Archive for the 'Society' category

A Mass Murderer’s Suggestion for Curbing Violence

Jan 16 2013 Published by under Crime, Gaming, Government, Music, News Media, Politics, Society

I am a mass murderer.  At least that’s what the media would have you believe.

I play violent video games. I watch violent movies. I have read tales of fantasy, violence and destruction most of my life.  I also listen to rock music – the harder the better – and have for most of my life.

Various media outlets and commentators have identified all of these things as contributing factors in the violent outbursts of the unhinged.  Given that I participate in not one, but ALL of them; given that I have participated in them for thirty years; and given that I am a guy who spends much of his day in front of computer and TV screens, I should be a powder keg just looking for a spark.

But despite all of that, I have not once opened fire in a shopping center, taken up arms against an employer, or gone on a school rampage.

I do own guns. I hunt with them. That’s it.

I work, a lot.  When I have time, I play video games…. with friends… and with my kids…  None of them have opened fire at a mall.

So it amazes me to see so many people blaming the games, the movies and the music for the acts that horrify us on our TV screen.  They call for video game content restrictions, or labels on moves, music and games.  And yet the senseless tragedies continue because all of our handwringing is applied to the wrong question.

Rather than ask “what outside influences caused that guy to be violent” we should be asking the question “why does one person exposed to that level of violent content show no tendency toward actual violence while another does.

That variable – for all the talk of guns, and high capacity magazines, and violent games/movies/ music – is what we must endeavor to identify and address.

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Aereo makes it tempting to give someone else money for something that’s already free

Jan 09 2013 Published by under Business, Cable, Pop Culture, Programming, Television

This is possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read - at least today.

“Its channel selection is limited to 29 over-the-air channels and Bloomberg TV. It doesn’t include the other cable networks I frequently watch. … A day pass costs $1 and gives you 10 days to watch up to three hours of recorded shows. You can pay $8 a month for unlimited live viewing and 20 hours of storage, or $12 for 40 hours. Or you can pay $80 for a full year and 40 hours. That annual price is less than what I pay my cable company for TV each and every month. It’s a great deal for people who mostly watch broadcast television and not a lot of sports.”

You know what is 100% free and doesn’t require any payment to the cable industry? Broadcast TV. This guy is suggesting people pay money every month – albeit to a different company – to watch something that is broadcast OVER THE AIR. The reason Aereo thinks it is legal is because they are just retransmitting something you can already pick up through your TV. It’s the act of retransmission that is illegal without permission.

If you want to get rid of cable – as the title implies – this completely fails to do that. The author even says so. Now, if you would rather pay a different company for something you can already get for free, maybe he is on to something.

Perhaps they should retitle this piece “Aereo makes it tempting to give someone else money you don’t need to be spending on something that’s already free.”

The problem, you see, is that everything on your TV is not cable. Some of it is good old-fashioned, pick-it-up-with-rabbit-ears broadcast TV.  For those born after 1990, let me explain. The rest of you can jump down a paragraph.

There are some channels that ‘broadcast’ TV.  That is, they transmit it over the open airwaves, and any chucklehead with a digital TV can pick it up FOR FREE.  (Yes, it has to be digital. I don’t have time to explain why.) ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc are all broadcast channels. So the two programs he mentions (Downton Abbey and Revenge) are already free without a subscription service of any kind.  Don’t believe me? Disconnect your cable box, switch the input to “TV” and see what you pick up. Fun, isn’t it.

I find it hysterically amusing that “ABC News” – which is affiliated with a broadcast station – has an article suggesting that you need to pay to get an ABC show that they deliver for free (Revenge is an ABC program).

Why would ABC do something that ridiculous? Because here is the real rub in all of this.  The broadcasters, who deliver all their shows for free, over the air, are also demanding retransmission payments from cable companies that make those same shows available to you without requiring you to switch inputs on the TV.  In fact, they are demanding ever-larger payments from cable companies. In some cases, I have been told by cable company reps, those increases can be more than 400%.

Broadcasters are a big chunk of the reason your cable bills go up all the time. They are charging you for something you can already get for free.  And as more people watch it for free, the broadcasters raise the rates on those still willing to pay.

Then they have the brass stones to run an article like this one that suggests you can pay someone else to get the stuff they air for free.

There are ways to get rid of cable. They don’t work for most, but they exist.  However, if all you are watching are broadcast channels, you certainly don’t need to be paying Aereo or anyone else for it.

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Tea with a Surprise

Aug 24 2012 Published by under Business, Craziness, Food, How Not To Sell, Stuff That Sucks, Yuck!!!

 So I drink a lot of tea and coffee – A LOT of tea and coffee.  So much so that buying packages of tea bags is kind of pointless.  Instead I buy great big bags of loose tea, and typically buy a bunch of them at once. About two weeks ago I bought five 8 oz bags of Starbucks loose Awake tea (like the bag pictured here from their website.)

I have some old tin tea containers I keep the loose stuff in and this morning I went to pour from one of the bags into the tin.  That’s when I heard the clank and thought to myself, “Tea doesn’t normally clank.”

Tea, you have to understand, is one of your quieter beverages in its natural state.  There typically aren’t really heavy objects in tea that would make a clanking sort of a sound. That’s one thing I really like about tea. It’s pretentiousness typically lends itself more to quiet introspection rather than noisily announcing its arrival.  That’s more of a soda thing to do.

So anyway, the clank really took me by surprise. I looked into the tin to see exactly who this tea thought it was and why it was coming around bringing all this ruckus.

That’s when I saw it.

Now, of all the things you typically don’t find in tea, hardware is typically high on the list.  The ingredient list on tea is usually pretty straightforward. It’s typically, you know, just the tea. There may be some teas that are iron fortified, but I don’t really think that’s what they mean.

In my case, the fact that my tea included anything other than tea was pretty much a surprise. I’m not talking surprise on the scale of discovering you’re a lottery winner, more like finding out that girl you were flirting with at the bar is really a dude.  The extra parts were kind of unnerving.

So I thought I would post about this for two reasons.  First, I haven’t posted in a while and felt the need to justify the money I spend on maintaining this site. Second, I thought I would throw this out there in case my friends at Starbucks are planning to include anything else in my tea – like maybe a baby mouse or a human body part (both of which, for the record, would rise to the level of lottery winner surprise.)

You see, I like my tea just with the tea in it. I don’t really feel like the piece of their processing equipment that was in my order was really necessary or appreciated.

Some may disagree. Somewhere in the US there may have been a guy who would have said, “Wow!  That is exactly the size felangee I needed to complete my time machine and finally blow this place!”

I, on the other hand, just wanted some tea.

Starbucks, do you think maybe, just maybe, next time you can make that happen?

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My letter to the Fine Folks at the CPSC

Aug 14 2012 Published by under Business, Government, Society, The Law

Earlier today I posted about the regulatory overreach by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and its war on the rare earth magnets known as Buckyballs and Nanodots.

This afternoon I penned a letter to the CPSC to register my complaint.  If you are interested in sending your own letter, I encourage you to do so. You can visit SaveOurBalls.net or click these links to open a new email to Nancy Nord, Anne Northup, Inez Tenenbaum, Robert Adler and their media flack Scott Wolfson

In the meantime, here is the text of the letter I sent. I thought I would share it.

I am writing to add my name to the list of those opposed to your action on novelty magnets.  As an owner of such novelties sold under the name Buckyballs and Nanodots, I purchased those magnets for my use and entertainment.  I am able to read warning labels and keep the magnets away from my kids as directed. I am also able to understand the Zen Magnets warnings as what they were, an attempt to both educate owners and simultaneously mock the government for its egregious meddling.

It is unfortunate that the government feels the need to protect people from their own impairments – stupidity being among them.  I was under the impression that Darwin had conclusively proven that isn’t really possible.  For instance, the CPSC notes that, on average, 25 children are killed per year by furniture.

How does the CPSC justify allowing the scourge of dressers and bookcases to terrorize our homes?

Perhaps the CPSC should instead require a warning label on people that says “Your IQ must be at least 100 to procreate.”  That would address both the possibility of children being given magnets to eat AND people putting a 100 pound, 60-inch TV on top of a flimsy, off-balance, particle board stand they bought at Ikea.

In the meantime, I have ordered several more sets of Buckyballs to show my ongoing to support to a company that has added jobs and more than $40 million in direct economic activity to the country in the last four years, despite the incompetent job government has done of attempting to solve the nation’s fiscal problems over the same period.  Those sales represent the first effective stimulus this government has achieved.

So congrats on that.

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CPSC vs. BuckyBalls

Aug 14 2012 Published by under Business, Government, Society, The Law

If you have talked to or followed me in the last 24 hours, you have no doubt heard about BuckyBalls - those small, BB-sized, rare earth magnets you see for sale in novelty shops.  April gave me some for Christmas and I am constantly fiddling with them.

Well the US Government, in its infinite wisdom, has banned them.  They have ordered all companies selling rare earth magnets to stop doing so.  I discovered this yesterday when I went to order a set from nanodots. They are no longer for sale in the US.

When I found them unavailable on Amazon, I immediately became suspicious because you can buy anything on Amazon.  A quick search of Google News for Buckyballs reveals the problem:

Feds file suit against Buckyballs, retailers ban product

The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Wednesday sued the maker of the popular magnetic desk toy Buckyballs to stop the sale of the product because of the risks posed to children.

Some major retailers, including Amazon, Brookstone and Urban Outfitters, have agreed to stop selling these and similar products at CPSC’s request. Children who swallow the tiny magnetic balls can require surgery when they become stuck in their intestines.
Dozens of children have needed surgery to remove the tiny magnets in Buckyballs as well as those sold by competitors of its maker, Maxfield & Oberton. At least 12 of the ingestions involved Buckyballs.

There have been, by the governments numbers, 33 incidents of kids being harmed by magnets.  12 involved Bucky Balls.  Bucky Balls has sold 2.2 million sets in four years each set contains between 125 and 216 balls. making a grand total of 275 to 475 million magnets in the wild.  If those 12 incidents involved just a few magnets, you are looking at a potential failure rate of one in 6 million to 1 in 13 million.

Yet the government response, despite warning labels on the product that specifically say they are dangerous if swallowed, is to ban the sale of the product.

By way of comparison, just for example, almost as many kids are killed by furniture per year (25) than have been killed by magnets.  More people (35) are killed per year by hot water than have been killed in total, by magnets.

Yet the government has not yet banned furniture or hot water.  But it may just be a matter of time given our overly-litigious society and activist government.

This overreach threatens, most directly, a company called Zen Magnets, the makers of Buckyballs.  They have, as noted, sold 2.2 million sets of magnets in the past four years (since they started).  The sets cost between $20 and $40. So despite the dysfunctional economy that government seems unable/unwilling to take seriously, this company has flourished by selling a novelty desk toy aimed at adults.

Now the government wants to shutter them because a handful of parents can’t or wouldn’t read the warning labels and be decent parents.

When people ask you to give an example of over-zealous, anti-business regulation, this is a good place to start.

 

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