Jim’s Random Notes

According to the Reuters article, Tax soda, pizza to cut obesity, researchers say

U.S. researchers estimate that an 18 percent tax on pizza and soda can push down U.S. adults’ calorie intake enough to lower their average weight by 5 pounds (2 kg) per year.

I’m not sure what “average” is supposed to mean here.  What little I can glean from the article indicates that they’re saying that the combined average weight of U.S. adults would drop by five pounds in a year.  That is, if you sum the weight of all the adults and divide by the number of adults, the result will be five pounds less than the previous year’s result.  That’s a pretty astonishing number, especially if they claim that those results will continue for any length of time.  That average five pound loss would be a higher percentage of the total weight every year and as the years go by there would be fewer people contributing to the loss.

I suppose I’ll have to find the actual research paper if I want to make any sense of things.  The reporting in this article is, like most medical or science reporting I see in the mainstream press, chock full of logical holes and “conventional wisdom” presented as fact.  For example, the article repeats the oft-reported statistic that two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese.  That statistic is based on a questionable sampling of BMI results, and the BMI standard is the subject of quite some debate.  That said, there does seem to be an overabundance of fat people.

That taxation is successful in changing behavior is no big surprise.  We’ve seen government attempt to limit teen smoking by making it more expensive, and it appears to work.  Although it never works as well as proponents say it will work.  And, if our experience with taxing tobacco is any indication, it’s unlikely that taxing “unhealthful foods” will have anywhere near the effect that these researchers claim.

I can imagine new Food Taxation Boards popping up around the country, contracting with Certified Food Health Consultants whose team of researchers investigate the Healthful Food Score of every type of food imaginable.  They’ll change labeling requirements so that every box of anything you buy at the supermarket, convenience store, or vending machine will have a letter grade indicating its Healthful Food Score.  Of course, due to political considerations (i.e. powerful representatives from states like California), foods made with organic sugar will have a higher score than foods made with plain old sugar.  That’s what we need, another obese bureaucracy whose mandate is to make us healthy.  Oh, the irony.

I wonder if the article’s mention of the estimated $147 billion annual cost of obesity in the same paragraph advocating taxation was meant to imply that taxation could offset those costs by any significant amount.  Probably not, although I suspect a lot of people will read that paragraph and think that the taxes will raise $147 billion per year.  I’d be surprised if the taxes raised even 10% of that.

The researchers did raise an interesting point, though:  government subsidies of the corn industry artificially lower the cost of corn syrup, making sodas and other sweetened foods much less expensive.  But then they make a mistake when they recommend that federal subsidies should go to producers of more healthful foods, rather than suggesting that government eliminate food subsidies altogether.  All too often, as in the case of tobacco, government can’t decide what it wants to do.  It props up the tobacco industry with subsidies and then taxes the heck out of it in order to limit consumption.  Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to just eliminate the subsidy?  Or is that too sensible a thing for a government to do?

I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of yet another corrupt bureaucracy sticking its hand out, this time demanding tribute if I decide to indulge in a bit of junk food.

The President unveiled his new budget today: 3.83 trillion dollars. The numbers fairly boggle the mind. The total budget works out to just about $12,500 per person in the United States, or about $47,500 per family. Or $34,800 for each of the 110 million taxpayers in the country. Of course, 41% (about $1.56 trillion) is deficit spending, meaning that 41 cents of every dollar the government spends in fiscal year 2011 will be paid for (supposedly) in the future. But with an existing debt of $12.5 trillion, this year’s budget will push the accumulated national debt past $14 trillion: about the same as the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Interest on the debt alone amounts to about $175 billion per year, or about $2,200 per family, 25% of which ends up in the treasuries of other countries that hold U.S. debt securities.

This year, total government debt will exceed total income for the entire country. The White House budget office says that debt will remain at that level through 2019 (that is, debt will roughly equal GDP), but those projections rely on GDP growing faster than most analysts say it can. At $14 trillion, national debt is almost 20% of all household and business assets in the entire country. If government spending continues at this rate, the accumulated federal debt alone will exceed total assets in 20 years or so. That doesn’t include the approximately $40 trillion (currently) in debt owed by local and state governments, corporations, and individuals.

I won’t try to lay the blame for this situation on the President. Not on the current President, and not on the former Presidents. Undoubtedly, they all have contributed to it by proposing budgets that fund pet projects or further their own agendas, but that’s to be expected. No, the real blame lies with Congress for approving such outrageous spending over the decades, and with us–the American voter and taxpayer–for continuing to allow it.

The President on Wednesday announced a proposed spending freeze on domestic discretionary spending as a way of trying to get the deficit under control. As laudable as that is (any freeze or decrease in government spending gets my vote), it’s pretty difficult to take it seriously. He’s talking about a projected “savings” of about $250 billion over the next 10 years. That’s less than 3% of the total debt expected to accumulate over that period, or about 1% of total spending. And it’s highly unlikely that Congress will approve even that miniscule spending reduction.

The President is in a tough spot because there are programs he positively cannot touch. Even if he were willing to forego re-election, there’s no way Congress would approve cuts in those programs. Doing so is tantamount to political suicide. What programs? I’m so glad you asked.

The following numbers are from the FY 2010 budget

• Social Security is 19.63% of the budget. 13% of the people in this country are over 65 years of age, and a very large percentage of them vote. Need I say more?
• Medicare is 12.79% of the budget. See above.
• Unemployment, welfare, and other “mandatory spending” is 16.13% of the budget. Almost untouchable, regardless of which party controls Congress.
• Medicaid and associated programs: 8.19%. Ditto.
• Interest on the national debt: 4.63%.  Can’t have us defaulting on our debt.

When you throw in the Department of Defense share of 18.74%, the total comes to 80.11% of the budget that the President has almost no control over. The budget is 20% over revenue before the President even gets to attempt spending reduction. Think of that: if you cut out military and all government spending other than the programs I mentioned above, we’d still have a budget deficit.

This is nothing new, by the way. I remember the same math being presented to me in 1981 or 1982. If anything, the President has fewer options today than Reagan did back then.

I see three ways out of this mess: Reduce spending, raise taxes, or somehow increase GDP by about 50% so that current tax rates will cover the deficit. In the current climate, spending reductions and tax increases are political suicide, and a 50% increase in GDP is impossible. Tax increases are less suicidal in most cases, and they have the “benefit” (in political terms) of pissing off fewer people, so that’s the route Congress will likely take in an attempt to prevent the inevitable. Even so, there’s no way they can make up a 40% budget deficit (or even a 20% deficit) with tax increases.

No. I guess I don’t see any way out of this mess. Our spending is out of control and there isn’t anybody in a position to slow or stop it.  It’s a frightening thought.

We just bought some off-lease Dell servers locally and I’m tasked with getting them set up and installed at the data center.  It’s not my favorite part of my work.  I’m at heart a programmer, and fiddling with hardware always manages to frustrate me.  Today’s encounter is particularly maddening.

We want to outfit these new servers with 32 GB of RAM each.  Since the machines only have eight RAM slots, we need 4 GB DIMMs.  I’ve mentioned before that quad-rank RAM is much cheaper than dual-rank RAM, so we go for the quad-rank parts whenever we can.  And our experience with these servers is that we can.

So I loaded one machine with 32 GB of RAM, turned it on, and it reported “No Memory.”  It turns out that these machines will support quad-rank RAM only if you have a later BIOS.  The BIOS on the machines we recently obtained is more than two years old.  But, hey, I’m okay with fiddling around a bit in order to save some money.

Now, Dell is great about making updates available on their support site, and within minutes I had downloaded the BIOS update on my workstation.  But installing the update turns out to be something of a problem.  You see, the BIOS update distribution creates a bootable FreeDOS diskette that contains the new BIOS image and the program to install it.

A diskette?  This is 2009!  Nobody even buys a server with a diskette anymore.  Hell, the Poweredge servers we bought don’t even have a place for a diskette drive!  How the hell am I supposed to install this BIOS update?  Would it be so hard for Dell to spend a little time making a bootable FreeDOS CD image that I can download?

There is another way to install the BIOS update, by the way.  Dell has Windows and Linux executable programs that will update the BIOS.  Of course, those require that your machine is running a version of Linux or Windows that Dell supports.  I find it irrational in the extreme that I have to install Windows just to update the BIOS on these machines.  If I’m really lucky, I won’t run into issues running Windows Server 2008 on a machine with an older BIOS.

I did briefly explore the idea of creating my own bootable FreeDOS CD with the required files on it.  There’s a program called FDOEMCD (FreeDOS OEM CD-ROM disc builder assistant) that supposedly will do that.  However, part of the build process is a 16-bit DOS program, which won’t run on my 64-bit Windows box.  I suppose I could put together a 32-bit XP system or a Virtual PC image, but doing that will take as much time as installing Windows.  Still, I’d sure like to explore that option one of these days when I don’t have anything more pressing to do like write rants.

And, no, I haven’t forgotten that I need to install Windows on these machines anyway in order to get everything running.  It’s just that having to install Windows first before doing the BIOS upgrade makes things a bit more inconvenient.

By the way, since I wasn’t looking forward to installing Windows five times, I’m taking a look at Clonezilla.  The idea is to install Windows once and then clone the drive image.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

President Obama and those members of Congress who approved the cash for clunkers program as part of the most recent war funding bill are celebrating today and telling us how they knew that it “would work.”  What’s their definition of “working?”  Why, that people actually took advantage of it.

Imagine that.  You’re going to give somebody up to $4,500 for their old worthless gas guzzler if they trade it in on a new, fuel efficient car.  And people take advantage of it?  Shocking!  In one week, the $1 billion allocated for the program is gone.  Congress today is expected to approve an additional $2 billion.

The clunkers collected through this program are supposed to be sent to a facility where they can be crushed and recycled.  However, there’s some wiggle room in the language, allowing transmissions and other parts to be salvaged.  And I doubt that there are sufficient controls in place to prevent the cars themselves from being resold and showing up on the roads again, either here in the U.S. or in other parts of the world.

Proponents of the program say that it is good for consumers, good for the auto industry, and good for the environment.  One would also expect that salvage yards and such would get a boost from the junked cars.

The truth is that this is a blatant handout to the auto industry and auto workers unions, paid for with money the government doesn’t have and will have to extort from financially responsible citizens in the future, and taken advantage of in large part by people who probably shouldn’t be buying new cars anyway.  It has the curious effect of artifically lowering new car prices to the point where it’s cheaper to buy a new car than to buy one that’s a year or two old.  I’ll bet used car dealers aren’t too happy about this one.

Congress and the President, of course, are falling all over themselves trying to scrape up more deficit spending so they can continue the program.  Damn the long term consequences, (some of) the people love this program!  Ain’t nothing like buying votes, is there.

Don’t you just love the way our political system works?

To summarize a long reply I sent to a mailing list message ranting about the evils of the Obama administration:

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no more an Obama supporter than I was a Bush supporter. The game is rigged, folks. Wake up and stop wasting your energy railing against the current President or passing around partisan screeds.  Take off your blinders and notice that both parties have one thing in common that should frighten any thinking adult:  their continued existence requires that you actively participate in the continued erosion of your own freedom.  The only way we’ll return to a more rational world, where the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the limits placed on government are actually adhered to, is to actively campaign to throw the bums out.  Get rid of every incumbent. Refuse to vote for anybody who claims membership in any of the major political parties.  Hell, get rid of party politics altogether.

Yes, I know.  I’m asking too much.  I’m not expecting it to happen.  But I’d just like you to know that until we get rid of the parties, all your ranting and carrying on is just pissing into the wind.

So go ahead with your tribal drum beating.  But please leave me out of it.

We’ve all experienced it, the anger and frustration that ensues when we try to open one of those clamshell packages that contain whatever new geegaw we picked up.  You can’t open it with your bare hands.  Normal office scissors are ineffective.  If you’re lucky you can puncture that plastic armor with your pocketknife, and if you’re lucky you won’t cut yourself with the blade or with the packaging itself.

The term for these feelings is wrap rage.  Consumer Reports officially recognized the phenomenon in 2006 when it created the Oyster Awards for products that are particularly hard to open.

It’s so comforting to know that I’m not alone.  A YouTube search for “wrap rage” results in almost 100 hits, including local television news stories, product demonstrations, and parodies of all sorts.  It’s the product demonstrations that amuse me more than anything else.  Some resourceful entrepreneurs who experienced wrap rage themselves decided to make a buck.  There are dozens of different devices designed to simplify the process of opening the clamshells.  Millions of units have been sold.

Amusingly, some of those devices are themselves distributed in clamshell packages, resulting in something of a chicken-and-egg problem.

The reason for this type of packaging is apparently theft deterrence.  If things are that hard to open, it’s unlikely that a thief will be able to remove small items from oversized packages and slip them into a purse or pocket.  I suppose it works, but at what cost?  Large retailers like Target and Wal-Mart are willing to annoy and inconvenience their customers with these packages rather than come up with a less intrusive way to deter shoplifting.

I have to admit that I’m surprised by the almost complete lack of outcry by the environmental movement regarding these packages.  Small items, especially, are often surrounded by many times their weight in protective plastic–plastic that more often than not ends up in landfills because even dedicated recyclers often don’t know whether the clamshell packaging is recyclable.  Environmentalist groups boycotted Big Macs back when they came in Styrofoam containers.  But clamshell packages?  I hear crickets.

I’m also surprised that, as much as people complain about these packages (and I don’t know anybody who extols their virtues), there hasn’t been a huge revolt by consumers.  Why aren’t there more people (or more vocal people) agitating for the abolition of this unfriendly, environmentally harmful, and dangerous to open packaging?  Again with the crickets.

After fighting one time too many with opening an armor plastic package to get at something that I found wasn’t worth all the effort, I will now make a concerted effort to avoid those packages whenever possible.  I’m done risking life and limb to open things.  If retailers want to sell me stuff, they’ll have to make it convenient for me to buy and to open.

Almost every year during monsoon season in the Phoenix area, some idiot will drive around a barricade and attempt to cross a flooded low water crossing. In most cases, search and rescue workers are successful in plucking the occupants from the stranded car. Invariably, the driver will claim ignorance, despite signs warning of the danger, barricades across the road, and many years’ experience living in the area. It’s impossible to live in the Phoenix area for any length of time and not know of the dangers inherent in driving through flood waters.

Things got so bad in Arizona that they finally passed what is termed the Stupid Motorist Law which, when translated to simple English, says that a motorist who drives around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of his rescue. I don’t know if the law has actually prevented anybody from trying to drive through a flooded area. It seems to me that if the threat of being swept downriver and drowned doesn’t deter somebody, the prospect of having to pay for rescue won’t raise a red flag either. In any event, I support the law simply because I believe that people should have to pay for their own stupidity–especially when said stupidity puts others’ lives at stake.

As hurricane Ike approached last week, officials in Galveston and other coastal areas urged citizens to evacuate, warning of a possible 25-foot storm surge and “certain death” if they stayed behind. By all reports, most people heeded the warnings and got out before Friday at noon. But somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people decided that they knew better, and stayed behind.

I was in the Williamson County Emergency Operations Center from midnight until 6:00 AM on Saturday. The eye of Ike made landfall at about 2:00 AM. The entire time I was at the EOC, I heard reports of 911 calls from people who had elected to stay behind, begging for somebody to come help them. Of course, nobody was going to send rescue workers out in the middle of a hurricane. Those people who elected to stay truly were on their own–just as officials had said they would be.

Today, 48 hours after Ike came roaring through, we’re still in the middle of what Governor Rick Perry is calling the largest search and rescue operation in Texas history. Over 1,500 rescue workers are searching Galveston and surrounding areas for people who are stranded in their houses, still surrounded by floodwaters. So far, every person I’ve seen interviewed after being rescued said pretty much the same thing: “I never thought it would be so bad. I was wrong to stay.” I’ve yet to hear anybody say they didn’t know that the storm was coming, or they didn’t hear the warnings to evacuate.

Those who stayed and survived were very fortunate that the projected 25-foot storm surge never materialized. The estimated 13-foot surge did a very good job of devastating the area. I imagine that nothing would be left had there been twice as much water, and it’s doubtful that any of the holdouts would have survived.

Those who did survive (and we may never know how many got swept away by the storm) are now stranded in the attic or on the roof, with no services, no food or water, and no way to get out except being rescued. It’s unfortunate that Texas doesn’t have a Stupid Homeowner Law that allows us to bill those people for the cost of their rescue. Whereas I fully support a citizen’s right to stay even in the face of “mandatory” evacuations, I also believe that they should bear the consequences, including paying the cost of pulling them out of an area they were advised to evacuate three or four days ago.

Here in the Austin area, Ike had almost no effect. We got a little bit of wind Saturday morning. Some parts of the area might have received some rain. We didn’t get a drop at our place.

I hear a lot of people say that they want to change their lives: lose weight, make more money, learn something new, take up a new hobby, accomplish some physical challenge, etc. Sadly, most of those people then go on to say that they wish they could do that, but they can’t. And most of the time the reason they can’t ends up being a variation on one of these two:

1. I don’t have enough time.
2. I’ll be too old before I complete it.

Excuse me, but both of those reasons are bullshit. The second one, especially. How old will you be if you don’t complete it? You can sit there and wish all you like, and complain about how you’re not getting any younger and the world is passing you by, or you can decide that you want to do something. Either way, time will pass. But after five or twenty years, the person who actually tries will have something to show for it. The person who spent that time complaining about how it’s too hard or will take too long will have nothing but bitterness.

As for the “I don’t have enough time” complaint: that’s crap, too. You might not have enough time to dedicate your life to a new pursuit, but you most definitely have time to improve your life. All it takes is an hour a day, and most people spend way more than an hour every day watching TV, surfing the Web, or doing other things that are neither relaxing nor productive.

Let me give an example. I’ve mentioned a time or two that I used to run marathons when I was younger. I since stopped running and took up bicycling, but lately I’ve wanted to get back into running. So I set myself a goal of running a 10K race (6.2 miles). I can’t run 6 miles today. I’m hard pressed to run even one mile without stopping. But I can run a bit, walk some, run a bit more, and so on for an hour every day. I don’t know yet how long it’ll take me to build up to 6 miles, but every day I go out I find that I can run a little bit further. And in a few months I’ll be up to 6 miles.

Another example is education. A lot of people think they need school in order to get educated. It’s true that if you want a degree or a certification, you need to attend formal classes. But if you just want to learn about a particular topic, you have all the educational resources you need on the Web, in your public library, bookstores, and Amazon.com. All you need to do is start reading. Try reading on your topic for an hour a day.

Want to learn the piano? Spend an hour a day practicing. Build strength? Get some weights and a beginner’s book and spend an hour a day lifting. Learn to write better? Practice writing an hour every day. Pretty much whatever you want to do, you can get a very good start on it by allocating one hour per day, and I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have at least an hour per day to spend on self improvement.

Try it. Rather than complaining about how something is too hard or will take too long, sit down and plan how you can accomplish that thing you’ve always dreamed about. Spend an hour per day working toward your goal. You’ll be surprised at how much progress you make in just a few weeks. The longer you work at it, the more you’ll learn and the better you’ll become, and the more you’ll want to continue. All you have to lose is time, and the rewards are potentially limitless.

The best thing about our government is that it never ceases to amuse me. It’s also continuously annoying, but I guess you have to take the bad with the good. It’s not the government itself that amuses me so much, but rather the absurd things that our illustrious Congresscritters do and say in an attempt to garner votes. The most amusing (and also the most frustrating) thing is that constituents continue to be taken in. Rather than making an effort to come up with a solution ourselves, we argue over which totally unworkable plan our elected representatives should vote on. This gives the leeches in Washington Congress incredible leeway to do anything, and then spin their positions to best advantage.

Examples abound. Let’s look at some of the more recent.

Dependence on foreign oil

Our country’s dependence on foreign oil has been a major problem since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. In the 35 ensuing years, Congress has put forth all manner of proposals to “fix” the problem. We’ve funded research into solar, geothermal, tidal, and other natural energy sources, provided incentives and subsidies for domestic oil exploration, coal, ethanol, and all manner of questionable energy saving technologies. Today our government has much more control over energy policy than it did in 1973 and yet we’re more dependent on foreign oil than we were back then.

Seven administrations and countless members of Congress have been “doing something about the problem” for 35 years, and the problem has gotten worse. And yet the vast majority of Americans look to Congress and the President for a solution to high gas prices, all the while cheering for or ridiculing the laughably simple minded, short term proposals that are put forth. Our representatives, of course, couldn’t care less. All they have to do is make themselves look good to their own constituents. As long as they can keep the voting public believing that government is the solution, their jobs are secure.

Every thinking American (and, sadly, I’m beginning to believe that the number is falling fast) knows that the solution to our energy problems requires conservation, domestic oil and gas production, development of nuclear plants, exploitation of wind, thermal, solar, and other natural sources, and research into more energy efficient transportation and buildings. We won’t solve anything unless we address all of those areas. And it’s going to take time. Government has proven that it’s incapable of formulating and implementing a workable energy policy. It’s time to get government out of the picture. No more subsidies, incentives, or preferential treatment. Let the market decide.

Tax Rebates

This is one of the dumber things I’ve seen Congress do. And, yes, I realize that both the 2001 and the 2008 rebates were initially proposed by President Bush. That doesn’t relieve Congress of their complicity and their ultimate responsibility. The 2001 rebate was “justified” by a “budget surplus”–a surplus that anybody with a fifth grade education knew was an illusion. This year’s rebate was “justified” by the current economic situation. Congress would have you believe that a windfall of a few hundred dollars (up to $1,200, as I recall) would “stimulate the economy” and soften the recession. Any thinking person could have told you that the result would be a short term spike in consumer spending, followed by a quick return to normal. I can’t prove this yet, but I suspect that it also resulted in people putting down payments on things they can’t afford, figuring they’d find a way to make the monthly payments.

Congress, of course, knew that the tax rebates wouldn’t have an effect on the economy other than to increase the size of the federal debt. But that’s okay. What’s a few billion more dollars compared to the time honored tradition of buying votes? It is an election year, after all. Besides, it made for good press coverage and retail store managers drooled over the prospect of Christmas in July. The rebates seem so popular that Senator Obama proposed a $1,000 rebate to fight energy costs.

The reaction of those receiving the rebates was predictable. Most squandered it like drunken sailors on leave. Those few who know the names of their Congressmen or Senators might have lifted a glass in salute, but most just thanked the government for the handout. That’s what surprises me the most. It’s like having somebody cut your arm off at the shoulder and then thanking him when he returns the forearm and hand. Idiots.

The “mortgage crisis”

This one is fun because there are so many levels of idiocy. Lenders made high-risk loans to people who were demonstrably incapable of paying them back, then sold those loans to a government sponsored enterprise, which ultimately will be bailed out by taxpayers when the original borrowers default.

When borrowing money in good faith, both the lender and the borrower are responsible for ensuring that the money can be paid back. But when the lender is just a middleman who gets paid for making the loan and selling it to somebody else, there is little incentive for him to vigorously check the borrower’s documentation. On the contrary, there is ample incentive for him to be very creative in putting together a loan package, both by making the terms of the loan appear attractive to the borrower and by making the borrower look attractive to the third party who’s buying the loan. Sure, the middleman will eventually be found out, but the short term rewards are incredible.

And when the ultimate buyer is a government sponsored enterprise like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, there is almost no oversight. When you have, with government’s blessing, a virtual monopoly on the secondary mortgage market, you know that you’ll get bailed out if things go bad. So where’s the incentive to insist on real documentation for the loans that you buy?

I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination. I’m not even a financial analyst. But I’m not an idiot, either. I and many others saw this coming three years ago. Congress ignored the problem at the time, or discounted it as scare mongering. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that most of them probably knew what was coming. But they also knew that there wasn’t anything they could do about it and that bringing it up would be very unpopular. Our elected representitives are many things, but stupid is not one of them.

Now that the real extent of the problem has become apparent, Congress is all over it with one proposal after another. They’re “doing something about the problem.” They know that there are only two possible solutions: either pump money into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to keep them afloat, or cut them loose and let people finally endure the consequences of their actions. We know, just by the the nature of elected officials, what their solution will be: another hundred billion dollars or more shelled out to fix a problem that Congress created in the first place. And We the Sheeple just nod our heads and thank Congress for taking care of us once again.

More is better?

All three of the above examples demonstrate extreme incompetence on the part of government. The Congress-proposed solution to those problems, as with all others, is more government regulation. As if making even more and larger bureaus, agencies, and departments will somehow transform government into an intelligent and effective organization. And we let them do it! When will people learn that the cure for a headache is to stop beating your head against the wall?

I used to get upset when I’d think about this stuff. I used to rant and carry on about the proper function of government, and how intrusive government is in our daily lives. But nobody listens. Nobody seems to care. I learned a while back to stop bashing my head against that particular pile of bricks. Now I just laugh and hope that the coming violent overthrow (which will almost certainly happen if government continues on its current path) doesn’t occur until after I’m gone.

I’ve ranted a few times over the years about people trying to hold fast food establishments liable for making them fat. I thought that craziness had faded after Super Size Me disappeared from public consciousness. And it mostly has.

And then a friend sent me a link to House Bill 282, introduced in the Mississippi Legislature. The title:

AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

Full text (pdf). Full text (text).

Maybe I should get a patent on that fictional Body Mass Index calculator thing hooked to the cash register (see the linked rant, above). They’d definitely need something like that if they want to use objective criteria to determine if somebody is obese.

We’re fortunate that this bill was killed in committee, but I’m very disappointed that the thing was actually written and submitted to the Legislature. Imagine if it were passed: “I’m sorry, Sir, but according to State Law, you’re too fat to eat here.” Somehow, I just can’t see that happening. I hope I’m right this time.

I decided to cancel the email message I was composing, and my mail program responded with this confirmation dialog box. I actually read it twice and then pressed the Cancel button as an experiment. Pressing Cancel cancels the Cancel operation. OK completes the Cancel operation.

Is it any wonder that people find computers confusing?

Is there anybody who finds OK and Cancel on this dialog less confusing or more informative than Yes and No options?

I’ll ask again: What idiot decided that Yes and No responses to a question should be replaced by OK and Cancel?

Sometimes I wonder why I keep my Sprint mobile phone service. I’m the only person I know who’s had the same mobile phone number and provider for 10 years. I’d switch to some other service, but they all seem the same to me. I’m definitely not a mobile phone power user.

But today I find myself in the odd position of calling customer service to request that they add a feature to my service. I find this odd because I have the most basic plan I could get from them, and the cheapest phone available (i.e. “free” with the contract). It’s also odd because I usually handle all my account needs online (don’t even get me started on Sprint’s brain dead Web site), but for some reason they won’t let me sign up for text messaging online.

So I dialed *2 for customer service and was informed that my wait will be “more than 20 minutes.” I’m sitting here with my phone on speaker, listening to very bad atmospheric jazz that sounds like it’s coming in on an AM radio in the middle of the night. Every 30 seconds or so a woman’s voice comes on and says, “Please continue to hold. All representatives are currently assisting other customers.” Then it starts to tell me about the Web site and the music comes back on–cutting off the information.

What really irks me about this is that they know my phone number. When I dialed *2 the automated response system said, “please hold while we look up your account information.” Wouldn’t it be more customer friendly for the system to record my number and put me in a queue for their customer service people to call back? I guarantee I’d be a lot more friendly than I will be by the time I’ve listened to 30 minutes of this bad music on hold.

To make matters worse, Sprint has this annoying habit of calling me at the most inopportune moments, trying to sell me plan upgrades. They’re quick to point out that the call will not be counted against my allotted minutes, and then they go into the pitch about how I need to add another phone to my plan (for who? Charlie, maybe?) or sign up for even more minutes that I never use. So I know they have the technology to pick up the phone and call. Why can’t they call me at my convenience.

Sometimes I miss Ma Bell. At least then you knew exactly what you were getting.