Still around

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a variety of reasons.

For a long time it seems that all the readers were trolls from Russia or Italy.  Today the bulk of the readers were from the United States.

An indicator of usage seems to have stuck and wasn’t increasing at all.

I spent more of my time posting comments to articles on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and some times on the Star Tribune and Duluth News Tribune.  The Post is wide open, posts immediately, and rarely deletes a comment.  The Times reviews comments before posting them.  The Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune have much less space and might edit beyond all recognition.  I’ve just about given up on the Duluth News Tribune.

Maybe lots of my readers are “Trump weary” and get enough of him via TV and daily newspapers.

I’ll try to post a wider range of articles.  If you ore a relative or a friend, send me your thoughts.

Don't protest Trump! Boycott him!

The Star Tribune had an article today titled "Trump's rally in Minneapolis targets Democratic fortress" by Jessie Van Berkel.  I sent her an email suggesting that protesters stay away because he feeds on opposition.  I suggested that they hold alternative events all over the city with the closest no more than five blocks.

Like this little blog, this suggestion won't be acted on by many, if any.

Hello to my Duluth readers.

Every so often somebody in a store or coffee shop will recognize my face and ask if if i am still writing.

And sometimes a person will ask me if I’m still writing for the Duluth Reader.  I answer this question with “Are you still not reading the Reader?”

I gave up on writing for the Reader when the editor/publisher bumped me too many times.  I had started writing again when he asked me at a public event to write again.  I don’t remember how long it was before he didn’t publish my articles again.  After he published none of my articles for four issues, I gave up writing for him at all.

I also have given up on writing letters to the Duluth News Tribune.  Chuck Frederik often rewrites any he publishes, sometime changing the meaning of what I wrote.

I also have given up writing letters to the Star Tribune.  Changing the meaning has happened with the Strib also, but not very often.

In the case of both papers, it is a gamble if any letter will be published, and so why should I bother.

I do get most of my sidebar comments to New York Times articles published.

I get all of my sidebar comments to the Washington Post because they have “instant gratification”: only the most egregious comments are pulled.

Both of these national papers allow comments to comments.  One does put oneself out there to other writers who take a complete different views.

Also, I should note that I am not “popular”.  I generally get less than ten likes, compared to 20 to 50 likes or even more.

Of course, I should also admit that I get almost no comments to articles I write here by anybody who knows me.  Most of my readership is trolls from Russia or Italy (Russian trolls masquerading as Italians).

So, if you know me and like anything I write here, please tell me the next time you see me.  Better yet, tell a friend.

Even if you don’t tell me that you read anything I write, I will see a blip in readership from the U.S. and a few other countries.

And of course, a big thank you to anyone who reads this blog regularly.

More on erratic behavior of online newspapers

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, using a MacBook Air, early 2015, macOS Sierra, version 10.12.6.
I was able to access and sign in to startribune.com.  I then clicked on e Access or whatever and asked to log in.  I didn’t keep track of the details but was told my account didn’t have access to that version.  I went back to the web version and clicked on eEdition.  Voila! and no intrusive overlay ads.  And I have access to the “Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee”.

Now the question is would I get the same result using my iPhone as a hot spot to my AT&T account.

I don’t feel like checking right now.  I would rather read the funnies.

And I read the Star Tribune and after that I accessed the Duluth News Tribune.  I forget the details on what I did, but I am almost done reading the opinion page.  Strange that I couldn’t access the DNT at all from home but I can from a coffee shop.

Erratic behavior of online newspapers

I sent the following email to the publishers and editors of the Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune.

Good afternoon,

If this email is upsetting the end of your day, I’m sorry.  But the erratic behavior of the online versions of your newspapers has been upsetting my month and many months before.

In the case of the Star Tribune, it has unwanted pop-up ads that are difficult, if not impossible to delete. Several days earlier in the week it occurred almost every day and I was ready to cancel my subscription.  The telephone chain to do so was ridiculous.  Yesterday, the eEdition worked fine, and I relented on cancelling my subscription.  Today the pop-up ads were back.

Jon of Feedback was very patient and supportive, but one piece of advice I should never have followed: resetting my iPad.  That wound up clearing all my saved passwords.  Now I have to look these up for my next visit to any of a number of password-protected sites.  And the problem of unwanted pop-ups is back.

In the case of the Duluth News Tribune, it may or may not come up with the eEdition.  On my iPad it was going in a circle of getting halfway to the eEdition and then wanting me to put in my password again.

At the moment, the eEditions are working on my MacBook Air, but I would rather eat breakfast with an iPad by my side: it takes up much less space on the table.

See my blog entry: "A newspaper’s takeover of subscribers’ computers"

http://magree.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-newspapers-takeover-of-subscribers.html

I am not alone in enduring these, but I wonder how many of your users have the knowledge and patience to work through this annoyance.  I know my wife who has over twenty years of computer experience wouldn’t and she is growing very impatient with my repeated complaints.  I know that I no longer wish to be an unpaid debugger of your software.

So, please cancel my subscriptions to the Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune.  I’ll renew them when you have fixed this problem.

Oh, yes!  I will post this email to my blog.

A newspaper’s takeover of subscribers’ computers

Given the increasing complexity of software and its decreasing user-friendliness, I think 1984 has arrived.  We are supposed to follow robotically through the latest commands of the software designer, aka Big Brother.  And like in 1984, we have no idea what we are doing or should be doing.

I have almost 59 years of computer experience.  I started with a summer job in which I used a textbook to learn to program an IBM 650.  That was a set of large refrigerator size boxes with punched cards in and punched cards out.

Over the next twenty-plus years I went on to program and debug larger and larger computers.  I was often an advocate of newer techniques, like using compilers instead of machine code or using email instead of typed memos.

Then personal computers appeared on the scene.  Some of them easy to use, some of them opaque to use.  In 1984, the Macintosh appeared.  It was a real break-through in ease of use.  Many laughed at WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures).  They preferred the complex set of coding that had to be done for the simplest tasks.

I was hooked and became a Certified Macintosh Developer.  I was eager to get the latest Mac with many great features: color, faster and smaller storage devices, and more.

Then OS-X (operating system 10) appeared.  It had many nifty features except ease of transferring older programs to it.  I never got around to rewriting my genealogy program and have lost all that data (except that which I had printed out).  On the other hand, there were many new features that were a delight to use.

But as one OS X after another followed, the Mac started being persnickety.  Printers that were easy to use became a nightmare.  Where is the setting to print an envelope.  Why does the scanner work well with an old OS but gives dark blobs on a newer OS?

Then sin of sins, without asking me, Apple decided I should install the latest operating system just because I was using wi-fi at a coffee shop.  Not only did Apple decide that I should upgrade, it decided that all my files in the Document folder should go to iCloud.  But that was more data than my free 5GB.  It asked me to upgrade my account to 50GB.  The extra $0.99 a month was no big deal, but I still haven’t completely reorganized my Document file so that I don’t need be hooked up to the web to use those files.

The same increasing difficulty has struck many web-sites.  I now subscribe to four newspapers.  Most of them generally work well with only a few quirks that take awhile to figure out.  Just like the print versions, the newspapers are filled with ads.  Generally you can just scroll past them.

But sometime last year, the Star Tribune began to have intrusive ads.  They would take over the computer with no obvious way out.  Not only would the ad page take over the tab slot on a browser, there was no way to get out of it except close the tab or follow it on to other pages in the ad chain.

A similar annoyance is a side-bar ad with a misleading message: “Log In”.  It is not a log in to the newspaper, but an ad for using a Google product for signing in to web sites.

A friendly guy at Star Tribune’s support department helped me try to clear things up.  But it was drastic, including resetting my iPad.  Guess what that did?  It wiped out all my cookies so that I had to enter saved passwords all over again.  Good thing I have the passwords stored in an obscure place.

Rather than making my life simple by easily accessing my bank accounts, reading the latest news, and sending email to friends, I seem to have gone into standby debug mode.

Unfortunately, one of those pop-ups appeared again this morning.  That’s it.  I asked the Star Tribune to cancel my subscription.  Bye to “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” and many other comics that are not in the Duluth News Tribune.  Good-bye to many in-depth state stories and editorials.

I do have relatives who spend a small fortune calling Geek Squad every time time they need to make some software change.  Do you think the Star Tribune would pay me for all my efforts?  Do you think your phone will run forever without re-charging?

P.S.  Well, maybe I'll keep the Star Tribune subscription for a few more days.  It worked fine this morning.

Corporate efficiency?

Olive is software to put facsimiles of the newspaper print editions on line.  By clicking on an article, a reader can see a more screen friendly copy of an article.  Both the Duluth News Tribune and the Star Tribune have Olive editions.  I subscribe to both, partly to get the comics rather than the text of some of the articles.

But for years the Olive edition has had a major flaw; a flaw that still exists in the current version rolled out last year.  I don't know where they get o• writing about people like Je•rey.

The Olive edition of the 2017-04-17 Duluth News Tribune converted a USA Today article about North Korea to:

"The secretive state also showed o• a submarine-launched missile that it successfully fired last year.
"Analysts said that the weapons on display raised new questions about North Korea’s capacities going forward. Je•rey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., called the show 'a bewildering array of new missile-related hardware.'"

I did change the quote marks to match the standard for quoting material that includes quotes.

Given all the product recalls, the unfriendly skies of the airlines, and much more, I would say the only efficiency in far too many corporations is move as much revenue as possible to the CEOs and board members.  Gosh, I wish I could get $250,000 or more for showing up for six board meetings a year.  And many of these people, including the CEO's are on the boards of several companies.

Corporate efficiency?

Forum Communications (owners of the Duluth News Tribune) implemented a new “improved” version of the Olive Edition.  This is a program that allows readers to toggle between a facsimile of the printed paper and individual articles.  I sent the following to the person who responded to my help message:

"I do find the new version a lot harder to use.  I prefer the way the Star Tribune is set up.  For example, the Strib version has a section icon at the top left.  Much easier than using the arrows to go back or forth page by page.  Also, when I first opened it, it didn’t automatically set the page to my screen size.  It took a bit of fumbling before had the page size adjusted properly.

"Olive still can’t translate the text correctly.  Most of the articles that I looked at still drop the first letter of a story.”

That paragon of efficiency, Netflix, sent me email that my next DVD would be arriving three days ago!!  Which it had!  Maybe their email system went down.  And that system was most likely set up by some corporation.

I downloaded Stitcher because iTunes was just getting too difficult to use.  I was finding it being less responsive to downloading and playing podcasts.  Even Stitcher has lots of hidden things that don’t work easily and clearly. Many of the operations don’t work as described in the help articles. I think I finally have my podcasts organized that I can download new episodes and can play them offline without a problem.

I’ve been at two different groceries this week where the register system did not work properly.  Fortunately, each had it come on line quickly or had a workaround.

Good old Apple!  I’m never sure what it will take to get a hotspot from my phone working.  Sometimes our iPads or laptops will recognize the hotspot immediately.  Sometimes it will take several minutes and multiple times turning the hotspot off and on again.  As somebody in a coffee shop loudly proclaimed months ago about gas prices: “It makes no sense!”

In defense of the oil companies and all the corporate and locally-owned stations, it does make sense.  Gas is an auction commodity.  Demand goes up, the price goes up.  Demand goes down, the price goes down.  Of course, there is also the seasonal switching of blends that decreases supply, causing the price to go up.

And those much maligned government agencies.  Working as planned.

Our social security checks are always posted to our bank on time.  (The bank does mark the payments as available immediately, but may take many hours to post them to our “ledger”)

If we order a book or DVD from the Duluth Public Library (either from the system or from MNLink*), they send us email within an hour or two of items being available at our branch.

*MNLink is a consortium of the local government libraries that make their collections available to other libraries in the system.  Often an item is delivered to the requesting library within two days of its being returned by the previous borrower.

And snowplowing has gotten better.  Our local streets are plowed several times after a storm and getting around may be a hassle for awhile and driveways may be blocked.  One thing that has improved is that a sidewalk plow generally comes around a day or two after a major storm.  It even makes up for those residents who rarely shovel their sidewalks.

Finally, the Duluth Transit Authority buses are fairly close to on-time even when the streets are not in the best condition.  And oh, yes, those friendly and courteous drivers are Teamsters.

A rebuttal of the Star Tribune misuse of the term “free market”

I submitted the following commentary to the Star Tribune a day or two after D.J. Tice’s column which I considered another misuse of the term “free market”.  I have not seen it published yet.  Could it be that “free marketers” don’t like reminders of true free markets?

D.J. Tice’s column “ A foolish system and your money …” leads me to believe he is one of those who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  I wonder if he has considered the number of times in a day that he has benefitted from public goods.

Did he drive on a freeway to work?  Did he pay the full cost of his share of the road, the full cost of the pollution from his car, and the cost of the loss of tax revenues from the houses that once were above the trenches that divide up our cities?

Did he take a bus to work?  His fare would have only paid part of the cost.  But the bus is a public good in that it reduces the number of cars on the road.  If he had to pay the full cost of his bus ride, he probably wouldn’t take the bus.

Did he walk to work?  Did he pay a toll for the sidewalk he used?  Did he put a coin in the traffic lights so that he could cross the street?

Let’s hope that his house never catches fire.  He would not be happy paying the full cost of the fire department response.  If his neighbor had the misfortune of a fire, would he help pay the cost of the fire department whose response kept the fire from spreading to his house?

I am a graduate of the Cleveland Public School System.  I doubt that my mother could have afforded the full cost of the schooling that qualified me to attend college.  Many other people, some childless, helped pay the cost of my education.

I could not have afforded the tuition at Case Institute of Technology.  A foundation paid full tuition the first year.  I flunked out of Case but the foundation kept paying a fraction of my tuition at Ohio Wesleyan University.  At both schools, many donors provided money to keep the tuition down somewhat.  Three-percent federal loans also helped.  I managed to get back to Case for graduate school with a graduate assistant position.  I doubt any of the work we did paid in full for our jobs and tuition.

Companies are demanding more and more highly specialized “skills”, but they are not willing to train people.  They expect the public schools and the colleges and universities to train these employees.  But they don’t want to pay the taxes for the public schools and colleges, institutions that would help those who can’t afford the elite institutions.  The smaller the pool of potential employees, the harder it is to find “qualified” employees.

Could he pay out of pocket for each and every medical visit he needed: office or hospital?  For those of us with well-paying jobs, health insurance pays for a chunk of the care, if not all.  But what about people who have jobs with no health insurance?  Has he considered that their lack of health insurance benefits him with lower prices? (Or the owners with much higher profits.)

What if there were a deadly epidemic that had no respect for wealth?  How might such an epidemic start?  Maybe those who first became ill could not afford the health care, health care that would have reduced their chances of spreading their disease.

Modern economies run a large array of public goods: roads, schools, police, fire, and regulatory inspections.  As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes supposedly said, “I like taxes; they buy me civilization.”

Why you should vote

“But when all is said and done, Jefferson has beliefs, Burr has none.”
- Lyric from "Hamilton" on Hamilton not liking either candidate but choosing Jefferson.

Quoted by Paul Anderson, retired Minnesota Supreme Court Judge and life-long Republican in "This Lifelong Republican is voting for Clinton".

See http://e.startribune.com/Olive/ODN/StarTribune/Default.aspx.

Awful Motors has introduced “new, improved” wheel design

Awful Motors has introduced square wheels, a cool new feature on all of its models.  Awful Motors stated in its introduction that round wheels were boring, they just went around and around.

This just in, after thousands of complaints of Awful Motors’ square wheels, the company has announced that by popular demand it will replace the square wheels with octagonal wheels, providing a significantly smoother ride.

Far-fetched?  This is not far from the abrupt changes that so many software designers put into their products.  A feature was working fine for millions of users, and then some designer has a “better idea”.

Some bothersome changes I’ve found recently are Yahoo! Finance’ rework of its pages and the Star Tribune’s changing relatively simple software to move between the print edition and an expanded article to cluttered software that never seems to work as one would wish.  I have no idea how other readers perceive the changes to the Star Tribune, but Yahoo had a page for comments.  These comments were almost all negative.

Google once had a simple way of moving from blog authoring to statistics without signing in again.  Now one has to log in over and over again and there are several clutter pages between authoring, feed analysis, and income review.

Apple, once the computer for the rest of us, has morphed into guess how this cool new feature works.  In the first few years of the Macintosh I was eager for a new version when real advances were made - hard drives, color, drag and drop, and on and on.  Now, I update to a major new release only when I buy a new device.

Often I think these changes are not for the benefit of the uses but the employment prospects of the designers.

Who decides radical design change?

After the dust for "Seamless" settled, I went to the Star Tribune web edition, expecting to see the usual facsimile edition.  Instead I found a clutter with a page occupying less of the screen than before.

Why do management and designers make radical changes that maybe only a few want?  Many users like the way things work and only want tweaks to fix a few things that don't work well.

Apple is notorious for this.  What worked one way well suddenly works in a completely different way.   Way back in the first decade of the Mac, I looked forward to updates, especially new levels.  Now, I won't touch a new level unless I buy a new gadget.  And many times, I wish I had stuck with the old gadget even if the newer is faster and has more data capacity.

I think the problem is "focus groups".  Management pays a few selected participants to attend a meeting while management watches behind one-way glass.  The moderator works and works to get the participants to agree to management's proposal.  Only when the participants agree to management's proposal do they get their honorarium and get to go home.

I know!  I was in a focus group to approve "Comfort Systems" for the Duluth gas and water department.  Few of us were happy with "Comfort Systems".  We didn't know until later who the entity was; we assumed it was a private utility.

Back to technology: "New and Exciting" may mean "Frustrating and Buggy".

To add insult to injury, Google won't let me scroll the text I pasted here.  It moves the window as a block instead of the text in the frame.  It didn't do that for the last post!!!

Writing to editors, authors, and other public figures

This article was "triggered" in part because of a letter I recently received and in part by the email conversation I mentioned last week with Michael Mann, author of "The Hockey Stick".

I have an unopened letter sitting on my desk.  It has no return address and the envelope is covered with a diatribe against Obama.  I generally put these unopened into the recycle bin.  Maybe I kept it as a fodder for this column.  I assure you that I will eventually put it unopened into the recycle bin.

My brief conversation with Michael Mann began with appreciation for his book and a quote that Adam Smith warned about "the denial machine" Mann mentioned.  I was surprised that the conversation went on so long; I should consider that he has many more things to think about than the wandering thoughts of an old man in Duluth.

After I finished a series of fantasy novels, I sent the author a letter of appreciation through her website.  She emailed a nice reply, but I didn’t follow up except possibly with a thank you.  I think these were all through her website because I have no copy in my mail box.

I had read a book or two by an author of military-political affairs, and I sent him an email thanking him for them.  He replied with a thank you and a suggestion for another of his books.  Then he came to Duluth and I got to meet him briefly.  I didn’t say anything significant; I’m a writer not a speaker.

And sometimes an email to an author leads to a long-standing friendship.  Some time ago I sent an appreciative email to a regular "Local View" contributor to the Duluth News Tribune.  We have some major differences of opinion, but our common ground is a basis for lunch every month or so.

Another local writer had a website that invited conversation.  I had had many email or face to face conversations with this writer.  I was surprised when he cut me off that he had more to do than have email conversations with me.  I wonder if I had written something he found offensive or if he really was very busy.  I hope he is very busy with many lucrative projects.

Over the years I've submitted many a letter to the editor or even an opinion piece.  Some of them were published; probably many more were assigned to the circular file.  But basically your letter or article should be timely, concise, and based on "facts".  I put "facts" in quotes because “facts” are too often some group's talking points rather than some observable set of information.  The hard part is that a fact in one situation is not a fact in a similar situation.  But be forewarned, many editors rewrite letters to conform to the publication's guidelines.  In doing so, they can "flip" your meaning to just the opposite from what you intended.  It has happened to me at least twice in two different publications.  If you are lucky, the editor will send you a copy of his or her revision for your approval.

I have all but stopped writing to politicians.  Almost all of them have staff send a position paper.  Too often these position papers are barely related to the subject of the letter or website comment.

Probably with electronic communication, even their staffs are overwhelmed.  Count opinion for or against.  Find position paper that seems to address issue.  Send it out with politician's automatic signature.

I miss Rudy Boschwitz's replies.  Whether he agreed with my letter or not, he would send it back with a one-sentence germane comment and a smily face.  I wonder if I have any of these in my very disorganized files.

Two letters from famous people that I thought I had kept I have not been able to find in several years of trying.

One was to Alex Haley, author of Roots.  I was sysop of the Genealogy Roundtable on GEnie, GE's competitor to CompuServe.  I invited him to attend one of our weekly online chat sessions.  He responded with a kind letter declining the invitation.  I think his reason was that he was a typewriter guy and hadn't really moved to use of computers.

The other was to a well-known movie actor.  I was going to write that you should note my middle initial.  But it isn't in my byline.  It is "D".  If you are under sixty I'm sure you will have no clue to what D stands for.  Your clue is the movie Being There Shirley McLaine, Peter Sellers, and ...

I wrote to this actor posing this same question.  He wrote a delightful reply.  Again, I can't find it in my messed up files.

What’s the point of all this bragging of hobnobbing with famous people?  Well, my original title was How to write to editors, authors, and other public figures.  With my catalog of correspondents this article became longer and longer, and it had only a nod about how to write a letter to the editor or an opinion piece.

So, here is my brief advice on corresponding with a famous person.

If you have something important or interesting to write, don’t hesitate to do so.  Many appreciate comments from their readers, customers, or constituents.  For many famous people, you can easily find an email address or website that takes comments. You only need three guidelines: be polite, be factual, and be brief.

Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2015-07-23 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/07/23/5661_writing_to_editors_authors_and_other_public

Quick correction of corporate mistakes

This noon I tried reading the eEdition of the Star Tribune.  Safari on my iPod said it couldn’t the load the page because of “too many redirects”.  No matter how many times in how many different ways, I kept getting the same result.

Come on, folks, don’t deprive me of my comics fix.  They are not as readily available as in the eEdition, the screen equivalent of the actual printed page.

I sent email to the digital access address of the paper.  Then I tried calling, but there was a wait.  Ah ha!  I’m not alone.

This was about noon today.  By sometime around three, if not before, the problem was fixed and I could read the comics again.

I did send a thank-you email.

The Magical Marketplace Can Be Malevolent

Once again, one who lives by profits justifies wages by the magic of the market.  See “Work like you mean it, and let the market set the best wage” by Scott Sayer, Star Tribune, 2015-04-20.  He writes, “Market forces should determine what an hour of work is worth.”

Once upon a very bad time, market forces determined that a slave should work as many hours as the master required. These masters were so determined that they were right, they were willing to wage a bloody war to protect their interests.

Once upon a bad time, market forces determined that children should work as many hours as the masters of the factories required.  These masters didn’t fight a military war to protect their interests, but they bought a lot of politicians to defeat child labor laws.

Once upon another bad time, market forces determined that young women should work long hours in unsafe working conditions as the masters of the factories required.  Even fires and other disasters did not stop the corruption from letting these conditions continue.  Then the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, killing 145 people, mostly immigrant teen-age girls, made a bit of progress in reducing these conditions.

Even in these supposedly more benign times, market forces determine that masters’ employees should work long hours, well past their ability to function safely.  How many people other than these employees have been killed by truck or bus drivers working longer hours than the drivers could stay alert?  Despite these deaths, there are still masters who decry government interference with too many regulations.

Now as many call for a minimum wage of $15/hour,  Sayer states “Market forces should determine what an hour of work is worth.”  He complains that these figures are coming “from bureaucrats who never had to sign a paycheck in their lives.”  But these “bureaucrats” are officials, elected by the People, who try to follow the Constitution and promote the “General Welfare”.

And just what are these “market forces” that Sayer mentions so often?  Are they many buyers and many sellers free to enter and leave the market?  Do these “market forces” provide buyers and sellers with all the information they need to make an informed decision?  Are all the costs of the transaction covered, or are there costs that others must bear?

There are far fewer buyers of labor than sellers of labor.  The buyers of labor are free to contract or expand their work force. The sellers of labor must find buyers or be hungry and without shelter.

Both buyers and sellers of labor might not provide all the information for informed decisions.  Buyers might not provide all the details of the job, including how safe it is, how many onerous rules there are, and how reliably checks are issued. Sellers might overstate their credentials, hide unsuccessful performance, or hide illness that limits their abilities.

Both buyers and sellers of labor might push off costs to others.  Buyers might not have insurance to cover work injuries. Sellers might engage in theft that needs to be investigated by public law enforcement officials.  Buyers might pay less than “a living wage” passing off to others the concern that sellers have sufficient food, shelter, and clothing.  Sometimes these costs are borne by relatives, sometimes by governments.

These are only a few of the ways that other than “market forces” can influence labor decisions.

Sayer decries that a living wage is based on 40 hours a week, and he wonders why such a limit.  He ignores that many people fought and even died to get a standard work week set at 40 hours.  This push came not from bureaucrats but workers who wanted long, healthy, and enjoyable lives.  They defied Adam Smith’s observation that it was legal for the masters to unite to keep wages down but illegal for the workers to unite to raise wages.

Consider that a work day is eight hours plus a half hour for lunch.  Assume that a worker has a half-hour commute each way and that the other two meals also take about a half hour each.  The worker has now accounted for ten-and-half hours of the day.  Add eight hours for sleep and fifteen minutes each preparing for bed or getting dressed. The worker has now accounted for nineteen hours of his or her day, leaving five hours for other activities.  It seems Sayer believes that the work day should use these extra hours up to give him a thirteen-hour day from his employees.

Even when I was enjoying my job, I was quite willing to go home at the official quitting time.  Sure, there were times when some pressing problem needed more work or when I was so involved in what I was doing that I didn’t want to stop.  In fact, I don’t think that there was an hour of the day at which I didn’t work sometime or another.  Sometimes that was when the work was to be done; sometimes that was when the work just kept going.  But I was always glad when work returned to a normal day-time pace.

It was not bureaucrats who decided the work week should be 40 hours, but We the People.  It was We the People who decided that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Software glitch gives ambiguous headline

The following is from the Olive edition of the Duluth News Tribune, 2014-12-19:

leaderskilledinairstrikes Three top Islamic State

This is the headline given when one asks for an expanded view of an article.

Just what does is mean?

“Leader skilled in air strikes”

or

“Three top Islamic State leaders killed in airstrikes”

This kind of headline frequently appears in the Olive Editions of both the Duluth News Tribune and the Star Tribune.  The Olive Edition is the newspaper as printed with the user benefit of expanding a page or a given article.  Really neat when it works.  But too often, a page is blank for several minutes.

The irony is that both the Duluth News Tribune and Star Tribune frequently have front page stories about problems that MNSure may be having.  Granted, this garbled headline problem is a minor nuisance compared to delays in accessing MNSure, but...

A safer driving test?

I sent the following to the Star Tribune on 1999-07-15.  I don’t think it was published.  The link to inrets.fr still exists but the link to ccad.uiowa.edu does not.

"Unreal games" reminded me of many earlier thoughts I've had about driving simulation. When I tried Silicon Motor Speedway at the Mall of America, I thought that its technology could be used to give more rigorous driving tests. When I read about Unreal's software engine https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4, I thought that this technology would be even better for a driving test.

States will probably continue to test applicants in real cars in artificial environments for many decades. But what if insurance companies tested their customers in artificial cars with a seemingly realistic environment? Instead of only stopping for a stop sign, keeping in the lane, turning correctly, what if
drivers could be tested on how close they followed, how well they could stop when a ball rolled into the street, how well they could drive at night, how well they could do in dozens of situations they would encounter on real streets.

As an inducement for drivers to take the test, the insurance companies would lower drivers' premiums according to how well they did on the test. Even if some drivers aced the test but continued many bad habits and attitudes, wouldn't they have gained some small change in behavior and skill?

To check on how far the technology has come, I searched the web for "driving simulator" and "driving simulations", I received 1300 references (via HotBot).  Clicking on the very first item (http://www.inrets.fr/ur/sara/drifac_e.htm) I found a wealth of other links. One was a Driving Simulation Conference in Paris, France this past week. Another was a set of abstracts of papers written at the Center for Computer-Aided Design at the University of Iowa; these discussed many of the problems of driving simulation and solutions already found (http://www.ccad.uiowa.edu/research/ids/technical-papers/). Other links were to a few software packages from around the world.

In what I did visit, I found government and auto manufacturer sponsors, but no insurance companies. I reduced the selection by adding "insurance" and still had 830 finds. The first twenty didn't look promising other than some school districts' driver education programs were mentioned.

Considering what I found in a few minutes was far more than I had read about recently, insurance companies and others in a position to test drivers may be doing more than I know.  For the sake of safety and comfort on the roads for all us, let's hope that someone, somewhere has already taken steps to increase dramatically the number of good, defensive drivers.

VA: problem is not the government

Many have been raising complaints about service at many Veterans Administration centers, and many of those blame President Obama and his administration.  But what critics overlook is that they got what they wanted: a smaller government.

How is there a smaller government?  By outsourcing management to private companies.  In the case of the Veteran Affairs Clinic in Hibbing, Minnesota, it is managed by Cincinnati-based Sterling Medical Associates.  See “Elected leaders meet with Hibbing VA workers over scheduling concerns”. http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/283912201.html

According to many of these same critics the purpose of a company is to generate profits.  In other words, good service is secondary.  Some companies do provide good service as a means of increasing profits.  Too many others will short-change good service if it means costs are cut and profits raised.

The sole purpose of government is to provide service.  Sure, this gets side-tracked too, but it is far easier to bring that leviathan back to its purpose than it is to get profit-driven companies to put service first.

Who decides? The many or the money?

Keith Ellison, U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, wrote a good “Counterpoint” in today’s Star Tribune - “Minnesota Values Deserve Our Support”.

My favorite line is “…the voices of the many, not the money, should govern our democracy.”

If you are a U. S. citizen, I hope you have Tuesday, November 4, 2014 on your calendar to remind you to vote.  In fact, be sure that the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November is on your calendar for every year.  Local and state officials need your electoral support, too.

I am an Olive grinch

How readable do you think the following is?

Yet some parameters endure. Phi losopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Not precisely, perhaps, but human history, both personally and collec tively, is definitely thematic. And you didn’t record it, you either won’ recall it, or your memory of it will faulty. Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree the primeval forest which fell with out being heard.” Perhaps that’s why launched the log — it made me seem more real. Or maybe the record is akin to scratches on the wall of a prisoner’ cell, tallying the days until release.

What kind of editor would let this text see print, what with dropped letters/punctuation and split words?  Other examples have bold subtitles moved into the text and many other distracting errors.

This is an example of “To err is human; to really screw up it takes a computer”.  The above is from “The snares and lairs of memory” by Peter M. Leschack in the Star Tribune, 4 May 2014, as displayed when expanding an article from the facsimile page of the Olive edition.

The actual printed text is:

Yet some parameters endure. Philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Not precisely, perhaps, but human history, both personally and collectively, is definitely thematic. And if you didn’t record it, you either won’t recall it, or your memory of it will be faulty. Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.” Perhaps that’s why I launched the log — it made me seem more real. Or maybe the record is akin to scratches on the wall of a prisoner’s cell, tallying the days until release.

The human editor didn’t make any mistakes, but the computer editor really screwed up.  This happens all the time in the Olive edition of both the Duluth News Tribune and the Star Tribune.  The Olive edition displays a facsimile of the printed newspaper.  You can easily “flip” the pages or jump to a section.  You can click on an article to expand it.

The expanded view has the advantage of bringing together segments printed on different pages and of having larger text.  But all the “translation” errors are distracting.  Did the author really write that?  Why is that unrelated bold text doing in this section?  And on and on.

This computer-induced garble is present in both the iPad and the laptop/desktop versions of the software.

Isn’t this a wonderful example of “business efficiency”?

Oh, well!  It still beats going to the corner with the right change in all kinds of weather or calling up to cancel when we’re out of town.  And I can easily make clippings of things on which I want to base another one of these whining entries.