Tag: random

Revisiting Court Decisions

In 2008, Miami-Dade enacted Ordinance 08-34 requiring cranes be able to withstand load from 140 mph winds. Construction companies objected — they’d need to spend more money ensuring public safety, and really how often are 140 mph winds ripping through Miami? Courts deemed the local regulation to cover worker safety and not public safety; the OSHA requirement, which is something like 90 mph, superseded the local government’s Ordinance (I think the 11th Circuit decision actually said it was a multi-purpose regulation … but since the requirement touched on workplace safety, OSHA wins). I wonder, as cranes come crashing into buildings in downtown Miami, if the court would revisit that decision.

I worked for a company that operated each regional area as an independent entity. Each had their own set of rules, regulations, processes … they just shared a common HR staff and all of the money rolled up to the same ledger. Their “sell” to this approach was that it allowed different regions with different requirements to make rules that met their customer’s needs. The unfortunate example that got cited, though, was a military base out in Virginia. *That* region had a policy where, upon being deployed overseas, a military family could have their account flagged as forward deployed. The the account would not be suspended for non-payment and no collections attempts would be made. Which is nice – but why weren’t military bases in other regions afforded the same courtesy? Or customers stationed at the base in Virginia who happened to retain their cell phone from their family’s home in Kansas? Essentially, I could never understand what about cellular service could need to be customized for a specific region where it was a completely unreasonable policy in other regions. There are areas where a single nation-wide regulation makes sense.

Construction regulations, on the other hand, seem very location specific. And a area where a nationwide minimum standard would be far more reasonable. I doubt there’s a lot of concern about coastal flooding in Denver. Snow load regulations for equipment in South Texas is silly, but I wouldn’t want to sleep next door to a crane in NYC that didn’t fall under some snow load reg. Builders in Maine don’t need to worry too much about tornado damage, but construction sites between OKC and Tulsa can reasonably be required to lash down their materials at the end of each day to avoid debris being flung all over the countryside. And, yeah, cities in Southern Florida can reasonably want large pieces of equipment to have higher wind load ratings than a crane in Seattle.

Furthermore — why is it “states rights” people only support the state’s rights to be *more* Republican? Why should Cali need a waiver to have stricter air quality and fuel efficiency rules? Why should Miami be unable to have higher standards for wind force? It isn’t like Washington needed a waiver to set their minimum wage above the federal set-point.

It’s chess *for girls*!

Sometime in the late 80’s, I saw a “Chess … For Girls!” game. It was exactly like every other chess set in the world, except it was pink and sparkly. I remember wondering how exactly that product development meeting went down. “Well, we don’t want too many people to want our product … so how can we alienate a good chunk of customers?”. No boy is going to want “Chess … For Girls!” even if they’d like a sparkly pink chess set. Some subset of parents will refuse to purchase it because it’s offensive targeting. It isn’t like derivatives of traditional chess are unique – they could have done anything with the marketing. Sets featuring Stan Lee’s superheros aren’t marketed as “Chess … For Boys!”. They could have just called it Chess. They could have made a few different versions featuring glow in the dark pieces, sparkles, and furry animals. But, no … they first imply that other chess sets aren’t for girls. And that the way you can identify a product as being “for girls” is to look for pink sparkles.

I thought we’d moved on from such marketing fails – hell, SNL made a spoof commercial with the exact premise. But today we saw https://jewelbots.com/ … so you can “code like a girl”. Umm, hi! I code just like most other programmers – with a keyboard and using a syntax appropriate for the language of choice. Like girl chess or that Google engineer’s terribly presented suggestion for diversity programs, the sexism isn’t even needed. The product is billed as 21st century friendship bracelets. Bands with what I assume are little Arduino computers in a round plastic thing that makes the whole unit look a little bit like a watch. The plastic housing has a flower design on it. Make an array of inter-changeable band options, a bunch of different plastic cases … and just call them 21st century friendship bracelets. You assign colours to registered friends, and the bracelet glows that colour when your friend is nearby. Use Bluetooth to send secret messages to friends. It’s a cool product  for either gender. And, hey parents … your kids are learning valuable programming skills too.

Pressure Washer

We got a pressure washer a few days ago. I don’t like using herbicides on the patio (well, I don’t like using them in general), but keeping the brick free of weeds is an inundating task. We’ve got some vinyl that needs to be cleaned anyway, and found a really good deal on a 2000 psi Ryobi pressure washer.

Tested it out to see if it works well and to see how clean ‘stuff’ gets with just water. Wow! I don’t know if the patio bricks have ever been cleaned. I thought they were a darker colour, but it turns out they were just REALLY grubby. It’s a messy and time consuming process – I’m planning to wear my safety glasses when I finish it up because even low velocity sand in the eyeball … not fun. But it’s a lot of fun too (tiring and ironically dehydrating, but fun). Especially when Anya wants to play in the ricocheting water like it is a sprinkler.

Here’s the difference between clean and uncleaned brick — weeds get blasted right out, dirt is cleared off the stones and from between the bricks (certainly need to get sand, between the bricks is washed clean), and nothing was used but water. We were worried about damaging the stones, but 2000 psi didn’t break anything. There was lot of mud piling up as I moved across the patio. I ended up taking a snow shovel and moving the mud off of the patio – otherwise I’d get to a point where the splash-back was making the already cleaned bits filthy again.

Once the patio is cleaned, I want to try it out on the siding and railing vinyl. Hopefully we can clean off the green stuff without detergent too.

 

Amazon Acquisition Of Whole Foods

I don’t know why everyone is talking about Amazon Fresh expanding to a radius around every Whole Foods store. There’s not a lot of cost savings or synergy there. Amazon will use their own logistics solution to move thousands of orders to a Whole Foods distribution center and those orders ride on trucks already headed out to the Whole Foods stores. You will stop in after work / on the weekend and pick them up. Saves the expensive last-mile shipping bit (where Amazon currently has to pay money to Fedex or UPS to get a package from their distribution centre to your doorstep). And may increase Whole Foods grocery market share … if you are going there anyway to pick up your stuff, saves time getting your groceries too.

Bad Sales Strategy

Shortly after exacerbating tensions between Qatar and its neighboring countries, the US is selling twelve billion dollars worth of F15’s to Qatar and a hundred ten billion dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia?!? Please tell me that provoking tense geopolitical relationships is not going to be a sales strategy. Great, you keep Boeing’s assembly line open … but this is too much like privatized prisons needing a constant increase in incarcerations to increase their profits.

The Great Negotiator

Hopefully the mythos of Trump as some superior negotiator will be dispelled by, well … let’s just say he reminds me of an employee with a grotesquely inflated resume. Sure, they get the job. At some point they show up for work and display their real qualifications.

A halfway decent negotiator understands the other party’s motivations – that would take some study and some awareness of something outside of yourself. More importantly, though, a good negotiator understands the strengths and weaknesses of their position. Knows what leverage they have – which isn’t to say you cannot negotiate a good deal when you lack leverage. That’s the point of bluffing. But if you are completely unaware of your standing, you don’t have the good sense to bluff.

Let’s be honest here — someone who didn’t think health care would be so complicated, who didn’t realize China didn’t have a whole bunch of sway over North Korea (nor the impetus to use their influence to benefit the US) certainly doesn’t understand what leverage he’s got in negotiating either. And someone whose big experience with taxes is managing to lose an incredible amount of money (probably park the debt somewhere that it won’t be collected) and turn that into a tax-free decade probably isn’t going to enter into the tax reform negotiating with a whole heap of power either.

The Peril Of Hosting Your Own Services

I love hosting my own services — home automation, file shares, backups, e-mail, web servers, DNS … bit of paranoia, a bit of control freak, and a bit of pride. But every now and again, hosting my own services causes problems because, well, vendors don’t develop processes around someone with servers in their house.

We got a new cable modem. Scott went to a web page (happened to be Google) and got redirected to the TWC activation page. Went through whatever, ended up calling into support, and finally our account was sorted. Woohoo! Everything works … umm, except I cannot search Google.

Turns out TWC manages their activation redirection by serving up bogus DNS info — their server IP instead of the real one. Which then got cached on our DNS server. No idea what TTL TWC set on their bogus data, but it was more than a minute or two. Had to clear the DNS server cache before we were able to hit Google sites again.

Irony, Thy Name Is Trump

Yesterday, Trump bemoaned how terribly he is treated as President. From a man who has never encountered a superlative he didn’t incorporate into everyday speech … not surprising. But I keep thinking about how Trump is treated in comparison to Obama. Fundamentally different stories, and one narrative has yet to be proven true or false. But even if Trump’s campaign literally had nothing to do with Russian influence in the election – simply had overly-trusting people trying to do the “right thing” and ended up speaking with the wrong people (I had eight calls from the dude, the last one ten minutes long because I was telling them to STOP CALLING ME). Even if we ignore abuses of power relating to the investigation into the nothing that really happened (you get charged with a crime you didn’t commit, try intimidating witnesses because the charges scare you or the bad publicity scares you … the intimidation itself IS a crime). The basic premise behind how Republicans treated Obama is that policies he advocates are so terrible that we’d rather literally accomplish nothing in the next four years. And any cycle you spend hosting a beer summit after making a completely fair assessment of public bias and police actions (seriously, would some old white professor have the cops called if he got locked out of his fancy brownstone?) or discussing birth certificates (hey, Trump, that would be yours) is a cycle not spent advancing odious positions. Agree or disagree with the positions, it’s a decent strategy that the Republicans cultivated there. Positions switch, and beyond play acting … are you really surprised to see the opposition using the same strategy?

Difference is that Obama had a halfway decent approach to dissent — Trump makes a dramatic reality show with a cliffhanger each week (and a bit like “how did you not expect to be red herring’d out of effectiveness” … voters, how did you not expect the reality show star to create, well, THIS!?).