Quick Hitts

Shirley Einhorn, my mother-in-law, died two weeks ago. She was generous and smart and talented, and her death has left all of us stunned and devastated. 

She was an avid reader who liked buying her favorite author’s hard-cover novels as soon as they came out. She’d also bought a Nook, and although she was comfortable with most technology, she found it clumsy and obnoxious and difficult to use; a poor imitation of the vastly superior Kindle. I tried it and agreed with her.

Going through her things, my wife found an unopened, unused Nook case and asked me to return it to Barnes & Noble.

There was no receipt in the bag, so I expected to be issued a gift card. It would probably be for their lowest sale price. Cases and accessories are usually outrageously overpriced. She probably paid forty bucks for it, and I figured I’d get a GC for half of that.

I waited in line and the first clerk I talked to said she couldn’t process returns, but the other clerk behind the counter could. I waited while that clerk’s slow-motion customer finished her purchase, then stepped up and told her why I was returning the cover.
She asked if I had the card that was used to purchase it. “No,” I said, “I have no way of knowing what card she used, or even if she used a card.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “without a receipt or the card we can’t do anything for you.”
“Seriously? This was bought from here, and since the purchaser died, I have no way of verifying the purchase. I’d be happy with a gift card.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you willing to lose a customer, forever, over a purchase this small?”

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.” Then she helpfully added, “Next time be sure to save the receipt.”

I left, angry and annoyed. I won’t be back. Ever.

I didn’t shop there often – maybe three or four times a year – but now I’ll be shopping there zero times a year. Free Clue, B&N: In today’s market no retailer can afford to piss off any customer, even one who only shops there occasionally. Shopping elsewhere is easy, cheaper, and fun. You’re barely staying alive, and this is one of the reasons. You just might want to review your return policy, while you still can.

State and Federal Legislators are trying to rush gun restrictions into law before the memory of Sandy Hook fades. It’s important they capitalize on fear, paranoia, and the innumeracy of the pubic before people lose interest and turn their attention to something else.

Many of the restrictions seem reasonable, like background checks, licensing and tests for mental competency. But even the most reasonable restrictions must be opposed, and opposed vehemently, for one very good reason: We know how nannies work. We have already seen their master plan in action.

When anti-smokers asked for, and received, a law mandating smoking and non-smoking sections in airplanes, there was little objection. It was a perfectly reasonable request. After it was in place for a while, they asked for, and received, a smoking ban on flights of less than two hours. That also sounded reasonable.

Imagine, back then, someone raising the following objection: “Folks, if you put this in place, it will eventually lead to a jihad against smokers. Smoking will be banned everywhere. Businesses will be prohibited from providing rooms where their employees can smoke. You won’t be able to smoke in a bar, fer chrisakes. When smokers obligingly go outside to smoke, nannies will complain they’re standing too close to the door, so laws will be passed forcing them to stand fifteen feet from any door or window. Then thirty feet. Smoking will be banned in parks and beaches and in private vehicles. Entire universities will prohibit it anywhere on their campus. People will be banned from smoking  in their own homes.”

Anyone making such a claim back then would have been brushed off a loony, but that’s exactly what’s happened. The nannies got one rule, one seemingly reasonable restriction in place, then paused while people got used to it. Then they demanded another restriction, got it, and paused again. Then they did it again, and again, and again. It took them fifty years of baby steps to get to where they are now, and they’re still pushing for even more restrictions.

The anti-gun lobby does not want anyone but the government to own weapons. That is their end goal, but they’re not foolish enough to try to reach that goal immediately. Few of them will even admit it. Ban all guns? Naw, not them. Never! All they want is to make them safer, or to make sure they’re registered so the government knows who has what, or to make sure that mentally unstable people can’t get to them, or to make the magazines smaller, or to limit guns that look scary. That’s all. Simple. Reasonable.

Baby steps.

The general public examines their current proposals, thinks about them, reacts to them, and many people support to the ones they think are reasonable. They think that once those reasonable restrictions are in place that will be the end of it. They assume that anyone opposing such things must be come kind of foaming-at-the-mouth gun nut. (And to be fair, there are a few honest-to-goodness foamy gun nuts involved in the conversation.) They are either unaware of the nanny master plan or think that it’s different this time.

It’s not. It never is.

So when people resist any attempts at any restrictions, restrictions you think are perfectly reasonable, don’t assume they’re just some violent whack-job that wants everyone to carry RPGs on the street.  They may be people who have looked at the numbers and seen that violent crime is lowest where gun ownership is highest. They may be folks who have studied history and learned that the first thing any tyrant does is disarm the public. They may have concluded that the eleven thousand gun homicides every year in the US are outweighed by the hundreds of thousands of crimes prevented annually by gun-wielding citizens. And maybe, just maybe, they know and understand how nannies of all sorts work, and so understand the importance of opposing any restrictions they want, on anything, ever.

It’s the only reasonable stance to take.

Southington, Connecticut, thinks they have a solution to violence. They’re offering a $25 gift card for every violent video game that’s turned in. The games will be incinerated, probably just with matches, although it would be much cooler if they destroyed them with a flamethrower or a BFG.

They don’t define what makes a game violent. Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty obviously qualify, but what about Diablo II and Starcraft? Rise of Nations features tiny solders killing each other. Football is a violent sport – how about a three-year-old copy of Madden?

I wish I lived close enough to take advantage of their foolishness. I have lots of old games I’ve played and am done with. I never buy them when they first come out – I always wait until the price drops and buy them out of the cheepie bins. I have a shelf full of games that cost five or ten bucks. There are even a couple unopened packages in my collection: A five-dollar intro to World of Warcraft and a promotional disk for Conan the Barbarian someone gave me at a convention. I could take several hundred dollars from these silly people.

“There is ample evidence that violent video games, along with violent media of all kinds, including TV and Movies portraying story after story showing a continuous stream of violence and killing, has contributed to increasing aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and is desensitizing our children to acts of violence including bullying,” wrote John Myers, a spokesperson for the program. “Social and political commentators, as well as elected officials including the president, are attributing violent crime to many factors including inadequate gun control laws, a culture of violence and a recreational culture of violence.”

There are a few little problems with his claims. First off, most elected officials are experts at getting re-elected, and little else. Social and political commentators are often quite ignorant about whatever they’re pontificating on. Free clue, Mr. Myers: their yammering isn’t proof of anything, ever, on any subject.

Let’s take a look at the “ample evidence” Mr. Meyers talks about. It’s….hang on….wait a minute…still looking…damn. There isn’t any. Not even a little. In fact, we could argue that increased video game violence reduces real-world violence.

Let’s start by agreeing with their premise that video games have become more and more violent over the years. Part of it is the technology – improved graphics allow for more realistic gore. Now let’s look at the sales numbers – American’s spend more on video games than any other form of entertainment, and violent games are among the most popular. Sales of such games rise every year. We’ll avoid the tedium of breaking it down to specific numbers and just give them that point.

Now all we have to do is look rate violent crimes committed in the US and compare them to video game sales.

Oops.

The rate of violent crime has been steadily dropping for the past thirty years. There was a spike last year, but the rate is still far below what it was three decades ago. It would be simple, with a few charts and graphs, to “prove” violent video games reduce violence. We could bolster this argument by adding some pseudo psychological babble about providing an outlet and escape valves and teaching children to cope with blah blah blah. This would be just as silly as blaming violent games for real-life violence, but if we did it carefully enough it would fool a lot of people.

These are all facts, of course, and mere facts are seldom enough to convince the unsmartenized masses, who will continue to clamor for crackdowns on anything they don’t like. But if you live near Southington, Connecticut, at least you have an opportunity to profit from their ignorance. Grab all the old, beat, discarded video games you can find and turn them into cash. Use it to go to a violent movie or buy a bloody video game, and claim you’re doing it to help reduce crime.

More Info:

I glommed the graphics from two good articles on the subject:

The NRA: oblivious and talking
Crime and Victimization Rates: Are Our Streets Still Safe?

The claim is becoming more and more common on the social sites I haunt: There is a cure for cancer, but Big Pharma is hiding it because they make far more money on ineffective treatments than they could from curing the disease. Could this possibly be true?

This is not a new claim. Thirty-five years ago my mother died of cancer. We received lots of snail-mail letters, some from complete strangers, telling us that doctors and drug companies didn’t want a cure, and were ignoring natural, 100% effective cures they couldn’t patent. Back then the popular woo was mustard plasters. You just had to travel to Mexico where a shaman would smear you with a magical mustard mix and cover it with a cloth. In a couple of days, it would draw the tumors out through your skin and you’d be healed.

Today’s miracle cures include hemp oil, laetrile, purple grapes, colloidal silver, cesium chloride, juice from various organic fruits and vegetables, coffee enemas, healing touch, and special machines that magically dissolve cancer cells, to name a few. These cures are breathlessly praised all over the net, in articles rife with exclamation points, on sites that look like they were designed in 1995 with Front Page. My personal favorite cure is maple syrup mixed with baking soda. But it has to be the right brand of baking soda, because, well, just because.

There’s no doubt that pharmaceutical companies have done rotten things. Some have hidden unfavorable test results. Some of their mood-altering drugs are no more effective than placebos. They’ve hidden or downplayed nasty and sometimes deadly side effects. They are quite capable of evil.

But they’ve also helped extend our lifespans and considerably improved the quality of our lives. For instance, I have Type II diabetes. Thirty years ago, it would have forced me to live with a very restricted diet and severely altered lifestyle. A hundred years ago it would have resulted in a nasty death. Today, big pharma’s drugs have reduced it to being a pain in the ass. It’s still serious, and requires care and attention, but it’s far less deadly than it was in the past.

I worked for a company whose sole client was a Big Pharma company, and learned a bit about how pharmaceutical companies work.

A drug company will sell a lot of drugs that net a decent profit and one drug that nets them billions. They have about five years to sell that one drug before their patent runs out and it becomes available as a generic.

They patent a drug as soon as they invent the molecule. The patent gives them exclusive rights to it for twenty years. It takes about fifteen years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, to test it, get it approved, and get it into production. (Most drugs will fail during the testing process and have to be abandoned.) That leaves them five years to reap huge profits before it becomes available generically. When that happens, the price drops dramatically. They can still make a good profit on it for a while – some people will still pay more for the trademarked version than generic one – but the monster profits are gone. And if/when it becomes an over the counter drug, the profits plummet even further. (How much was your last big bottle of generic ibuprofen?) This is why they’re always searching for the Next Big Drug.

When their primary drug’s patent expires, if they don’t have another Big Drug to replace it they are in serious financial trouble. It’s not uncommon for their Next Big Drug to be a minor variation of the Last Big Drug, but ideally, it should be something completely new and different, because that will be more profitable.

Imagine, for a moment, that a company comes up with a drug that cures cancer quickly and effectively with minimal side effects. It would probably be rushed though the approval process, giving them six or seven years of exclusivity instead of the normal five. It would sell more, world-wide, than any other drug in history. It would bring in hundreds of billions of dollars. Their corporate executives could use their stock options and bonuses to buy private islands, hell, whole countries, and personal private jets to get to them. The drug’s name would be a household word. And when the patent expired, they’d not only continue to sell it under a trademarked name that was now known to every human on the planet, they’d also have some new variation of it that would let them repeat the cycle. Meanwhile, their competitors would also be creating and releasing variations and improvements to it.

Do you honestly think any company would sit on something so vastly profitable?

What if the cure were something common, like a tincture made from dandelions and mud? Would the researchers who discovered it, knowing they would become world famous and have a secure place in history, sit on it? Wouldn’t pharmaceutical companies come up with some slight variation they could patent and sell in over-priced capsules?

The idea that a cure would be suppressed is even more ludicrous than the snake-oil being sold by the perpetrators of this myth. No smartenized person should fall for it.

Many many years ago I thought “I’d like to read a novel about a vampire who becomes a Jehovah’s Witness.”  But no one had written one, so I had to.

Blood Witness, released as a podiobook a while back, is now available on your kindle for less than the price of a Starbucks coffee. It’s full of action, adventure, sex, violence, blood, gore, horror and humor. And blood. Did I mention blood? Yeah, it’s right there in the title, so yeah, there’s lots of that.

Buy it right now, before you forget.

I’ve seen quite a few mashups done in this style, and while most of them are pretty cool they usually seem a little forced, a little contrived.

Not this one, though. It captures not just the words, but the style and attitude of my two favorite philosophers.

I like PBS. I watched Cosmos as a youngster and it filled me with wonder and helped fuel my love of science. I thought Julia Child was a hoot, and she helped inspire my love of cooking. Sesame Street wasn’t around when I was a kid, but my kids loved it and I enjoyed watching it with them.

PBS has been in the cross-hairs of conservatives for as long as I can remember, and as a small L libertarian I agree with some of their arguments on a purely philosophical level. Government’s job should be preventing and punishing force and fraud, providing for the common defense, and little else. There is no valid constitutional justification for Big Brother sponsoring Big Bird.

I’m also certain that PBS could survive in the free market. If the funding were pulled tomorrow, they’d be able to make up the difference with increases in public contributions and corporate sponsorships.

Having said that…going after PBS is stupid. It’s not stupid because PBS is a valuable resource. It’s not stupid because PBS can survive on its own. It’s would be stupid if PBS showed nothing but a 24/7 video feed of a goldfish bowl. With one dead goldfish floating in it.

It’s stupid because the amount of money we’re talking about is trivial.

The feds gave PBS $445 million last year. That works out to about .01% of the federal budget. Cutting PBS would be like draining a swimming pool (a pool of debt) by bailing out a sippy cup of water and shouting, “Look what I’ve accomplished!”

Compare the cost of PBS to just one useless federal department – the Department of Education. Put in place by the lovely Jimmy Carter, the Department of Ed has sucked down hundreds of billions of dollars over the decades and accomplished nothing except impeding advancements in education and shutting down hundreds of college athletics programs. Their budget for this year is nearly $70 billion dollars, including a $1.7 billion dollar increase from last year.

If we eliminated the Department of Ed, just shut it down completely, we’d save about $70,000,000,000 this year. And next year. And the year after that. As a side effect, we’d have 50 states experimenting with the best ways to provide education; 50 real life laboratories we could all study and learn from.

If, instead of cutting PBS, we doubled their budget, then denied DoE’s annual budget increase, we’d save nearly a billion dollars.

If we eliminated the DoE and gave one year of their funding to PBS, it would fund them at their current level for 153 years. During that time we’d save the $10.7 trillion dollars we would have wasted on the DoE. (The actual number would be quadruple that, given the tendency for federal agencies to double in size every ten years or so.)

$445 million is a lot of money in raw dollars, but it’s a trivial part of our federal budget. It’s a rounding error. It’s piddly. If we focus on eliminating the piddly, that’s all that will get done.

It will give brief bragging rights to a few political weasels. They’ll hold up a few sippy cups and proclaim, “We cut PBS and the Piddillydiddly Department and the Federal United Committee Keeping Allergy Labels Legible and saved a billion and a half dollars! Whoop De Doo and Hooray for us!” Meanwhile, the pool is overflowing and the citizens are drowning in the debt.

I’ve only discussed the budget effect of eliminating just one large, useless federal agency. Now expand that to the hundreds of large and mid-sized agencies we could do without. Let’s fix the federal budget by eliminating them first.  Afterwards, when there’s just a puddle left at the bottom of the pool, we can debate on how badly we need to get rid of it.