So this is pretty great:

It reminds me of some of the theories surrounding teleportation I bat around in my head. The only way I can imagine teleportation working is essentially a cut-and-paste job, in which case it seems likely to me that you are cloning yourself and killing yourself every time you use one. If we’re going with supernatural technology, it seems to me like portals are safer.

I’ve mentioned here and there that we’re going on a trip, and so we are! To Alaska, where my sister-in-law Ellie will be getting married for the third and we hope joyfully permanent time.

This will be the first trip we’ve taken in 2015. I’m looking forward to seeing the in-laws, and looking forward to the weather, but am really not looking forward to the flights, which will involve two days in each direction. The flight from Dulles (yay!) to Zaulem will be be direct, which is better than adding a fourth leg to the flight but but is an awfully long time to spend in a plane. We’ll be spending the night in Zaulem and then on to Anchorage and then Fairbanks. It’ll be our first time in Zaulem since we moved away, though it’ll pretty much be a matter of going to a hotel room and then back to the airport.

We don’t fly exceptionally well as a family. The ways in which my personality’s and Clancy’s clash are accentuated with every phase of such transportation. Kids, it turns out, make transportation more complicated. Unfortunately, we live just far enough away from the family (nevermind Alaska!) that driving is also extremely rough.

It’s almost enough to make me a fan of rail…

John Oliver recently did a bit on food waste, which alone is worth watching.  In the clip, he talks about how US tax code has a provision for large corporations to be able to take a tax deduction for charitable (food) contributions, but for small business, although a similar provision exists, it isn’t permanent & has to be renewed each year.  This means that the small business owner won’t know until after the annual vote if there is any financial/tax incentive to donate food to food banks.

That alone is a bit of a WTF, but the real meat of the piece is what happened when the House tried to fix it.  Seems that the House passed a bill that would (among other things), make the tax deduction for small business permanent.  When that bill (House 644) got to the Senate, it was renamed, gutted, and essentially replaced with Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with amending the tax code to incentivize small businesses to make charitable food contributions.

So, my question is what is the reasoning behind this kind of action & why is it permitted or tolerated (e.g. why does the House not pitch a fit/why doesn’t someone in the Senate just have an ally in the House submit the bill they want/etc)?

Google is repurposing a coal plant in Alabama to be a new data center.

From Brother Judd: All Anglospheric Politics Is Indentical.

The HUD SCOTUS ruling was a policy victory for the left, but could create problems politically.

I thought the incline/decline in Western Wyoming was rough, but this puts that to shame.

Somewhere along the way, adults and coloring books became a thing.

Here is a thought: If someone goes so far as to change their name to avoid undue public attention, how about we do not actually publicize their new name?

Churches are often told they need to liberalize in order to avoid irrelevance, but Alexander Griswold argues that liberalization leads to irrelevance. Along similar lines, Mollie Hemingway is sadly correct when she criticizes the New York Times for calling United Church of Christ (and the Episcopal Church) “major denominations.”

David Cameron is doing a good job of making me think maybe I’d be a Liberal Democrat.

If the lights went out, here is what some cities would look like.

On efforts to create a music triangle in the South.

The gaps in which being human happens

Welcome to Pariahville, a city of refuge in Florida for sex offenders.

Lisa Endlich Hefferman defends the Mommy Track.

I was originally going to write a do/don’t list about how to interact with customer service reps (CSR’s). But those lists preach only to people who don’t particularly need to hear the sermon.

Instead, I’m offering things to consider when dealing with a CSR. I’m deliberately leaving my definition of CSR open-ended, but examples of what I mean are waiters/waitresses, fast food workers, bank tellers, in-bound call-center reps, and retail or grocery store workers and cashiers. (For the record, I’ve had all of those jobs except waiter.)

TEN CONSIDERATIONS.

1. Unless you’re a regular customer, the CSR doesn’t know that you’re not a jerk. Let’s say a transaction requires you to present an ID. (as in a teller transaction). If the CSR has to ask you for it–instead of you just presenting the ID–he/she doesn’t know you’re not the type of person to get upset and scream at him/her for having the temerity to ask for it. Similar deal if you’re at a takeout restaurant and you need to present a receipt to pickup a food order. If you don’t just present the receipt, the CSR might not know how you’ll react if he/she asks for it.

2. When you ask to see/speak with a supervisor, it’s sometimes interpreted (by the supervisor) that the CSR has failed. There’s a game in a lot of customer service interactions. The CSR does what he/she is told by management. The customer disagrees with the decision. The CSR has no authority to change the rules. The customer asks for a supervisor. The supervisor then reiterates the rule or changes it. This can reflect poorly on the CSR, because an often unstated part of their job is to run interference between the customer and management. There’s usually no disciplinary action taken against the CSR, but when it comes to review time, the CSR’s failure to run interference consistently might be mentioned and taken into consideration.

3. [a variant of consideration no. 2] A lot of the rules that the CSR has to enforce don’t seem to make sense, actually don’t make sense, and the CSR knows they don’t make sense, but the CSR has to enforce them anyway as part of their job.

4. [another variant of consideration no. 2] A lot of the rules that the CSR has to enforce don’t seem to make sense but they actually have a rationale behind them or their rationale isn’t quite what you think it is. I’ll return to the example of ID’s at the teller window. It’s not always that the teller doesn’t know who the customer is. It’s sometimes that the teller doesn’t know that the customer isn’t the type of person who makes a withdrawal, later forgets about it, and then claims that it wasn’t they who came in to make it. (ID practices vary. In my experience, tellers often make compromises, and sometimes it’s bank policy not to even ask for ID if the amount withdrawn is below a certain amount.)

5. If the establishment does not have enough CSR’s to handle the volume of customers, the CSR probably doesn’t need you to tell him/her that, probably dislikes the situation as much as you do, and probably doesn’t have the authority to remedy the situation. The CSR usually can’t hire new people, sometimes co-workers call in sick or don’t show up or aren’t scheduled, and a large influx of customers with too few CSR’s means the CSR has to work a lot harder to help the customers. Often even the shift manager lacks hiring or scheduling authority, and they’re often the ones scheduled to be in the store/restaurant at the odd hours that a CSR shortage is most grievous.

6. If the CSR seems rude, maybe he/she is just shy, or has had a difficult day, or is using a defense mechanism because of the types of customers he/she usually gets. Sometimes a grudging attitude or working inefficiently is one way of coping. Male customers, I have heard, sometimes interpret a smile or friendly from a female CSR as flirting or as an invitation to be asked out. She doesn’t know the customer isn’t a potential stalker. (I bring that up because I know of one example where a customer exhibited what in my opinion were stalker-like behaviors to one of my female coworkers when I was a bank teller.) Or maybe the CSR is just rude. But it’s important to know what you don’t know before or when you decide to call the employee on, or speak to a supervisor about, their “attitude.”

7. [a variant of consideration no. 6] If the CSR seems lazy or seems not to be doing things he/she is hired for, the “laziness” might not be what it seems. Most CSR jobs in my experience have busy times and slack times. The slack times are often a chance to rest. To a certain personality that seems like laziness–and to another personality, that seems like “stealing from the employer”–but it can be just taking a much-needed couple minutes to relax. In some cases, what looks like slack time is actually not even slack time. When I was a teller, we had to run numerous nighttime deposits on a tight schedule–before a certain time in the afternoon when we rolled over to the next business day. Running those deposits was stressful because we had to be very careful to accurately count the money, fill out slips to note any discrepancies, and help customers in the teller line in the process. In the middle of running a deposit, it could sometimes look to the customer as if the teller is just counting his/her money. Again, it’s important to know what you don’t know.

8. If you are on “friendly” terms with a CSR, and see the CSR taking a lunch break, that CSR probably doesn’t want to spend the break talking with you. That break time is the CSR’s time. Depending on the employer or laws of the state, the CSR might not even be paid for that break time.

9. The customer is often (but of course not always) a lot better off than the CSR. Before you lecture the CSR about how you work for a living (with the implication being the CSR doesn’t work), you might consider whether you actually earn more money or have better working conditions than the CSR. I got this talk occasionally in many of my jobs. Once was as a retail stocker and the lecturer was an irate teacher (pro-tip: if a customer goes out of their way to tell you they’re a teacher, that usually means they’re going to treat you poorly. #notallteachers, of course.) Another time was as a bank teller, and the lecturer was someone who (judging by his paycheck) earned a lot more than I but who seemed to think that because I worked in a bank, I was automatically raking it in. (It was the mid-1990s, and I was earning $8 per hour, without benefits, and with a restriction that I could work only 1,000 hours in a year. $8 went further then than now, but still….this guy seemed to be earning a lot more. [/grinding axes])

10. There’s a master/servant dynamic going on in customer service transactions. This dynamic probably underscores the main principle behind all the preceding ones. It is in my opinion deeper, more complicated, and more fraught with potential conflict and emotion than the fiction we have to adopt as a shorthand to explain the employer/employee/customer relationship. In that relationship, it is presumed that an employer agrees to pay an hourly wage, the employee agrees to work at that wage, and the customers deal with the employee, and after a certain amount of time the employee goes home. But add to that a sense of being told what to do and having to do it and facing bad consequences if one doesn’t do it to the customer’s or boss’s satisfaction. The power differential can be something almost visceral and can transcend rational action. Sometimes even the best paying job has its frustrations and moments when the worker just needs to detox or whatever. That’s not always captured in the quid pro quo, money for service equation we, among whom I include myself, tend to talk about when it comes to policy discussions.

CONCLUSION.

I tend to over-think these things. And I’m not perfect. I probably err too much on the side of defending bad CSR behavior and I probably therefore come off as condescending or obsequious in my interactions with CSR’s as a customer. There are times–probably more than I realize or would like to admit–when I as a customer have lost patience or been snippy or otherwise let my frustrations show.

Finally, I really do intend the above points as things to consider, not do/don’t commands. I’m not saying, for example, “never tell people the shop is short-staffed,” “never call out rude behavior,” or “never ask to speak with a supervisor.” I do admit that some of the “considerations” I describe are just part of the job description and in other cases, the “considerations” over-determine or at least strongly imply what I think customers should do. But what I really want to say is that if we as customers want the marketplace to be more humane, maybe one place to start is in reflecting how we treat those whose job it is to serve us. And one step to that goal is considering how they feel.

This video seems to be getting attention from cat people, but it’s the guitar at the end that just kills me.

It’s just like “OH! OUCH! Oh, and of course the guitar just has to join in…

It’s no fun dealing with a sick dog, which is one of the things that we’ve had to deal with lately.

Even when healthy, Lisby lays around the house a lot. So it’s not always easy to tell when she isn’t well. In this case, the illness took the form of an inflexible bladder. It first started by waking up in the morning and finding a puddle on the carpet. Then it started seeming like we were having to take her out and awful lot. It got really bad when I would ask her if she needed to go out, I’d start getting my shoes on, then she would just pee on the floor while I was doing so. (As near as I could tell, saying “outside” caused her to relax her bladder… which left her unable to hold it for even a couple minutes.)

By the Sunday, she was vomiting and her lack of energy had become really evident. She’d become seriously dehydrated.

It turned out to be a bladder infection (we’re pretty sure). It took quite a while for her to rebound, but she did.

What’s kind of funny is how much having both a dog and a little one prepares you for the handling of a lot of urine-related issues.

Especially little Lain.

We had a lot of difficult getting Lain to sleep at night, and one of the things we relied on was milk and later water. The problem with this was that she would overwhelm her diaper. Even if I changed her diaper at three in the morning, by morning it would be overwhelmed again. Dealing with extant urine had become a part of life. That situation resolved a few months ago, but dealing with Lisby gave me flashbacks, as I was setting my alarm for three in the morning to take the dog out.

The good news is tha the solution for all of the above is about the same. When we first got Lisby, one of the things I immediately got was some urine-cleaning solution. Turns out, it works for baby urine, too! And spilled soft drinks.

Tom Carmody has an instant classic piece on Iceman, a quasi-antagonist in Top Gun played by Val Kilmer. Carmody argues that between Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Iceman (Val Kilmer), Iceman is the one you want to work with:

From the beginning of the movie to the end, Iceman seems like the kind of pilot I want operating a fighter plane, whether it’s the Cold War or tomorrow. He’s not concerned with scoring points or showing off. He isn’t going to pose with the enemy. He’s not going to unnecessarily antagonize anybody or raise the geopolitical temperature. He wants to win, and to bring everyone back alive. He’s just really good at what he does.

Maverick, on the other hand — okay, he scratches three MIGs to Iceman’s one in the final dogfight. But he also seems like he might be a self-obsessed sociopath who should probably be in treatment and definitely needs to learn how to act his age.

Hard to argue with that. He also has some other examples of “bad guys” who were actually good guys. The principal from Ferris Bueller, for example. It’s pretty hard to argue that one. He also mentiones everyone trying to get Axel Foley to tamp down in Beverly Hills Cope, which is not only true but also applies to half of the exasperated supervisors and weenie due process people in half of the cop movies ever made (especially when crime was high). He also mentions Walter Peck, the EPA prick from Ghostbusters.

There, of course, I have to draw the line.

He’d have a point if he had intervened sooner, before the presents of ghosts had become so apparent. At that point, yeah I would think that it was a giant con job. Just about everyone would. But once it’s a known thing, a reasonable EPA would be actually spending its time conferring with the Ghostbusters and finding out what exactly it is that they know and developing their own plan. Once you have an EPA task force or something actually doing something about the problem, then maybe you shut the Ghostbusters down. But Peck is so reviled not because the movie tilts against him (as is the case with the other characters) but because his character really is the consummate bureaucrat. There’s obviously a problem, there is no known way of dealing with the problem, and here are people dealing with the problem, but since they’re making a profit off of it and we didn’t expressly allow it we have to shut them down.

Anyhow, here’s a video on a pro-market view of Ghostbusters:

I’m cautiously optimistic about the Iran deal. The high points are that Iran reduces its uranium stockpile by 98%, cuts its number of centrifuges for enrichment by 70% (and gets rid of its newer, more advanced ones), agrees to enrich only to a level that can be used for power production but not for weapons production, and most important sets up a robust inspection regime.

All that is is good, but there are some points that make some people unhappy.

It does allow Iran to keep its nuclear program. Sorry my imperialist friends, but even Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy. They want to sell their oil for cash, particularly as (or if) oil prices increase, rather than burn it all themselves. Nuclear energy is a staightforward business proposition for them.

It only lasts for 10-15 years. This is how negotiations work; you take what you can get, and then you keep talking after you get it. Sometimes all you can do is buy time, and a 10-15 year window is better than the 1 year window we have right right now. That gives us another decade to keep trying to talk them out of developing nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, their leadership is aging and their large under-30 population is increasingly disaffected with their government. Time is on our side, not Rouhani’s or Khameni’s.

Will Iran actually allow inspections? That is the key. But while there’s reason to be skeptical of Iran, we can’t actually know how that works out until we get there. The agreement at least contains meaningful inspection protocols, so it’s too early to call it a failure. On paper, it appears to contain what critics demanded.

But don’t buy the Obama administration’s talk about sanctions “snapping back” if Iran doesn’t comply. The return of sanctions would not be automatic but would require a vote of the UN Security Council, where its chances of passage are slim. The reality is that almost nobody but the US wants sanctions on Iran even now. Not most of Europe, which wants to sell to Iran and purchase their oil; not Russia, which is Iran’s only reliable ally; and not China which is investing heavily in Iran and building a railroad to provide a quick route to Europe for Chinese goods. And for those keeping score, Russia and China have Security Council vetoes.

But deal or no deal, the effectiveness of the sanctions was dying out anyway. It’s time to accept that and move on.

Could we have gotten a better deal? It’s doubtful. Our real alternatives to this deal are the status quo or an invasion. Neither of those is as good as this deal.

Educational software for children should be aimed at children and not parents and educators. Did anyone else here ever play Spies in Europe? It was a predecessor to Carmen San Diego. Fond memories, from which I learned all about Europe.

When you’re wrong, you can always convince yourself you’re right.

The “Florida Man” phenomenon is more a product of Florida’s open government laws than anything to do with the Sunshine State.

When it comes to flipped houses, buyer beware. We found out our house was quasi-flipped some time after we bought it. Oh, and that a dog was left to starve in our basement after an acrimonious divorce.

At least arguably, the best and most cost-effective way of dealing with the homeless is to give them housing. Too bad you could never get Republicans on board with the idea.

On the other hand, half of state housing in New Zealand tested positive for meth.

Do fetuses feel pain? It’s complicated.

Mormons pay their debts. Their student debts if they went to BYU, at any rate. Other praiseworthy schools: Vassar, Harvey Mudd, and Notre Dame.

Have recent studies and reports exaggerated the prevalence of racism?

Here’s a really cool map of population growth/loss trends in Europe. It’s interesting how uniform growth is in France and the UK (and Ireland!).

Here’s an interesting concept. Safety Trucks that allow people behind trucks to see what’s in front of it.