Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. A greybeard reflects on the time he reset printers systemwide to charge people a nickel a page for print jobs:

Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies. One of the best was sent to me later in the day by intercampus mail, printed on their laser printer, with a nickel taped to it.

If it isn't obvious that this link is strictly for entertainment purposes, its title will make it so: "The April Fools Joke That Might Have Got Me Fired"

2. Rabbit Hole of the Week: A biology professor takes a deep dive into "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters." Among many other things, you will learn why small animals do so much better in falls than we do:

When any object falls, it accelerates until the drag force equals the force generated by gravity acting on its mass; from then on, the velocity is constant. This speed is known as the "terminal velocity"; for a full-sized human it's about 120 mph and is very terminal indeed. However, the drag on an object is proportional to its cross-sectional area, while the force due to gravity is proportional to its mass (and thus volume, if density is constant). As objects get smaller, gravitational pull decreases more rapidly than drag, so terminal velocity decreases.

Of course, as an old gem of black humor notes, it's not the fall that hurts you, it's the sudden stop at the end...

Indeed, sufficiently small animals cannot be hurt in a fall from any height: A monkey is too big, a squirrel is on the edge, but a mouse is completely safe. The mouse-sized people in Dr. Cyclops could have leapt off the tabletop with a cry of "Geronimo!" secure in the knowledge that they were too small to be hurt.

The whole thing is this good, but it's a half-hour read.

3. Some time back, I noted an interesting shopping site for visually impaired people who like to cook.

I followed through on sending my wife there for Christmas ideas, and my favorite two gifts have been the butter slicer and the wide-mouthed funnel.

It's more satisfying than you might think to slice up an entire stick of butter all at once without making a mess.

As for the wide-mouthed funnel, I like not having to worry at all about making a mess or scalding my hands when I pack a hot school lunch for my daughter.

4. At Ask a Manager, someone exposes the office plagiarist during a meeting:

A colleague kept stealing my work -- copy-pasting stuff from documents I'd written, and claiming PowerPoint decks as her own. So I embedded my name in everything I made -- in the footer or the slide master, in a tiny white font. Then when she claimed the work was hers in a meeting I asked for the mouse to "point to something" and "accidentally" highlighted where it said "documents created by (my name) on date.

More fun where that came from here and here.

-- CAV

Record Set, Message Missed

Although business writer Suzanne Lucas pitches her piece to HR professionals, her post mortem of Cory Booker's record-setting filibuster has lessons for anyone interested in effective communication.

Her broad points are:

1. Focus on substance over spectacle.
2. Tie actions to clear goals.
3. Engage in two-way communication.
4. Don't preach to the choir.

Lucas starts off by noting that, contrary to Cory Booker's stated goal,

... the focus of the headlines and reporting wasn't about the policies that Booker advocated for or the solutions he proposed. It was about the record-breaking speech, which overshadowed its purpose. For leaders of all kinds, it's a cautionary tale: Are your actions driving meaningful change, or are they just grabbing attention?

I'm no fan of Booker, and I suspect our lazy and incurious news media deserve some of the blame for its focus on nonessentials. Nevertheless, it is clear that Booker could have greatly increased his odds of success by following her advice.

For example, regarding her first point about the hazards of creating a spectacle:

Booker's speech broke a record previously held by Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. While the delivery was historic, Booker's speech inadvertently revived discussions about Thurmond's opposition to civil rights -- an unintended consequence that distracted from Booker's intended message.

Don't let flashy execution overshadow your core message. If your team walks away talking about how you said something rather than what you said, you've missed the mark.

Always ask: Will this method amplify my message or distract from it?

Her other points are just as worthy of consideration, too.

-- CAV

For Starters, Walker's Legacy in Danger

Special elections in Florida and Wisconsin provided shots across the bow to the Trump Administration, at least according to the Wall Street Journal. The GOP retained two safe congressional seats in Florida, albeit with less-safe margins than normal, and lost the election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.

Whatever one can glean from elections so early in a term, I think it is fair to say that if there really is a "MAGA backlash," it is nothing compared to what there will be if the worst-case scenario of Trump's "liberation day" tariffs -- 20% or more across the board -- comes to pass; and then either Trump refuses to back down or Congress fails to get him under control by finding the will to take back its authority over tariffs.

If that happens, that paper's warnings to the GOP will definitely apply:

Republicans can console themselves that they held the Florida seats and thus their narrow House majority. And we hope the results don't scare House Republicans into backing away from their tax and regulatory reform agenda. That's what Democrats would love, so next year they'd get the benefit both ways -- motivated Democrats and sullen Republicans after a GOP governing failure.

But the elections are a warning to Mr. Trump to focus on what got him re-elected -- especially prices and growth in real incomes after inflation. His willy-nilly tariff agenda undermining stock prices and consumer and business confidence isn't helping. [bold added]

The piece goes on to note the worst consequences of the Democrat victory in Wisconsin:

As for Wisconsin, Republicans in that state will now have to live with a willful Supreme Court majority that could reverse nearly everything the GOP accomplished under former Gov. Scott Walker. School vouchers, collective-bargaining reform for public workers, tort reform and more are likely to be challenged in lawsuits by the left. Congressional district electoral maps will also be challenged and could cost the GOP two House seats. [bold added]

Given that the only indications of congressional action on tariffs so far has been either merely symbolic or the exact opposite of what is needed, I expect a bloodbath in the midterms.

The cowards in the GOP would do well to start fearing their constituents more than the President.

-- CAV

Income Tax to Die in Mississippi?

Mississippi, where I was born and raised, has made headlines for being the first state to eliminate an existing income tax.

Unfortunately, any notices concerning the death of the income tax there are premature.

Having followed the news lately, I knew that the elimination would follow a timetable, as almost any such reform would. What I didn't know is how long a timetable that is:

The new law put Mississippi on a path to become the first state to eliminate an existing income tax, per the Associated Press. The measure reduces the tax over time, dropping .25 percent annually starting in 2027. Once the rate reaches 3 percent in 2031, further reductions must be offset by "growth triggers" to ensure the state has adequate resources to operate.

In addition to the move on income tax, the new law also cuts the state sales tax on groceries from 7 percent to 5 percent and boosts the gas tax by 9 cents to 27.4 cents per gallon.

...

Neva Butkus, a senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, estimated the state will lose $2.6 billion from its current $7 billion budget as a result of phasing out the income tax. Additionally, as Butkus told Mississippi Today, the action may be ill-timed given Washington's current cost-cutting mentality. As AP reported, Mississippi's economy and budget are among the most reliant on federal spending in the nation, and therefore, any future budget cuts or federal grant freezes by Congress would be felt more deeply than in other states. [bold added]

Hmmmmm.

I advocate limited government and ultimately the abolition of all taxation.

I am under no illusions about time tables: I am sure there will be taxation until the day I die, and I have no reason to believe that we are anywhere close to turning the tide against continued growth of the welfare state. (In other words, the process will take time and we are nowhere near starting it.)

Even the "cost-cutting mentality" cited by Butkus is a mirage, given Trump's refusal to even consider phasing out entitlement spending, which isn't a proper function of government, and yet consumes the lion's share of the budget in today's welfare-regulatory state. (Ironically, the transience of this "mentality" might end up helping the plan work, but at the likely much higher cost of the federal government raising taxes.)

So, while I love the idea of eliminating the income tax, I am highly skeptical of the eventual success of even this plan, given that I have heard of no corresponding cuts in Mississippi's own spending, and that's even before we account for the state's heavy reliance on federal money.

None of this means I won't be pleasantly surprised some time in the future -- Reaching zero could afford well over a decade. -- and even this measure was a pleasant surprise.

But rolling back the welfare state is even harder than this measure was to accomplish, because it requires a revolutionary improvement in our culture to occur first, that will cause at least a sizable minority to loudly demand freedom over the illusion of safety and security.

This attempt at a shortcut was hard, and there are no shortcuts.

-- CAV

Surprise! Competence Doesn't Matter to Trump

As if the President's hiring of an anti-vaxxer to head the HHS, a buddy of Bashar al Assad to head intelligence, and a media figure to head defense weren't enough of an indication, his handling of the fallout of SignalGate should show that Trump values personal loyalty to the point that he scorns merit.

Consider the following from the Times-Union:

A responsible administration would want to immediately get to the bottom of this. Instead, from President Trump on down, the response has been, at various turns:

• to deny the seriousness of the matter;
• to falsely state that no war plans were discussed;
• to parse the meaning of the word "classified";
• to deflect responsibility;
• to refuse to answer questions from Congress; and -- of course --
• to attack the journalist who reported the story.

We would normally urge the inspector general for the Department of Defense to review this failure. But Mr. Trump fired the person in that post in January, part of a purge of 17 inspectors general in various agencies and one of many actions the president has taken to reduce accountability in government.

Like a bad punchline, the next sentence is, "That leaves any hope for accountability, once again, to Congress." Congress? You mean the guys who went along with these horrendous choices in the first place?

This is alarming and I am largely in agreement with the editorial, although I would also like to add a point I gleaned from Yaron Brook's commentary on the matter.

I unfortunately do not remember which episode of his podcast this came from, so cannot point you to it or verify my recollection. The gist was that the main government actors in SignalGate failed to respond even like adults to their exposure by the Atlantic: An adult would admit the mistake and pledge not to let anything like it happen again from the outset. (And I think Brook may have a point that the original breach alone might not have been worthy of a firing had they chosen this course.) Instead, we have gotten the childish pattern displayed above, which the President himself adopted over the weekend when he said:

"I don't fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts," Trump said, calling the story "fake news" throughout the interview.

"I do," the president said when asked whether he still has confidence in Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also in the Signal chat and sent a detailed timeline of the planned strikes before they happened.

"I think it's just a witch hunt and the fake news, like you, talk about it all the time, but it's just a witch hunt, and it shouldn't be talked [about]," Trump added. "We had a tremendously successful strike. We struck very hard and very lethal. And nobody wants to talk about that. All they want to talk about is nonsense. It's fake news."

We got away (this time) with planning a strike over a channel known to be of interest to (and possibly already compromised by) hostile regimes.

Faced with proof of a security lapse that could have cost the lives of servicemen, all Trump does that we can tell is pretend nothing went wrong. This isn't the same thing at all as, say, We are conducting our own investigation of this breach and putting a plan in place so that nothing like it happens again.

It's just more "owning" the "leftist" establishment, rather than defeating the left, much less doing his job or, heaven forbid, using his bully pulpit to promote a positive agenda of returning our nation to the founding ideals that make it great.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. I've heard of people opting for dumb phones and hunting for dumb television sets and cars with actual knobs for controls. And then there was that spamming refrigerator that made the news a while back.

But now, people are rightly getting upset about dishwashers that require an internet connection to do simple things:

You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

An app? I mean, I can understand maybe adding some neat convenience features for those who want them. Like on my new fridge -- which I chose not to connect to WiFI -- it has an app that would allow me to monitor the inside temperature or look up service codes more easily. If I wanted those add-on features, which my old fridge didn't have, I could get them.

But requiring an app to access features that used to be controllable via buttons on the dishwasher itself -- or are still if you pay $400 more for the fancy "800" model? That's no bueno.

Sure, companies ought to be free to offer whatever kind of garbage they want on an open market, but I'll be damned if I'm going to reward ridiculous things like this with my business.

And no thanks: I don't want the prospect of things like having to pay a subscription to do something I used to be able to do by pressing a button -- or suddenly being unable to use an appliance if its vendor goes out of business.

This may or may not bother you, but I'm going be very careful and picky the next time I have to buy an appliance, even if no one in his right mind would think the internet is necessary for something like it to work.

2. An nice bonus to law and order is that, once in a while, you get to read a good dressing-down of a bad actor who chooses the wrong person to threaten with a lawsuit.

I encountered a good example of this recently in the form of a letter written in response to a company with a reputation for extorting settlement money by threatening infringement suits over its intellectual property:

I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not. [emphasis in quote from blog post]

Tort reform, including a "loser pays rule, would go a long way towards rectifying this situation, since many victims of this strategy can't afford to fight back.

3. There is a nonzero chance that the star Betelgeuse will go supernova in our lifetime. That sounds neat, but what will it be like when that happens?

It will be visible during the day. It will be brighter than any planet. It will be almost as bright as the full moon. You'll be able to read a book by the light of the Betelgeuse supernova at midnight.

But it will actually be painful to look at because unlike the full moon that is this gorgeous disc in the sky, Betelgeuse is still going to be a tiny pinprick of light. So it won't be comfortable to look at, and it will last a few months before fading away as all supernovae do. But as impressive as it is, it won't be dangerous.

Bright enough to read by at night? Good thing it won't last more than too long, then.

4. It was through spell-checking a blog post that I first learned that restaurateur has no n.

If that strikes you as odd, here's why:

A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these "restorers" became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called "restaurant." It wasn't until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. After the French Revolution of 1789, chefs who used to be in the service of aristocrats began opening public eating places serving all kinds of foods -- not just healthy soups. That's when the restaurant as we now know it by its current name and style began to take shape.

You'll have to go there for the main part of the answer, which is in the paragraph before the one quoted above.

I found my knowledge of Latin helpful in understanding this, although absent the knowledge of the origin of the terms, I never connected the grammatical dots on my own.

-- CAV

No Patience for Bad Hospital Manners

Miss Manners takes a question from someone who recently suffered the double misfortune of being hospitalized and having to share a room with a proselytizer:

A few months ago, I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. For most of that time, I shared the room with a very friendly, talkative woman who had been in the hospital for a long time. While still needing medical care, she was clearly on the mend; she was bored, a little lonely from her long stay, and pleased to have a new roommate to talk to.

It immediately became obvious she was a committed evangelical Christian and all she wanted to talk about was religion. I started by making short, noncommittal responses and trying to change the subject, but my lack of enthusiastic response made her decide I needed to be "saved." For the remainder of our time sharing the room, I was bombarded by "give your heart to Jesus" appeals...

The confrontation-averse patient ended up pretending to be asleep on the order of 23 hours a day to avoid the incessant evangelizing.

Miss Manners gives good advice, as usual, but the most important lesson I took from her reply was not to forget that even hospital patients have agency.

I wouldn't have trouble telling someone like this to can it, if my answers at the start didn't succeed in putting her off, but the solution of asking for a room(mate) change is gold, and one I will not forget.

About a decade ago, a medical condition I did not know I had (and which I can easily control, now that I do know) landed me in the hospital for a couple of days. Believe me: There is no rest night or day, and the last thing on earth I'd want to deal with in such circumstances is being the captive audience of a magpie.

Thanks again, Miss Manners, and may I never actually need this advice!

-- CAV