What passenger really cares whether the wind is coming out of the north or south? Maybe once in a hundred thousand flights one of the first class snobs is planning on having his driver take him from the airport directly to the marina where he will be taking his ketch for a sail that afternoon, and, with this handy wind data he can start planning his tacking course. But most of the time, all the first class folks want to do when landing in Madrid is find car hire in Spain at the Hertz desk.

My hypothesis is that the pilots receive a transmission with all the weather data, and rather than consider its utility to their audience, they just read the whole thing out to us verbatim. The practice amuses me every time I fly.

And now you will be unable to ignore it, too.

By complete chance, April 17, 2012 was also Equal Pay Day, which sounds like a glorious day of liberal celebration, but is actually very sad indeed. Equal Pay Day is the day upon which a working woman has earned enough to fill the wage gap between her and her male colleagues for the previous year. Let me state that more concretely. The income American woman earned, on average, from January 1, 2011 to April 17, 2012 is equivalent to how much an American man in her same position made from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011. From the Equal Pay Day website:

The next Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 17, 2012. This date symbolizes how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men earned in 2011.

Wow! I knew that women’s salaries were lower across the board, but I didn’t realize it was quite so much.

I love the coincidence that both these methods of representing a percentage of income by calendar dates fell on the same day. The fact that a man’s tax burden is equivalent to a woman’s inequality gender burden is quite striking. To my male readers, imagine working side by side with equals in your organization, but that you were the only one that had to pay taxes, and your coworkers kept all their gross salary. How would that make you feel?

There aren’t a lot of options on the What You Can Do page if you’re not an employer, other than raise awareness and complain to legislators. Perhaps all we can hope to do is instill a value of fairness and gender financial equality in our kids and hope some of them grow up to be CEOs.

If you’re going to talk to someone about this topic – and I hope you are – there’s one arithmetical error you should be aware of that is very easy to fall victim to. This coincidence of Equal Pay Day falling on Tax Freedom Day does not mean that the tax rate and the female salary deficit are the same percentage! If a man earns 4 apples a year, and a woman earns 3 apples, she is earning 75% of the man’s salary, or 25% less. But to make it to Equal Pay Day the next year, she needs to work 33% of the year (not 25%!), since the 1 apple she needs to make it to the male annual income is 33% of her annual 3 apples. If Equal Pay Day were to fall on Tax Freedom Day in this fruity hypothetical example, the average tax rate would be 33% and the female pay deficit would be 25%.

The real numbers are that, on average, American women make 77.5% (22.5% less) of an equivalent male salary, and the average American pays 29% of their income in taxes.

One thing I love about going plastic-only in the US is that it gets around that horrible sales tax that causes purchases to be higher than the price listed on the items in the store. I hate that! In Spain, the VAT (or IVA, in Spanish) is included on all the prices, so if you’ve got one item that’s 0.95€ and another that’s 2.25€, you can go ahead and count out your 3.20€ while you’re waiting in the checkout line and hand over the exact amount to the cashier. That sort of calculation is all but impossible in the States.

The second thing I love about using only a debit or credit card in the US is that it allows for more accurate tipping. Several times I’ve noticed items priced on bar and restaurant menus such that, if you don’t want to deal with coins (who does?), you’ve got to give a 30% tip. For instance, say your bar bill comes to $3.05. If you drop four $1 bills on the bar and walk out, you’ve left a 31% tip. But when you are given the blank space to write in any value you choose, and you won’t have to deal with change in return, exact percentages are more accessible.

The third thing I love about using plastic rather than cash is that you automatically get a record of your purchases. Sometimes, in Spain, I’ll take a couple hundred euros out of the ATM and then, after what seems like a few short days, I’m out of cash again and I have to rack my brains to remember where it all went. Sure, it’s possible to keep a diary of each transaction, but it’s such a bother that I would never do it. Knowing where you’ve done business before can help the next time you have to search for car hire USA or other repeating transactions.

I’ve lived so long abroad now that when I go back to the States, the green money looks funny and fake to me, not like the colorful Euro notes and coins that are valuable enough to take the time to bend over and pick up off the ground. The US coins are so worthless I’d rather just not have a quarter than lug one around in my pocket all day.

I dare say that one could live quite comfortably in the US with a wallet only big enough to hold a drivers license and a single credit card. That’s something I miss in Spain.

Another way that this fallacy presents itself is when someone from a wealthy nation travels to a poorer nation, which is the only way to virtually travel back in time. Some tourists think, “Oh, how quaint that the people here take their clothes down to the river by donkey and wash them in the fresh river water! How natural! This is how humans should live. I envy these people.” Shut the hell up. No you don’t. There is no rational person that washes clothes by hand that would not prefer to have a washing machine to do it for them in a tenth of the time with a hundredth of the effort. Anytime the adjective “quaint” comes to mind, ask yourself if you really mean it in a positive way. As an immigrant back to The Old World, I catch myself falling victim to this fallacy sometimes.

What set me off on this little rant was a TED Talk, by Sherry Turkle, that I saw this morning about how the internet and smartphones and texting and social networking is making us more lonely. What? Are you out of your mind? I disagree with just about every point made in this talk.

As with absolutely everything, you can do smartphone social networking too much, but reasonable people set reasonable boundaries. Yes, I have been in a room with two other people, and every one of us was using their smartphone. But I’ve also been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with reading! Why aren’t we talking to each other?! Give me a break.

The world is getting better for humans by almost every metric, but something in our brains makes us long for days of yore when life was actually harder than it is now. You know that quote by Stephen Hawking?

Time travel might be possible, but if that’s the case, why haven’t we been overrun by tourists from the future?

Perhaps it’s just that no one wants to come back and live in the relative squalor.

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.

— Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

In Spanish, it’s even worse, since each W requires four syllables with uve doble. Stephen Fry has suggested we say “wuh wuh wuh”, but that sounds like a dog barking to me.

Given the ubiquity of hypertext “web” documents, for me, it comes down to this:

The fact that you have to put the http:// before all of your web addresses anyway already tells your browser and the server and everybody that you’re looking for a hypertext document, so the “www.” is entirely superfluous!

But old habits die hard, even if they are a waste of resources. Just think of all the bandwidth we are dedicating on a daily basis to sending those four bytes to represent the “www.” across the wires!

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the whole darn thing, said back in 1999 that the WWW prefix was outdated:

Nowadays, however, the web server may be far and away the biggest service foo company has, and it might make sense to give it pride of place. Remember you can only do this with one service. You could use http://foo.com/ which is after all easier to type, even though people expect to have to type the “www”.

This issue seems even more important now that we’re in the age of Social Networking in which web links are passed around in dizzying quantities, giving rise to an entire industry of URL shortener services.

I hope that more and more companies will figure this out and buck the trend. It’s easy enough to forward a URL with “www.” to one without it, so your customers will still find you. In the mean time, you can find me at erikras.com, not www.erikras.com.

I found the following video on my phone recently. I had no idea that she had shot it.

It’s a pretty common practice lately for her to say something, and if I don’t understand what she’s said after about four times she’s attempted it, and I ask, “What are you saying?”, she’ll look exasperated and say, “I don’t know!” and leave the topic.

Now that I’ve seen the video, it’s clear that she was asking “How do I get this thing into ‘photo’ mode so I can take a photo?” She’ll figure it out soon enough.

Lest you think I’m implying that Americans are much more polite than Spaniards, let’s look at another set of customs: the dinner party.

When you are a guest in someone’s home in Spain, there is an unspoken rule that you shouldn’t ask for anything to eat or drink, and that rule is remedied by the expectation that the host will offer you things to eat and drink. Americans have this same system to some extent, but where Spain and the US diverge is at the dinner table.

In the US, when a host lays out a bunch of food on the table at a dinner party, the guests more or less understand that it’s all for them and they can ask each other or the host to pass the potatoes if they want more. In Spain…not so much. A Spanish guest will tend to eat only what he is expressly offered to take. As a result, proper hosting etiquette is to constantly suggest that people with empty plates take more food. Sometimes it’s even considered polite for a guest to decline food that he really wants to give other guests, or the host, the option to take it. Since both parties understand this, a polite host will continue to persist even after the guest has declined.

Personally, this drives me mad. I really can’t stand customs where no doesn’t mean no. I prefer to tell the truth and not have to repeat myself. But, I have to remind myself that I am in a different culture where my host is only being polite. It takes effort. And I’m not the only one. My wife had the opposite problem of waiting for food to be offered to her in the States, and sometimes walking away from the table hungry and annoyed at how rude Americans can be. Now that she and I fully comprehend the cultural difference, we know not to get annoyed, or, if we do, that no one is to blame but ourselves.

When you visit other cultures, the people will, by definition of being from a different culture, seem rude to you, and you will seem rude to them. If you can’t bend your mind around to the opinion that experiencing and learning about these differences is the very thing that makes traveling and living abroad so much fun, then you should go back to your hometown where everyone behaves just like you.

This ad for HSBC got a lot of airtime back when I was living in England. It illustrates my point perfectly and humorously.

Think, People!

Here are two particular offenders that I’ve seen in the last week posted by more than one of my Facebook friends. If you have posted this, I’m not directly calling you an idiot, just pointing out that, either you and I have very different ideologies, or you did something without thinking, which is something I do all the time. If you still believe your support of the statement to be valid, then by all means explain yourself in a comment.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

He’s saying, in terribly fragmented sentences, that what most surprises him about Humanity is that we plan and worry about the future and strive for wealth. Seriously?

My friend, Lance, who re-posted this in order to mock it, nailed his comment. I’m paraphrasing, since I can’t find the exact comment:

The Dalai Lama is a doofus. That’s what we do! That’s like “our thing”. Saying that’s what most surprises you about humanity, is like saying that what most surprises you about cows is that they go moo.

I get the whole romantic Carpe Diem, “dance like nobody’s watching”, vibe, which is great, but no one actually does that. The very reason our species has become so dominant is that we, unlike all our furry planet-mates, developed the capacity to not live solely in the present.

There are people who have suffered brain damage and specifically lost their ability to form memories and plan for the future, and no one would call that state the pinnacle of human existence. In fact they require constant care and attention (which requires wealth that the Dalai Lama would prefer that we not have saved up for a rainy day). The Dalai Lama himself is so concerned about the future that he’s discarded the millennia-old tenet of his religion about how the Dalai Lama is reincarnated throughout history, and wants to appoint a successor before his death. The irony of his power play is that by discarding the reincarnation doctrine, he’s also discarding his entire claim to authority. That’s the problem with Religion’s trick of setting the standards just out of human reach and claiming that past dead leaders really did attain those standards (e.g sinlessness, enlightenment, etc.). Present day leaders can’t possibly live up to them, and are destined to appear as hypocrites. I could say that what most surprises me about the Dalai Lama is that, as a leader, he’s such an egotistical control freak, but I won’t…because that’s so incredibly human of him.

I always say to people, “No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.” People earn $10 an hour. People earn $40,000 a year. “Earn” means work. Okay? It doesn’t mean steal, which with these vast amounts of money, of course you steal them.

Fran Lebowitz

This sounds very clever and empowering at first glance, particularly in the midst of the present Occupy Wall Street movement against bankers. Believe me, I’m very much in favor of Wall Street reform and taxing the billionaires at a much higher rate than the rest of us, but this statement, after a little thought, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s logical conclusion is not a place I want to live.

Bob is working hard at his sweat-inducing factory job earning a $40k salary. One day, Bob realizes that the weather hasn’t been very good this year, and, having grown up on an apple orchard, knows what that means. So he goes down to his local farmers market and, at the opportunity cost of foregoing some of the pleasures his $40k-earning colleagues enjoy, buys up as many barrels of apples as he can afford. Sure enough, when harvest season comes along, there aren’t many apples on the store shelves, and the price shoots up. Bob then backs his pick-up into the farmer’s market and starts selling his apples that he bought at the original price at this new elevated price. According to Fran Lebowitz, any profit he has made merely by foresight and thought has been stolen! She doesn’t specify from whom, but I assume she means that Bob should apologize and give that money back to society.

John works with Bob at the factory and also earns $40k sweating away his 40-hour week. One particular part of the manufacturing process at his plant has always struck John as particularly laborious, and he’s certain there’s another way. While his coworkers are out at the pub most nights, John stays in his garage at home tinkering with his workshop. After years of refining his design, he patents it and starts up a company to market it. What he’s designed is a piece that can be fit onto one of the machines at his factory to make the process much more efficient so they can produce twice as many units per day. His device, which costs only $50 to manufacture, will save his ex-employer, and thousands of similar factories around the country, at least $5,000 per day. How much should he charge them for the device? Fran Lebowitz would suggest that charging any more than what it costs him to pay his $40k/year employees to manufacture the device would be stealing. WTF, Franny?

The worst thing about this Lebowitz quotation is that it leads logically to exactly to the “no incentive for innovation or hard work” communist hell hole that the Conservatives think all Liberals are trying to take us to with “class warfare”. Passing this stuff around only hurts the Liberal cause.

I totally stole this idea from Dustin Timbrook, the artist that did this masterpiece.

To conclude, I’d like to state that I enjoy these little quotes as much as the next social network addict, and some of them are really good, thought-provoking and important to spread. And the social networks have done an excellent job in facilitating the spread, haven’t they? Zuckerberg’s term is “frictionless sharing”. I just wish that people would put some more thought into whether or not they really want to support a statement before hitting “Share”.

Recently I read an article by Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, about some research into the forces acting on this political pendulum. He cites a paper written by Larry M. Bartels, of Vanderbilt University, entitled Ideology and Retrospection in Electoral Responses to the Great Recession. Here’s a bit of the abstract, although the entire paper is worth reading:

My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices—most notably, a boost in incumbent governments’ electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs.

I have long since been irked that voters don’t vote based on issues, and now this paper has made me even more cynical about the knee-jerk thoughtlessness of the electorate. Apparently, when we are all averaged out, we tend to vote with the simplest of algorithms:

And what is the best indicator of whether or not the average voter’s life sucks? That’s right! The Economy! Check out these depressing charts from Bartels’ paper…

You can think of the x-axis as being how well the economy is doing, and the y-axis is how well the incumbent governing party did in the election.

What the incumbent government does during the crisis can have some effect, however. For instance, if there is some stimulus spending, they can soften their inevitable decline a little bit. But the absolute worst thing a government that wants to stay in power can do during an economic crisis is to cut spending. Behold:

Surprise, surprise! What do the Republicans in the US Congress – who have, on more than one occasion, mentioned that their primary goal is not to better the nation, but to defeat Obama in 2012 – want more than anything? To cut discretionary stimulus spending! Republicans are such political geniuses. Of course, they have to be, since their ideology tends to screw the majority.

I really wish, more than anything, that, as I get older and incrementally wiser, I could find reasons to be less cynical about politics, but that just isn’t happening. Can anyone see anything to be optimistic about in this data? This strong correlation between the economy and government turnover is, of course, terrible news for Obama. If such a charismatic leader can’t buck this trend, then it really is a law of human governance.

To allow their content to be crawlable by search engines, they display it all, but then put up a translucent element on top of the entire page to block navigation and easy human consumption. If they really wanted to get serious about the paywall, they could do so pretty easily, but I guess they assume this tactic will stop most people.

AdBlock rules to disable The Onion’s paywall

www.theonion.com##DIV[id="gregbox-wrap"]
www.theonion.com##DIV[id="gregbox-overlay"]

International Only

At the moment, this paywall is only in effect for international visitors. A statement from The Onion:

We have found that most of our readers share articles with each other, and flow in and out of our site, and we do not want to limit that behavior.

There is also a set of avid readers, and we have chosen an article limit which allows that fan base to support us directly. On other platforms like the Kindle and Nook, we have had great support from our fans and other interested readers, which has given us confidence for this move.

We are testing a meter internationally as readers in those markets are already used to paying directly for some (other) content, particularly in the UK where we have many readers.