Category Archives: Consumer Affairs

Friday, November 29, 2013

Shop Til You Drop

If you’re going out to join the throngs at the mall, have fun and remember where you parked.

I’m not going to sneer at the people who have been lined up since earlier this week to get great deals.  Hey, that’s capitalism and that’s how we roll.

My only suggestion is that you shop with an eye to local merchants rather than the big dogs.  There will always be a Wal-Mart or a Target, but the local bookstore or clothier might be a better place to find something special, and it keeps your money in your neighborhood.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Without A Prayer

The Supreme Court will rule next year on whether or not corporations can have faith.

The cases accepted by the court offer complex questions about religious freedom and equality for female workers, along with an issue the court has not yet confronted: whether secular, for-profit corporations are excepted by the Constitution or federal statute from complying with a law because of their owners’ religious beliefs.

The justices accepted two cases that produced opposite results in lower courts.

One was brought by the owners of Hobby Lobby, an arts-and-crafts chain that its owner, David Green, said is run on biblical principles. The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver said forcing the company to comply with the contraceptive mandate would violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law providing special protections for religious expression.

In a divided opinion, the appeals court relied in part on the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which said corporations have political speech rights just as individuals do in spending on elections.

“We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression,” Judge Timothy Tymkovich wrote for the majority.

The second case went the other way. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia ruled that Conestoga Wood Specialties, a Pennsylvania cabinet-making company owned by a Mennonite family, must comply with the contraceptive mandate.

In both cases, the plaintiffs are conservative Christians who object to contraception and don’t want to be a part of allowing their employees to use birth control.  Given the current make-up of the Court, it’s 50-50 that they could rule in favor of the plaintiffs and thereby open the floodgates of evangelicals objecting to everything that touches their particular faith, including discrimination against certain people or people of a certain color or ethnicity and have the Court’s tacit backing for it.

That also lets the door swing the other way.  Say you have a business that is run by a religious person who is a progressive; a Quaker, perhaps.  He or she views over-population as a mortal threat to the planet and therefore requires that every employee, male and female, have contraception coverage on their insurance plan regardless of the employee’s faith and practice.  If there are any hard-core Catholics in the company who object to having that rider on their insurance, well, too bad.  (Of course, no true Quaker would ever do that.)

It goes beyond health insurance.  What if the company owner is Orthodox Jewish and requires that the company allows only kosher food in the building, even for those who aren’t Jewish.  Can he be penalized for firing a worker who brings a cheeseburger or clam chowder for lunch?

I will begrudgingly give ground to churches who don’t want to hire LGBT people if their doctrine includes gay-bashing even though I’m indirectly supporting them by allowing them to skate around the tax code.  But I draw a very bright line when it comes to for-profit businesses whose owners feel that their own personal religious peccadilloes have any bearing on the lives of their employees.

If you want to make millions of dollars and use the Ten Commandments as your business model, open a mega-church.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Sunday Reading

Leonard Pitts, Jr. — Living in a time of moral cowardice.

Martin Luther King“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963

This is “tomorrow.”

Meaning that unknowable future whose unknowable difficulties Martin Luther King invoked half a century ago when he told America about his dream. If you could somehow magically bring him here, that tomorrow would likely seem miraculous to him, faced as he was with a time when segregation, police brutality, employment discrimination and voter suppression were widely and openly practiced.

Here in tomorrow, after all, the president is black. The business mogul is black. The movie star is black. The sports icon is black. The reporter, the scholar, the lawyer, the teacher, the doctor, all of them are black. And King might think for a moment that he was wrong about tomorrow and its troubles.

It would not take long for him to see the grimy truth beneath the shiny surface, to learn that the perpetual suspect is also black. As are the indigent woman, the dropout, the fatherless child, the suppressed voter, and the boy lying dead in the grass with candy and iced tea in his pocket.

King would see that for all the progress we have made, we live in a time of proud ignorance and moral cowardice wherein some white people — not all — smugly but incorrectly pronounce all racial problems solved. More galling, it is an era of such cognitive incoherence that conservatives — acolytes of the ideology against which King struggled all his life — now routinely claim ownership of his movement and kinship with his cause.

When he was under fire for questioning the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, Sen. Rand Paul wanted it known that he’d have marched with King had he been of age. And he probably believes that.

But what people like Paul fail to grasp is that the issues against which African Americans railed in 1963 were just as invisible to some of us back then as the issues of 2013 are to some of us right now. They did not see the evil of police brutality in ’63 any more than some of us can see the evil of mass incarceration now. They did not see how poll taxes rigged democracy against black people then any more than some of us can see how Voter ID laws do the same thing now.

So there’s fake courage in saying, “I would have been with Martin then.” Especially while ignoring issues that would press Martin now.

No, being there took — and still takes — real courage, beginning with the courage to do what some of us are too cowardly, hateful, stubborn or stupid to do: see what is right in front of your face.

Because when Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream,” he was not, contrary to what some of us seem to believe, calling people to co-sign some vague, airy vision of eventual utopia. No, he was calling people to work, work until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” This was not a sermon about the someday and the eventual. “Now is the time,” said King repeatedly. So it was. And so it is.

We live in King’s “tomorrow” and what he preached in that great rolling baritone at the temple of Lincoln 50 summers ago ought to inspire us anew in this post-Trayvon, post-Jena 6, post-Voting Rights Act, post-birther nonsense era. It ought to make us organize, agitate, educate and work with fresh determination.

It ought to challenge you to ask yourself: What have you chosen not to see? And now, having seen it, what will you do to make it right?

Because, we face tomorrows of our own.

Thankfully, we move into them with the same elusive hope — and towering dream — of which King spoke, the one that has always driven African-American people even in the valley of deepest despair.

Free at last!

Free. At last.

Also: A photo album from the March in 1963.

Software Error — Why Steve Ballmer failed at Microsoft, according to Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker.

Windows_XP_BSODSteve Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, finally figured out a way to make some money for himself: he quit. This morning, Ballmer announced that he will retire within the next twelve months. The company’s stock surged; Ballmer is now worth about a billion dollars more than he was on Thursday.

Ballmer is roughly the tech industry’s equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev, without the coup and the tanks and Red Square. When he took control, in 2000, Microsoft was one of the most powerful and feared companies in the world. It had a market capitalization of around five hundred billion dollars, the highest of any company on earth. Developers referred to it as an “evil empire.” As he leaves, it’s a sprawling shadow. It still has cash—but that matters little.

What has gone wrong? For starters, Ballmer proved to be the anti-Steve Jobs. He missed every major trend in technology. His innovations alienated people. When he tried something new, like Windows Vista, the public lined up around the block to trade it in. Microsoft missed social networking. It completely misjudged the iPhone and the iPad. It embraced complexity in product design just as everyone was turning toward simplicity. It entered growing markets too late. When was the last time you used Bing? In 2000, Microsoft made most of its money selling Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows. Today, it still makes its money that way. Ballmer’s reign has done more to defang Microsoft than the Justice Department could ever have hoped to do.

The company suffered from the classic innovator’s dilemma. It built extraordinary software that you run on your desktop. And as we moved away from our desktops and into the cloud and onto mobile devices, Microsoft trundled slowly and tentatively. It hesitated to embrace the cloud, and it hesitated to build anything that didn’t work with Windows. In 2005, it brought in a legendary coder, Ray Ozzie, to solve this problem. In 2010, he left. The company has built a technically brilliant gaming system, and the recently launched Xbox One is fully cloud-based—and almost totally separate from the parts of the company that bring in cash.

Ballmer, manic and sweat-stained once too often, failed to be a great manager, or even a tolerable one. As Kurt Eichenwald wrote, devastatingly, in Vanity Fair, the company long utilized a system called “stack rating,” whereby every member of the company was judged relative to his peers. If you worked on a team of ten, you knew that two of your colleagues would get great ratings, seven would pass, and one would fail. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft,” Eichenwald wrote.

What comes next for Ballmer? He’s just fifty-seven, a couple years younger than Gorbachev was when he left. But I think he’ll be quiet: doing good deeds, giving away his fortune, and popping up his head from time to time. The more important question is what comes next for Microsoft—an American company, founded by a skinny nerd, that provides software used around the world. Reversing the company’s decline, in an industry that transforms itself by the day, won’t be easy; Microsoft needs someone who can attract brilliant developers as well as she anticipates trends. They need someone very different from Ballmer. In his memo to Microsoft employees, he wrote, “I cherish my Microsoft ownership, and look forward to continuing as one of Microsoft’s largest owners.” Given the size of his financial stake in the company, there’s almost no one who should want a better C.E.O. for Microsoft than Ballmer himself.

Also, see Roger Kay at Forbes.

Being Literal — Merriam-Webster caves in — figuratively — to the overuse of a word.  By Dana Coleman at Salon.

Much has been made of the use, misuse and overuse of the word “literally.”

Literally, of course, means something that is actually true: “Literally every pair of shoes I own was ruined when my apartment flooded.”

When we use words not in their normal literal meaning but in a way that makes a description more impressive or interesting, the correct word, of course, is “figuratively.”

But people increasingly use “literally” to give extreme emphasis to a statement that cannot be true, as in: “My head literally exploded when I read Merriam-Webster, among others, is now sanctioning the use of literally to mean just the opposite.”

Indeed, Ragan’s PR Daily reported last week that Webster, Macmillan Dictionary and Google have added this latter informal use of “literally” as part of the word’s official definition. The Cambridge Dictionary has also jumped on board.

How did this come to be? Mainstream use of “literally” to provide emphasis to a statement was aided in recent years, perhaps, with the help of a couple of popular sitcoms. Parks and Recreation’s Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe) extends his liberties with the word even further with his pronunciation (LIT-rally) and the frequent misuses of the word in “How I Met Your Mother” even helped inspire a drinking game. But I digress…

Webster’s first definition of literally is, “in a literal sense or matter; actually.” Its second definition is, “in effect; virtually.” In addressing this seeming contradiction, its authors comment:

“Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposition of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.”

So it’s okay to use literally to mean figuratively as long as you really, really, really need to do so? Hmph.

Doonesbury — Worthy.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Short Takes

Coup in Egypt — Morsi out, military in.

U.S. and Germany to discuss N.S.A. activities.

Taliban ignoring peace overtures.

Team to examine the site of the fatal fire in Arizona.

Chrysler recalling almost half a million vehicles.

R.I.P. Douglas Engelbart, 88, inventor of the computer mouse.

The Tigers beat the Blue Jays 6-2; Max Scherzer goes to 13-0.

Happy Fourth of July.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

And We’re Back…

…just in time for me to get going to work.

I’ll be back with some real content — or what passes for it here — when I get home tonight.

Oh, and AT&T said they would “consider” giving me credit for a lost day only after service has been restored.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Short Takes

Iranian-backed militant group on the rise in Iraq.

Chinese army unit is the culprit behind the effort to hack U.S. computers.

It was a fuel leak that caused the fire on the stranded cruise ship.

Pro-gun lawmakers are open to the idea of limiting gun magazine sizes.

Nebraska Sen. Mike Johanns (R) is retiring after only one term.

Gas prices hit 4-month high.

Proof:  Maker’s Mark to stop watering the whiskey.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Happy Valentines Day

Web

To those of you who celebrate Valentine’s Day, have a nice time with your best-beloved, and may you have all the joy and happiness you deserve. To those of you who don’t, happy Thursday.

Short Takes

Explosion kills 7 anti-Taliban militia in Pakistan.

Jack Lew gets grilled at confirmation hearing to be Treasury Secretary.

The GOP is filibustering Chuck Hagel.

President Obama took his SOTU message on the road to North Carolina.

It’s a deal — American and US Airways agree to merge.

Former Sen. Scott Brown gets a gig at Fox News.

Styrofoam next on the hit list in New York City.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Monday, February 4, 2013

Super Ad

It’s been a long time since I’ve paid attention to the Super Bowl.  I think the last time I did was when the Broncos were playing in 1998, and that was listening to it on the car radio as I drove back to Albuquerque from Phoenix after doing a home show.  (The fun part of that drive was picking up the game as it was being broadcast by KTNN out of Window Rock, Arizona, and the commentary was in Navajo.)

Last night was no exception.  I didn’t really care who won, and I really didn’t care about all the hype and buzz about the halftime show and the commercials that will be played over and over again.  But there was one ad that Rick at SFDB pointed out that was worth watching.

Okay, that’s good.  Plain, simple, and makes its point.  No CGI, no risky language, no sexism, no objectifying of genders, and a message worth broadcasting to an audience that probably contains its fair share of members of the NRA.

(Let the record reflect that Mr. LaPierre has done a complete 180 on his view on universal background checks.  He now thinks they are a sign of impending doom from an encroaching government that is bound and determined to disarm America.  He doesn’t say exactly why he’s flip-flopped on this reasonable idea, but I have a feeling it has less to do with the practicality of it — in 1999, the idea of universal background checks done over the internet was in the same realm as a jet pack for everyone — and more to do with who’s sitting in the Oval Office.)

One Super Bowl ad is not going to change the minds of millions of Americans and make them in favor of universal background checks.  It doesn’t have to.  The overwhelming majority of Americans — and NRA members — already approve of the idea.  So the ad itself isn’t really an attempt by Mayors Against Illegal Guns to win people over to their point of view.  It’s basically an appeal to a very small but vocal minority of gun-strokers who think that anything that smacks of “well regulated” is the end of Freedom.  So far, they’re the ones who have been the loudest voices against anything to do with gun control, gun safety, and gun sanity.

This one ad won’t change them, but it may isolate them and make it clear that they’re the ones who are the targets.

Monday, December 31, 2012

Looking Back/Looking Forward

As I do every year on New Year’s Eve, I make predictions about the upcoming year.  Let’s see how I did for 2012:

Barack Obama will narrowly win re-election against Mitt Romney. It will be a campaign of fear, loathing, excess, and outrage… and that’s just on the GOP side until the inevitable coronation of Mr. Romney. The amount of money to be spent on both sides will be enough to run several mid-sized countries. Re-election campaigns are, of course, a vote on the performance of the incumbent, and Mr. Obama will have to defend his record, but the Republicans have, by their own actions, inactions, and lurch to the right in response to their hatred of all things Obama, made the choice in the election pretty clear. The stated GOP agenda has been to deny Barack Obama a second term, but other than that, they have offered nothing of substance if they win the election. That’s not surprising; they never do. They live on bumper sticker slogans and ten-word answers — Repeal Obamacare; Ban Abortion; Deport the Brown People; No More Taxes; Kill the Queers — but they offer no solutions, unless you want to go back to revive the bold and new ideas from the administration of William McKinley. The campaign will resemble that of the one in 1948 where Harry Truman, coming back from dismal approval ratings, beat the patrician and automatonic Thomas E. Dewey. Mr. Truman ran against an intransigent and right-wing-whacky Republican Congress, and Mr. Obama has pretty much the same situation. It won’t be a landslide, but unless there’s a complete meltdown of the Obama campaign juggernaut, he’ll win and might even win back Congress for the Democrats. It will not be the end of the right-wingers by any means; if anything, the re-election of Barack Obama will drive them even further over the cliff, and we will find out that the level of lunacy is infinite.

As I noted shortly after the election in November, I nailed it.  The only thing I missed on was the possibility of winning back the House, but the Democrats did gain seats.

The Supreme Court, by a vote of 5 to 4, will uphold the new healthcare law, and the California Prop 8 case will get on their docket for 2013.

Right on both counts.

Despite the best efforts of the Republicans, the economy will continue to improve, but at about the same pace as it currently is, meaning that by Election Day the unemployment rate will be around 8%. Consumer confidence will continue to grow, and while the housing market will still be soft, bigger ticket items like cars and appliances will start to sell; those old cars can’t run forever.

Right again, although I underestimated the strength of the auto market.  They are having their best year in a long, long time.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will be recalled, which will send a shiver through right-wing governors from Ohio and Michigan to Florida. As the thousands of people in the streets from Madison to Wall Street proved, you mess with the middle class at your peril, and that sleeping giant has been awakened.

Okay, I blew that one, and Rick Snyder in Michigan is making Scott Walker look like a liberal.  But I think the backlash will continue, and he has to run for re-election in 2014.

Here in Florida, Sen. Bill Nelson (D) will win another term in a tight race against Rep. Connie Mack (R), and Rep. Allen West (R) will be tossed out on his ass by the good people of Broward County. Alan Grayson (D), who lost in 2010, will win back a seat in Congress, and this will send a strong message to the Florida Democrats that if they can find some good people to run for office, they can beat Rick Scott in 2014.

Nailed that one, too, but the strongest contender in the race against Mr. Scott is the newly-minted Democrat Charlie Crist.  Hold your nose, Democrats; to quote E.J. Hornbeck in the film of Inherit the Wind, he may be rancid butter, but he’s on your side of the bread.

The Tigers will go all the way this year. They got very close this year, and there’s always next year.

They did make it all the way to the World Series, only to blow it in a four-game shut out.  Argh.

We will lose the requisite number of celebrities and friends as life goes on. As I always say, it’s important to cherish them while they are with us.

This year seemed especially harsh, both with friends at work and at home, and names that have been part of our lives.  Peace.

Personally, some things never change. I’ll go to the William Inge Festival in April — my 21st time — where we’ll honor David Henry Hwang. I’ll go to Stratford in July with my parents, and I’ll go back to work on Tuesday. I’ve done some tinkering with the Pontiac as it verges on becoming a certified antique, which happens when the 2013 models go on sale. I have no plans to move or change jobs, and the only momentous thing that will happen is that I turn 60 in September. Big whoop.

All true, and to celebrate the Big Six-Oh I threw a little party.

Okay, let’s move on to the predictions for 2013:

- President Obama moves into his second term with pretty much the same situation in Washington and Congress as he has had for the last two years, so nothing will really get done.  The budget matters, including the fake drama of the Fiscal Cliff, will still be around in some form because it’s a lot easier to kick it down the road than actually do something, especially when you have a Republican Party that absolutely refuses to work with the president on anything at all.  It has nothing to do with policy, deficits or debt, taxes or revenue.  The reason is pretty simple: they don’t like him, and so like a kid in grade school who refuses to do his math homework because he hates the teacher, they refuse to budge.  You can pick your excuses, ranging from his Spock-like demeanor to his refusal to suck up to the Villagers, but most of it comes down to the unspoken reason that dare not speak its name: he’s black.  No one dares say that out loud, but get three beers in any Republican, and I’ll bet they’ll admit it by saying “He’s not one of us.”  How many dog whistles do you need?  A big tell was that in the last-minute budget negotiations, Mitch McConnell went to Vice President Joe Biden as the go-between the Congress and the president.  Why?  Because Mr. Biden was in the Senate and knows how to talk to them, and also because he’s the white guy.  So we will have another year of gridlock, and the new Congress will make the one just concluded look good.

- The Supreme Court will rule the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Prop 8 are unconstitutional.  It will be a very close vote, probably 5-4 on both cases, and they will narrowly rule on both cases, doing their best not to fling open the doors to marriage equality with a blanket ruling and leave the rest of it up to the states.  But they will both go down.  On the other hand, they will rule against Affirmative Action.  I also think there will be some changes to the make-up of the Court with at least one retirement, either voluntary or by the hand of fate.

- Even if we went over the fiscal cliff or curb or speed-bump, the economy will continue to improve, with the unemployment rate going below 7% by Labor Day.  I know this only because I know that our economy, like the water level in the Great Lakes, goes in cycles no matter what the hand of Wall Street or Washington does… unless they completely screw it up like the last time and make it even worse.

- After the extreme weather we saw in 2012, at long last we will move to do something about climate change or global warming or whatever it is fashionably called.  It won’t be done by Congress, however; it will be because the people who make a living off the climate, such as agriculture and coastal enterprises such as fishing and tourism, will make it happen through their own efforts.  (Yeah, I’m being extremely optimistic on this one.  A year from now I will happily concede I blew it.)

- The extremism from the right that entertained us in 2012 will continue, albeit muted because 2013 isn’t an election year except in New Jersey, where Chris Christie will be re-elected and start his Howard Dean-like campaign for the presidency in 2016.  The GOP will refuse to acknowledge they have a problem, but as 2014 looms and the wingers that were elected in 2010 face re-election, they will find themselves scrambling hard for candidates that can survive primary battles where the nutsery reigns and then win the general election.  The only reason Governors Rick Scott of Florida, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and John Kasich of Ohio will be re-elected in 2014 is if the Democrats don’t move in for the kill.

- I’ve given up predicting the Tigers’ future this year.  Surprise me, boys.

- We will lose the requisite number of celebrities and friends as life goes on. As I always say, it’s important to cherish them while they are with us.

- Personally, this year looks good on a couple of fronts.  The Pontiac is due back from the body shop this week, and I have formally entered it in its first national Antique Automobile of America car show to take place in Lakeland, Florida, in February.  Things are looking better at work with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools getting a number of important grants, including a $32 million program from Race To The Top for math preparation, and the District won the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education this past fall.  One of my short plays has been selected for production in May 2013 at the Lake Worth Playhouse’s Short Cuts series, and hope springs eternal for a full-scale production again of Can’t Live Without You here in Florida.  This time I have a good director who would love to do it if we can get a theatre.  I’ll be off to the William Inge Festival in May to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Inge’s birth, and plans are in the works for our annual trip to Stratford, Ontario, next summer.  My family continues to enjoy good health and good spirits.  The blessings continue.  (PS: No, I still don’t have a Twitter account.)

- And of course, the usual prediction: One year from now I’ll write a post just like this one, look back at this one, and think, “Gee, that was dumb.” Or not.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Friday, December 7, 2012