Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:58 on 28 June 2015

So, I ordered my replacement KVM switch from Amazon well over a week ago. Being a cheapskate, I opted for the free shipping. Which, of course, was the slowest shipping option.

It ended up being as slow as possible. The surprise was how it ended up being so slow: the item didn’t even ship until Friday, and Amazon then paid extra for a Sunday delivery so that the arrival date could be honored. Seriously, now: WTF? Why not ship it using the slowest, cheapest possible service the day they get the order?

Since it shipped from one of their Seattle-area warehouses, that would mean I got it about as soon as if I had paid extra for expedited shipping. But so what? The worst-case arrival date is just that: a worst case. There’s nothing wrong with making a package come sooner than that, particularly if it costs Amazon less money in the first place.

Then a thought occurred to me: What they did is botch a process (shipping a package) until it became a crisis and then spent extra money on heroic measures to deal with the crisis. That’s exactly how Amazon handles managing their technical staff. Instead of having procedures guaranteed to ensure routine, smooth operation, they pay people extra (Amazon has a reputation for having generous salaries) to work long hours in endless crisis mode (something else Amazon has a reputation for).

So, while consistent, both their shipping and their employee management practices still mystify me.

I can’t find the old post at the moment, but I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this (mis)management style before. Since then, I’ve come up with the term “techno-sadism” to label it by. It’s as if management believes that productivity is managed by making people work as hard as possible, which is done by ensuring that teams are in perpetual crisis mode.

How absurd it is becomes clear when you think of the manufacturing sector. How many manufacturers consider it a good thing to have routine operation of the assembly line to be disrupted regularly, to the point that heroic amounts of overtime and speed-ups are needed to compensate for the disruptions?

Published at 12:49 on 10 June 2015

Despite how Tacoma has had a successful, municipally-owned cable TV and Internet utility for years, Seattle’s idea on doing anything vaguely similar is a big no-can-do. It’s basically the same attitude that made Seattle about forty years late to the game when it comes to building a rail mass transit system.

Of course, any time a billionaire wants pet projects for that entire neighborhood which he owns, or a taxpayer-funded sports stadium for his team, the City of Seattle sits ready and eager to bark on command. Same if it’s a freeway project, even if it uses a risky, unproven technology and it’s a road which would normally be the state government’s responsibility, anyhow.

Because, well, priorities. Duh.

This is another one of those days where I get to feel smug and satisfied about living outside the Seattle City Limits.

Published at 08:28 on 11 May 2015

Much worse, in fact.

The reason is not nuclear contamination, but chemical contamination. Specifically, PCB’s. Yes, they are banned. But the ban started only in 1979. Indian Point dates back to the early 1960s. So it’s entirely possible that the transformer that caught fire contained PCB’s. One that caught fire there in 2011 did, in fact.

If so, there is now a major environmental contamination event in progress. Worryingly, there is no mention in the Establishment media that the transformer in question did not contain PCB’s. That makes me suspect that news that it did is being hushed up.

It’s the only reason I can think of for not bringing up the subject of PCB’s in the news about this event. If it was known that the transformer was in fact PCB free, it would be in the interest of plant’s operator (and its regulators) to make this fact well-known. Omitting such information only becomes in the Establishment’s interest if PCB’s are in fact present.

It’s much like the subject of asbestos (known to be widely-used at the time the World Trade Center twin towers were constructed) was conspicuously absent from news accounts at the time the 9/11 attacks happened.

No, this doesn’t prove anything, but it certainly raises valid suspicions.

Published at 19:08 on 29 March 2015

It purports to be a site that lets one file an income tax return electronically for significantly less than Turbo Tax does. But it’s too good to be true.

They offer two options: download and use their software, or do all the work in a Web browser. Naturally I chose the former one; a real user-mode program is much preferred to fragile and clunky Javascript (and all complex Javascript-based web sites are fragile and clunky).

Suddenly, without ever asking me what kind of computer I have, it’s downloading… a Microsoft Windows .EXE file. I have a Mac. Naturally, there was no system requirements information for their software listed prior to this point.

I abort the download and go to the home page to try and use their Web interface. This causes me to be automatically logged out. It asks me to log on again, this time using a long user-unfriendly number instead of my username.

I log on and end up at an account settings page. There is no option for filing via the web. There is a “TaxAct” link at the top of the page. I click on it. I end up back at their home page. I am also auto-logged-out again.

I try several more times. I do notice somewhere an option to log on via a screen that’s not as obviously-located as the main one. This one asks for my username. (Why on earth can’t the clowns that coded their site code a consistent log-on screen?) But I end up at the same useless account settings page.

From what I’ve concluded, once a user makes the fateful decision to choose one method, this unbelievably lame excuse for a service cannot change you to another method. I suppose I could open a service ticket and have that done behind the scenes.

But, why bother? If their software design is that awful, their Web-based service doubtless has some of the flimsiest, clunkiest, most fragile Javascript imaginable on it… in spades. Experience has taught me that you can judge a book by its covers when it comes to software: bad design in one place in a company’s code is an almost certain indicator of pervasive bad design.

Forget it. I’m either going to use Turbo Tax or pay someone else to do my taxes (and given how spendy Turbo Tax is, it’s not immediately clear that it makes economic sense for me to use it).

Published at 10:23 on 29 October 2014

The reason is, there’s no easy profits to be made in doing what needs to be done.

Take fighting the disease in Africa. Those who are getting it are primarily poor. They can’t afford to pay for the necessary health care. It must be simply given away to them. There’s obviously no money in doing that. So not enough care is being provided, and the disease is exploding into an uncontrollable epidemic.

Take reasonable travel restrictions. Right now, health workers are getting there primarily via commercial air flights. The same flights that will carry anyone with money to buy a ticket, with only minimal screening. The airlines have no incentive to adopt aggressive screening, because it would make it harder for paying customers to buy tickets. Moreover, restricting flights would restrict commerce, meaning that the countries affected would become even more dependent on the First World just giving them necessary aid, at lest in the short term (the epidemic won’t last forever, after all). So there’s two more ways in which capitalist greed is interfering with the fight against Ebola.

Take a both prudent and humane quarantine policy. Right now, we can’t have both, thanks again to capitalism. We can either be prudent but inhumane, confining returning volunteers in unacceptable conditions, or we can be humane but incautious and subject them to ineffectual measures that are less immediately punishing. What should be done is to be both cautious and humane: treat them as returning heroes and give them luxurious quarantine facilities (devoting a rural luxury resort to such purposes would be a good way to do this). But there’s no profit in that, so capitalism won’t do it, either.

And neither the liberal or the conservative faction of Establishment politics is advocating what needs to be done. The former promotes a recklessly incautious policy, and the latter the stigmatizing of both its victims and those who are fighting the disease.

So instead we live in a world which has been pushed needlessly to the brink of a catastrophic global pandemic, thanks mostly to the capitalist profit motive.

Published at 22:14 on 23 August 2014

First, capitalism unleashed the industrial era which set the stage for the unfolding catastrophe.

Second, as a system capitalism is uniquely ill-suited to addressing a problem like climate change. Reason is, its worst effects won’t happen until everyone presently alive is dead, so there is very little self interest for anyone to address the problem today. And capitalism is all about the pursuit of self-interest.

To the contrary, what self interest there is lies in denying the existence of the problem and opposing any action intended to address it, as is illustrated by the actions of the Koch Brothers and others.

Published at 09:03 on 1 May 2014

But, really now, the WHO is very, very late to the game.

Things like the routine use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture should have been completely banned decades ago. Antibiotics have absolutely no place being given as routine supplements to farm animals merely because it fattens the bottom line of those raising them.

Published at 11:49 on 7 April 2014

So, I’ve been on the Island for a year it’s lease renewal time for me. I have two options: a normal lease at $1400/mo, or month-to-month at $1600/mo. The penalty for breaking a lease early is a fixed $1500/mo.

Wow, a fixed penalty of $1500/mo that’s less than the normal rent of $1600/mo without a lease. It seems like a no-brainer. Not so fast! Time to run the math.

The way to do it is with what is called expected value, essentially a weighted average taken by enumerating all possible scenarios then multiplying a scenario’s cost by its probability. After much thought, I chose a Poisson distribution with λ = 4 months as an educated guess.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the local real estate market and I actually think it will be more like three months, but I’m being a little pessimistic in case the entire spring and summer fly by and I end up buying nothing. In that case, things will get dead in the coming winter.  So, given those assumptions, here’s what happens when I find a home so many months into my continuing tenancy here:

MONTH       PROB        CUM      LEASE     M-to-M
    1     0.0183     0.0183    1427.47    1600.00
    2     0.0733     0.0916    1484.25    1575.54
    3     0.1465     0.2381    1491.58    1462.45
    4     0.1954     0.4335    1359.71    1230.32
    5     0.1954     0.6288    1086.19     917.64
    6     0.1563     0.7851     754.07     603.03
    7     0.1042     0.8893     457.11     350.16
    8     0.0595     0.9489     244.25     180.90
    9     0.0298     0.9786     116.24      83.83
   10     0.0132     0.9919      49.76      35.13
   11     0.0053     0.9972      11.39      13.41
   12     0.0019     0.9991       6.67       4.70
TOTAL                          8488.69    8057.11

PROB is the probability I will find something that month and CUM is the cumulative probability (i.e. the chance I find something that month or in an earlier month). Odd; what’s going on here?

The issue is the percentage cost. $1500 isn’t much a chunk of 11 month’s rent, but as time goes on, it becomes a bigger and bigger chunk of the remaining rent if one quits early:

MONTH %PENALTY
    1     9.74
    2    10.71
    3    11.90
    4    13.39
    5    15.31
    6    17.86
    7    21.43
    8    26.79
    9    35.71
   10    53.57
   11   100.00
   12     0.00

Why 100% instead of 107.14% for quitting in month 11? Simple: only a fool would pay $1500 in penalty fees when it’s cheaper to pay $1400 to rent an unneeded, empty apartment for an extra month.

Still feel like I’m pulling my own leg here, using lots of math when common sense says it must be the other way? Consider the case where I find something in five months (that’s the point where the odds become in my favor of finding something).

With a lease, I pay 5 × $1400 + $1500 = $8500.

With no lease, I pay 5 × $1600 = $8000.

Sure, there’s a chance I’ll pay more, if I end up spending another year here and not finding anything. But the odds seem to be in favor of my paying less. In fact, the lease is only to my advantage if it takes eight or more months to do something I expect to do in four or five months.

Mine is a corporate landlord; doubtless they’ve run this sort of analysis themselves and deliberately crafted their lease-renewal offer to have a seductive yet economically disadvantageous option to it, knowing they can expect to pocket on average around $400 of pure profit each time they sucker a tenant into agreeing to it.

Published at 15:10 on 27 January 2014

This phone is tempting, despite still having all the disadvantages inherent in a smart phone.

Alas, I suspect the temptation to be mostly academic. If the phone can do all which is claimed of it, then expect the government to promptly ban it. If not officially, then behind the scenes by getting the cell phone carriers — who have a track record of being the willing lackeys of the surveillance state — to agree to not support it, by deliberately crippling their networks, if need be.

The latter wouldn’t be hard to do; just block all serial numbers in the Blackphone’s range.

Published at 10:28 on 13 October 2013

One of the propaganda pieces in favor of them, which alas I can’t seem to find on the web, shows someone in a grocery store where prices are not marked on anything yet where the clerk occasionally mentions things like “Oh, that’s sure an expensive item.”

The customer asks to see the prices, and is condescendingly scolded “Oh, that’s called ‘shopping’ [complete with air quotes]. We don’t do that here.”

It’s a profoundly dishonest statement of the problem, because the setting implies the unstated premise that the prices being charged are as simple, straightforward, and easily comprehensible as they are in a grocery store. When it comes to health care, nothing could be further from the truth.

One of the biggest sources of waste in the US Medical-Industrial Complex is how both providers and insurers employ vast armies of paper pushers. Providers employ them to come up with new ways of billing and charging insurers. Insurers employ them to come up with new ways for disputing and refusing charges.

Neither side’s paper-pushers contribute one iota towards providing actual health care, yet of course they must be paid wages and benefits. It’s the main reason why the USA both spends more per capita on health care than any nation, yet covers a smaller fraction of its citizens than any other developed nation.

It may be wasteful, but at least the battle of the paper-pushers the status quo represents is a fair fight. But with the new high-deductible plans, I am now expected, mostly on my own, to match my wits against an army of creative billers with centuries of collective experience in coming up with ways for separating payers from their cash.

Can you say “unfair match?” But, hey, what would the insurance industry care? They are not going to be the ones conned into paying more. In fact, quite the contrary: providers will naturally focus most of their energies on creatively billing consumers who haven’t yet reached their deductibles. Con artists always go after the easiest marks, after all.

So insurers get to both outsource a good chunk of their labor and they make the remaining billing disputes they don’t outsource easier for themselves. Such a deal. For them, that is.