Blackcap Blog

Published at 14:59 on 11 October 2013

So, there’s this new option available where I work called a “Health Savings Account”. The one offered by my employer is actually a very generous plan. And it sucks less abjectly than the ironically named “flexible” accounts, which you have to use within a calendar year or lose, forever.

But, there’s still a whopper of a catch. In this case, it’s called “You must save your receipts. Every last one. For seven long years.”

Good heavens, I can’t even keep one week’s worth of notes on a project straight. I could not fathom what would be required to care for hundreds or thousands of slips of paper for seven long years.

And note that these aren’t pieces of letter-sized paper one gets delivered by mail; they are randomly-sized small slips that get handed to you at the pharmacy or the clinic, ones that you must not, ever, leave in your pockets when doing the laundry. You must not let one fall out of your wallet unnoticed, ever. You must not forget and leave one on the sales counter. You must not toss one in a sidewalk waste-basket by mistake. You must not leave it in the bag then toss the bag in the recycle bin. Ever. Or woe unto you if you are audited.

Obviously, there’s people in the world who are intrinsically organized. My parents, for one. When they work on a big project, every item on the desk is at a neat 90-degree angle with respect to the other items and in order, always. It’s just the way they’re wired.

It’s also just not the way I am wired. Even if I make conscious effort to organize my things during a project, within a minute or two after said effort is ended, a significant degree of chaos and disorder will have emerged. It doesn’t bug me; in fact, I never even try to achieve strict desktop order anymore. It’s just not the way I work.

Sure, there needs to be greater cost control in the medical establishment, but I’d much rather get it like, say, the Canadians do, by having a Medicare card that I can just use, with other people (you know, the intrinsically organized types) being paid to professionally do all the receipt-tallying minutia that I am personally so ill-suited to do.

And I don’t think I am the only one. Really, now, saving every last medical receipt? For seven years? This is someone’s idea of “reform?” Seriously?

Published at 19:27 on 10 February 2013

Unlike most liberals, Peter DeFazio gets it.

For a particularly egregious example of just how wrong the outcomes of carbon trading can be, consider how it is enabling indigenous people in Chiapas who live very modestly being moved off their land so that Californians can continue their fossil-fuel-intensive lives unchanged.

If you want a modest first step that can easily fit within Establishment politics, it would be a carbon tax (levied at the point of purchase of any fossil fuel), not casino capitalist games with “trading” carbon emissions. Worries about such as scheme being regressive taxation or leading to growth of government can be addressed by making it an “untax“: a revenue-neutral tax that simply goes into a trust fund which is refunded to all equally on a per-capita basis. Wastrels will end up losing, and the carbon-thrifty will be rewarded; the poor will tend to come out winners simply because they can’t afford to consume much, even though they might spend a higher percentage of their income on fossil fuels than the non-poor.

Published at 21:18 on 19 January 2013

I spent the afternoon investigating another island alternative to Seattle, should my desire to telecommute from Bellingham for one reason or another not come to pass: Bainbridge Island.

It’s not as culturally compatible with what I desire as Vashon Island is, but all in all it is a far more practical location and could be a workable solution. Vashon’s sole town is in the center of the island, miles (and an arduous hill) from the nearest ferry landing, and that ferry goes not to Downtown Seattle but to one of Seattle’s outer neighborhoods, a significant bus ride from Downtown. There are a few foot ferries that run from Vashon Island to Downtown, but the key word is few: miss them, and you’ve gone from a little bit late to incredibly late.

Bainbridge Island, by contrast, has its sole town on the same harbor the ferry docks at, and every run of that ferry goes directly to the dock in Downtown Seattle. So I would be able to walk from my apartment or condo on the island to the ferry, and then walk from the ferry to my office Downtown. No worrying about missing the one or two useful ferry runs of the day, or about timing transfers from bus to boat.

Bainbridge, like Vashon, is a once-rural island that has turned mostly into exurban hobby farms. Thus, it still has the minus of not having any large and truly wild areas on-island. In Bainbridge’s case, however, that doesn’t matter so much, because the far side of the island is connected by a bridge to the Kitsap Peninsula, which in turn is connected by a bridge to the Olympic Peninsula. It ends up being possible to drive to some very nice hinterlands without having to compete for limited vehicle space on the ferries with all the other summer weekenders.

In fact, that limited vehicle space acts as a sort of limiting valve for how busy the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas can get on summer weekends, meaning less crowds (and a very low chance of traffic congestion) for me.

So, a condo on Bainbridge could work for me. There’s no food co-op there, but the one grocery store on the island is one of those rare supermarkets which really does live up to its claim of having a full and comprehensive selection of organic and natural foods. (I’ve seen such things before on islands.) And there’s the basic selection of businesses any town of 10 or 20 thousand people would be expected to have (in addition to lots of upscale boutiques). I wouldn’t have to live a life revolving around a car for my daily routine.

But, Bainbridge is still very much part of the Seattle metro area. It’s easier access to nature (compared to the big city across the water) is a privilege rationed out on the basis of the ability to pay a significant premium; it’s one of the most expensive places to live in the Pacific Northwest.

I have a good job and no kids to support, so I could afford to live in an apartment or condo there. That’s not the issue. The issue is that a greater urban area which reserves basics like access to nature and a home in a quiet, unpolluted neighborhood so much according to socioeconomic class is not an urban area in keeping with my core values.

In Bellingham, by contrast, everyone lives a bicycle ride (not a drive in a car) away from large wild areas. The children of the poor and the working class can ride their bikes on the trail to Larrabee State Park as easily as the wealthy California retirees. There’s even a mobile home court which abuts a green space in Bellingham; housing close to nature is not strictly limited to the affluent, either.

So, Bainbridge would work as an alternative, but it’s very much a “Plan B” alternative. My primary desire involves shaking the dust of Seattle’s elitist class privilege from my feet.

Published at 19:42 on 9 December 2012

It turns out that in the 1980s, when stalinist East Germany was running into increasing economic problems, and when capitalist pharmaceutical companies were running into increasing difficulty finding willing human guinea pigs to experiment on, a deal was cut.

Published at 20:03 on 5 December 2012

Some months ago, I wrote a rant about what I believed to be the capitalist censorship of radical political opinion. It seemed a reasonable thing to presume at the time: the building in question had been a disused eyesore for over a decade, mainly serving as a venue for advertising posters of various sorts.

And then a radical political group appropriates it for their own message, followed quickly by the building being surrounded by fencing. Mere coincidence? Highly unlikely.

Unlikely or no, I feel safe now saying that it does indeed appear to have been coincidence. There’s been an ever-increasing amount of activity at the site since it was fenced, and it’s now quite obvious that the building is in the process of being gutted and renovated.

Moral of the story is that even fair dice sometimes come up snake eyes.

Published at 22:35 on 1 October 2012

A prime example of that can be seen by considering the abandoned building at 11th Avenue E. and Pine St. in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. For over a decade it’s been disused for any purpose save for those of bill-posters. It’s typically covered in ads for upcoming music performances and whatnot.

Well, about a month ago, a group called Grrrl Army decided to appropriate that space for their own. It was a wonderful action which provided a glimpse of what a world where advertising is used to challenge people to become better individuals, instead of simply to turn a profit, could be like:

This was arguably vandalism, but then again, so was the postering of every available vertical street-facing surface on this structure, which to reiterate has been tolerated for a decade or more. But, it’s postering with a political meaning (as opposed to postering to encourage people to spend money). We can’t have that!

The building’s owners saw to promptly erect a fence to prevent any such further defilement of their precious dilapidated eyesore from happening again:

What’s particularly amusing about this is that the structure, post-Grrrl Army action, was far more attractive than it had been in years. The unified effect of everything being the same basic color scheme made it look significantly better than the disorganized collection of advertising which it had previously borne. It’s not just me who thinks so, either: a number of my friends volunteered the same opinion.

Published at 20:54 on 20 August 2012

It seems as if one of my recent posts has attracted the attention of search engines, probably because in relating how I solved a Macintosh frustration, the information has proved helpful to others.

So far, so good. The bad news is that’s attracted the attention of spammers. No, they’re not getting any spam posted: I have several lines of defense against that. But they are getting through the first line of defense: the captcha on the comments form.

They’re probably doing that with the free porn scam, in which one writes some back-end software to impersonate a browser (not hard to do; I’ve done so many times for legitimate purposes), and presents the captcha image to someone who wants to be rewarded by viewing some porn for free if they solve it. The front-end that displays the porn then passes on the solution to the back-end, which uses the information to send back a form response containing the spam.

It’s a pretty minor irritation, but an irritation nonetheless. Maybe I’ll get motivated to go through my server logs and start reporting them to those responsible for the IP addresses the requests are coming from.

Published at 09:23 on 18 August 2012

Note to all: avoid iTunes videos that you must pay for like the plague.

I had been wanting to watch some Portlandia episodes , and last night tried to with iTunes video. Big, big mistake. After charging me $2.99 and commencing the download, iTunes sneeringly informed me that I could not watch said video on my computer, and then launched into a paragraph of arcane technobabble that even I could not understand at first.

Apparently, some lame copy-protection scheme mandated by the Hollywood studios considers all but a select few Macs a piracy threat, presumably because the digital video signal going between the system unit and the monitor could be used to create a decrypted, free copy of the video.

Of course, that’s no excuse for iTunes’ bait-and-switch behavior. iTunes could obviously tell if the system it was running on was unacceptable to Hollywood (hence the message); there’s no reason whatsoever for not sending it before you pay for a video and start the download. None except pure greed on Apple’s part, that is.

While researching the issue, I came across a comment in passing that mentioned BitTorrent and pirated copies of videos. A light went on. I downloaded BitTorrent, downloaded an AVI video player, typed in a few Google keywords, and within a matter of minutes BitTorrent was merrily downloading the content Apple had previously defrauded me for. Content which actually played.

And the BitTorrent download proceeded far faster than the iTunes download had. Just for yucks, I tried it again with another episode and that one arrived promptly and without issue, too.

Way to go Apple and Hollywood: you’ve successfully made it so difficult and risky for customers to pay for content that they opt for the easier option of pirating it instead.

Published at 08:19 on 30 May 2012

And that’s that the ill-considered initiative measure to privatize liquor sales in Washington State is certain to increase prices. The Establishment media is at this late hour, one week before the state liquor stores close for good, starting to feebly offer the caution that prices “might” go up.

Really, now, how couldn’t they? One of the measure’s selling points, trumpeted by its advocates, was that it would not reduce revenues to the state; the legislation was crafted to be revenue neutral. And capitalists are capitalists: in the retail liquor business, as in any business, the goal of business is to make a profit.

So, the state is still making its profit. To that picture, we now add capitalists taking their cut. Just where is that money going to come from? Does anyone honestly think the new for-profit liquor stores are going to harvest C-notes from a secret orchard of money trees and make their money that way? This is not rocket science we are talking about.

Sure, some of it is going to come from union-busting and pushing worker pay down. But that can only go so far. The advocates of paying workers less always overestimate the profits for owners that this will generate.

In short, prices will go up. It’s as close a thing to a future certainty that a simple economic analysis can predict.

Published at 19:08 on 20 April 2012

My new apartment is an a ZIP code that is very ethnically and economically diverse. There’s areas that are in a historically low-income, majority-minority neighborhood, and there’s areas (not far away) which are thoroughly bourgeois, where palatial homes enjoy sweeping lake and mountain views.

It seems this diversity is allowing me to get a glimpse into how con artists prey on the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Witness the very strange junk mail I received from the so-called “St. Matthew’s Churches” of Tulsa, OK (complete with a cheesy paper “prayer rug” that I’m supposed to have a spiritual experience with because of an optical illusion about Jesus’ eyes opening), promising financial riches to all who send in their prayers.

Not surprisingly, they are very well known scam outfit.