don't make it such an obvious waste of my time. Frankly, your current bag-check execution makes the TSA - and their +80% failure-rate look like paragons of security. Your security efforts make feel more secure going to a nightclub in a bad part of town.

-tom

Should be interesting to see if I get any kind of response. I'm guessing either no response or yet another, completely impersonal form letter.

Oh well, fuck Regal. Their theatres are always filthy and poorly run, any way. Somehow, they even manage to fuck up the execution of theatres with luxury seating (seriously: no table service??).

I really wish Alamo would take a stab at closer-to-the-city locations.

Rising Medication Costs

So, NBC news decided to do a click-bait style piece on the rising cost of prescription medications, tonight. They talked about the end-user effects but none of the underlying causes, so I decided to see why prices for existing medications were generally trending upwards in price rather than the downward that would be expected as mature products reached the point of "economies of scale". I found a ConsumerReports article on the subject. Interesting read.

Point #1 is kind of maddening. If you weren't covered by a large, powerful lobbying group and did the same thing, you'd end up jailed for price-gouging.

#3 is kind of a difficult nut to crack, if you're on multiple drugs and the lowest prices aren't found all at the same source. Who has the time to shuttle from store-to-store to score the lowest price (especially if you receive no co-pay difference for having saved your insurer money)

#4 I haven't found any of my doctors to be anything other than neutral on cost-concerns. Frankly, it's not my doctor's job to factor in price when prescribing to me. If price is a concern, he should be willing to work with me - and, when I've raised the concern, no doctor has been anything but happy to ensure that I am able to most-affordably acquire my medications (they'd rather you take something affordable than not fill scripts due to price problems)

#5 One of the medications I'm on is over $5,000/dose. My annual out of pocket maximums go up, year by year. The maker of the medication has an assistance program that, thus far, has made it so my annual out-of-pocket maximums are bridged.

Still Haven't Seen It All

I suppose it's nice to know that, even on the wrong half of my 40s and after two decades in IT, it's still possible for a vendor's "technical" presentation to be the worst one I've ever had the displeasure to sit through.

Seriously, vendors: if I'm asking you a question, it's an opportunity for you. You can either use that opportunity to impress me - to sell to me - or, like today, you can use it to completely turn me off of you and your products.

If I ask you a question, "I don't know" is actually an acceptable answer. If I ask you a question you don't fully understand, it's also ok for you to tell me you don't understand the question as asked and ask me to elaborate on or restate my question. Bulling ahead and trying to give an answer to a question I didn't ask - especially if it demonstrates you didn't understand my question - is not ok. Giving me an answer that can't possibly be correct and that you can't defend if I challenge the response is also not ok. Giving me an answer that contradicts something that the later slides in your PowerPoint say is so is also not ok. Framing your answer as an opinion rather than fact - particularly if your slides are making a contrary assertion - is decidedly not ok.

It's been a good, long while since I've left a vendor presentation completely furious.

Godzilla's Refuse-Haulers

Getting our cube-area ready for renovations, so we all have to move out. As part of that, there's a lot of trash cleanup involved. They asked for volunteers to help take rollaway carts down to the dumpsters. Got to the dock and was told "you need to take it to the end of that ramp and empty it into the big dumpter". Pushed my cart to the end of the ramp and leveraged the cart over the lip of the dumpster so I could empty it wholesale.

Get back to the bottom of the ramp and the dockmaster's shaking his head. He says to me, "was really expecting that you'd scoot it to the end and then dig the stuff out manually to empty it."


"Yeah, well: my way seemed faster".

Cut Loose

One of the realities of working on geographically-disbursed teams is you need a group calendar to help keep track of where everyone is (and who's out on vacation, training, etc.). The one weird thing I've noticed is that many of my co-workers, when posting their PTO days, indicate _where_ they're taking their PTO.

When I see the "where" notation, all I can think is, "that's nice, but why did you feel the need to post that detail?" Are you trying to demonstrate "I'm someplace that I can't really help you even if you do try to call me?"

I mean, you're on vacation. It shouldn't be the business of anyone on the team where you are. Set your Out of Office on your mail account and hit the road. Don't check your mail. Don't answer your phone (the latter is easy if, like me, the only number you give people is GV - since GV's really good at enforcing contact-hours and you can always set a group-level "I'm on vacation" voicemail greeting). BE on vacation.

Traffic, Here, Is Ass

Illustrative of how dicked-up traffic is in the NoVA suburbs of DC:

Today is the last day at this job for a frequent co-worker of mine. Originally, they were going to have a going-away lunch for him. They rescheduled to a 15:00-17:00 after-work event. I got into work ass-early, today, expecting to leave for the day in time for the original lunch-window. Instead, I ended up coming home - figuring that, since the event-site is four miles from my house, I'd just drive back.

Unfortunately, that four miles is constrained by a bridge from NoVA to MD. Waze was showing red all over the damned place, already, with a projected drive time of forty minutes. I got to my route decision-point - the ramp onto the highway that crosses the river - and opted to turn-back. Traffic from the highway was backed up past the ramp and through the next-closest traffic light. No go.

Called my friend up to convey my regrets.

Hit Or Miss

Went to this week's Lana Del Rey concert in Bristow, VA. It was supposed to be a friend and his wife plus me and my wife. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired to prevent his wife from coming ...and she was the primary reason for going to the show.

Still, Lana Del Rey has a pretty damned good voice. That said, she's not someone worth going to see in person. For being the headlining act, her set was much more like an opening act's. It was both unusually short for the main act and included no encore sets.

Look: I get that a lot of the people that go to your show might normally have worry about going to school the next day, but that's no reason to give me a $50 performance when I've paid $130 for each of my seats (not including the various "convenience" and other fees I'm forced to pay). And, while it's great that you decided to "interact" with the audience by walking down into the buffer zone between the stage and the pit area, that you failed to even give the token hello or acknowledgement that you knew where you were playing was kind of weak. I'd really hoped that the two times the camera had closed in on your face, what looked like an eye-roll was something else. But, given the other things, it just really seemed like you didn't want to be there.

Oh well. Maybe you're just more comfortable in small night clubs. I can't think that that many people showed up and keened if this is what you're like all the time. Then again, given the age of your primary demographic, it'd be unsurprising if this was a lot of those people's first concert-going experience. At least, for them, things can really only go up from here?