The problem with applying unfettered capitalism to the health system is that it takes the purpose of health care away from curing disease and keeping people healthy and makes it selling them health care products and services. Suppose a new superbug suddenly appeared in hospitals all over the world. Suppose it was killing people and there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it from spreading from the hospitals to the general public. But suppose that all along there were older, generic drugs that could kill this new superbug and could have prevented the deaths of those who had died, but the drug companies weren’t interested in them there was no profit to be had in selling people the old drugs…
It’s not fiction…it’s happening right now. You’ve heard about that new super staph bacteria…right…?
Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) — Generic, World War II-era antibiotics may become the newest weapon of choice in the fight against deadly, drug-resistant staph germs.
Physicians funded by the U.S. government are mounting two studies of drugs costing less than $1 a day to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA. The bacteria, once found only in hospitals and nursing homes, are spreading to communal settings such as schools and gyms. Last month, MRSA was linked to the deaths of a student in New York and one in Virginia.
The generic antibiotics are used to treat infections before they require surgery. Drugmakers, meanwhile, are spending hundreds of millions developing medicines that cost more than $100 a day to treat advanced cases. More than 18,000 Americans annually are killed by MRSA, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
…
The grants represent a realization by the NIH that there is a “gap in the current knowledge” about the older drugs and that government needs to step in when market conditions may discourage drug companies from filling it, Moran says.
“We know these drugs work,” he says. “They are already in wide use. But we want to confirm what doctors are doing, and the trials may change behavior somewhat.”
…
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the NIH, says the grants were intended to fill a vacuum left by pharmaceutical companies. Drugmakers, he says, don’t have an economic incentive to study drugs with expired patents or to develop antibiotics that have limited market potential.
(Emphasis mine) The article goes on to state that the use of the older drugs is only a stopgap measure until newer (hideously expensive) drugs can be developed. But of course, those newer drugs will also only be stopgap measures too, as the germs evolve and develop resistance. But look at this confession here, that the profit motive doesn’t work in health care, and so the government has to step in and do these tests. Drugs may already exist that kill this new superbug, but we don’t know that, because the drug companies aren’t interested in selling them because they can’t make enough profit on them.
And the bottom line there is, people are dying for the sake of drug company profits. Welcome to the best health care system in the world, according to the republicans. And obviously what’s so good about our health care system is how much money it makes for the drug companies. That’s the purpose of health care in George Bush’s America. Not to cure sick people. Not to keep healthy people healthy. The purpose of health care in America is to make drug company executives rich.
I’ve never understood the appeal among the art pundits for architect Frank Gehry’s style.
I think his buildings are more like fruit wine hallucinations then daring expressions of form. But I’ve always assumed that part of the appeal at least, was how he managed to do what he did, be so expressive in his way, and still make what must have been many extremely complex engineering problems all work out right.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a negligence suit against world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center in Cambridge, one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up.
The suit says that MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which was hailed by critics as innovative and eye-catching with its unconventional walls and radical angles. But soon after its completion in spring 2004, the center’s outdoor amphitheater began to crack due to drainage problems, the suit says. Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit. Mold grew on the center’s brick exterior, the suit says, and there were persistent leaks throughout the building.
The suit says it cost MIT more than $1.5 million to hire another company to rebuild the amphitheater, with new bricks, seats, and a new drainage system.
The institute alleges that both Gehry Partners and the construction company, New Jersey-based Beacon Skanska Construction Company, now known as Skanska USA Building Inc., violated their contracts with MIT and are responsible for construction and design failures on the project. The 400,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center, on Vassar Street, also houses labs, offices, classrooms, and meeting rooms, and features a "street" that winds through the ground floor.
"Gehry breached its duties by providing deficient design services and drawings," says the suit, which was filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston on Oct. 31 and seeks unspecified damages for costs and expenses incurred by MIT.
Gehry Partners did not respond to repeated calls and e-mail yesterday from the Globe. A spokesman for MIT declined to comment because of the pending lawsuit.
An executive at Skanska’s Boston office yesterday blamed Gehry for problems with the project and said Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company prior to construction that there were flaws in his design of the amphitheater.
"This is not a construction issue, never has been," said Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of Skanska USA. He said Gehry rejected Skanska’s formal request to create a design that included soft joints and a drainage system in the amphitheater, and "we were told to proceed with the original design."
After the amphitheater began cracking and flooding, Skanska spent "a few hundred thousand dollars" trying to resolve the problems, but, he said, "it was difficult to make the original design work."
I worked as an architectural modelmaker for much of the 1980s and I know the companies I freelanced during that time all had teams of engineers on staff whose only job was to pay attention to the environment a building exists in as much as the physics of keeping it standing up. Snow loading, ice, rain, even nooks and crannys where birds might nest were all taken into account. And I saw designers overruled time and again by the engineers over those issues.
After learning of the lawsuit yesterday, Silber said Gehry "thinks of himself as an artist, as a sculptor. But the trouble is you don’t live in a sculpture and users have to live in this building."
Oh bullshit. The sculptor who doesn’t understand how marble or bronze behave, or whatever material it is they work in, is no artist. Art is a step above craft, not below. You cannot approach the vision in your mind, in your heart, if you are not a master of the materials you work in, or at least aspire to be. You have to love your tools, and know them as well as you know your own hands.
Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.
Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time. Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places. I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections. The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear. The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal.
And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility. Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night. When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty. The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close. The national debt has skyrocketed. So have foreclosure rates. People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum. And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes. I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.
"Greed is good", they said. People should have paid more attention. No, greed is not good. Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year. Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year. Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow. There is only now. Right now. I want it Right Now. "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.
People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.
But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”
People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”
Bush is not incompetent. He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power. Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They don’t matter. Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow. Greed is good. Or to put it succinctly:
SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror,who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:
"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"
….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery’s parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."
Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?
You got what you voted for. The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print. You didn’t read the bold print.
During my lunch break at work today I took a quick drive to my local Wild Birds Unlimited shop to buy a case of "Woodpecker’s Delight" suet cakes for my suet feeders for the winter. I’ve been re-adjusting the layout of the feeders in the front yard here at Casa del Garrett for another try at defeating the local squirrels, and I’m hoping I can attract the variety of woodpeckers again this winter that I did last. And of course, it was an excuse to drive Traveler, my new Mercedes-Benz C300 somewhere.
I was about halfway up I-83 to to the beltway when I noticed a rattle coming from somewhere in the back of the car. I waited for a while for it to go away. I tried ignoring it. I tried to think if I had anything stored in any of the rear door armrests but I knew I didn’t. I’ve been keeping that car spotless inside. I tried cocking my ears this way and that to zero in on where exactly it was coming from and couldn’t tell exactly…just that it was coming from somewhere around the area of the rear window. I tried raising and lowering the rear window sun screen a few times, but that didn’t solve it, nor change the tone of the rattle one bit. I tried raising and lowering both the rear windows. The rattle didn’t go away.
When I got to Wild Birds and parked I opened a back door and got in the rear seat and looked around for something, anything, that I could see might be obviously causing the rattling sound. But there wasn’t anything. I checked the seatbelts, poked and pressed at some of the upholstery and door panels, tapped on the rear deck paneling around the speaker moldings. It all seemed as solid as the day I bought the car. This had all the makings of one of those perfectly annoying car rattles that just drive you nuts until you find it. Every car I’ve ever owned has had one of those. But this wasn’t just any car. It was my brand new Mercedes-Benz.
The last thing in the world I wanted was to know beyond any doubt that my brand new 45 thousand dollar car had a rattle in it. Other then an outright mechanical failure, there wouldn’t be much more then that to demolish my sense of pride in owning a work of Mercedes-Benz rock solidness. One of the delights I’ve had in the past few weeks in just driving that car somewhere, anywhere, is its exceptional feel of solidity as you drive it down the road. That’s always been one thing in which a Mercedes-Benz is quite unlike any other car, except maybe the rarefied hand built cars of the super rich like the Bentley and Rolls. A Mercedes sedan is a bit stogy, but solid as a rock, over engineered and high performing in a way its looks don’t advertise…the ultimate techno geek car when you think about it. No way could it have a rattle.
But that was what Mercedes-Benz was. In the 1990s they stopped being that, to the discontent of many. Then some years ago they owned up to it, and promised to start building them like they used to. For the last couple of years it seemed like they had finally turned a corner. They divorced Chrysler, they got rid of the CEO who led them downward in quality for the sake of his grandiose dream of making Mercedes the world’s biggest auto maker. And I wanted so much to believe.
I bought my case of suet and barely looked at the other merchandise. I was preoccupied. Does the warranty cover rattles…? No way was I going to allow my Mercedes to have a rattle. Tolerating it was absolutely not an option. Mercedes-Benz Don’t Rattle Goddammit. I will Not allow it! On the way back down I-83 the rattle returned like a chicken coming home to roost. I was getting depressed. I’ve owned a junker or two in my time and I know the sound of a rattle that isn’t going away until you track it down and fix it. And the more I listened to it, the more it sounded like something coming from inside a panel somewhere.
I drove back to work in a funk. This month I have many other things going on at work to occupy my mind. Back home again in the evening, I logged into the servers at the Institute and did a little more work. After rush hour had settled down a tad I walked out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, and thought about it. I sat there in a funk for a few minutes. Who do I know that I can get to sit in the back seat and isolate a rattle for me while I drive the car…? All afternoon at work I’d been trying to debug a set of server configuration problems that were keeping me from getting some things done I’d needed to get done. So my mood wasn’t exactly serene and peaceful. But now that debugging mind frame I’d been in all afternoon took charge of my little rattle problem…
Let’s step through this… Where’s the rattle coming from? The back of the car. What’s in the back of the car?
Well…the trunk of course. I got out and opened the trunk. Inside my trunk I have several items. One is a big canvas pouch I bought at a truck stop ages ago. It’s supposed to hang off one of the front seat headrest pillars down the seatback, and it has big pockets to hold a roll of paper towels, bottles of cleaner, a flashlight maps and other miscellaneous items. I wasn’t about to hang it off the back of one of Traveler’s seats, so I put it in the trunk. The other item is a small Rubbermaid container that holds my emergency kit…road flares, duct tape, tire sealant, heavy duty jumper cables, a large APC 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC power converter, a bright orange safety poncho and a few miscellaneous tools. Also in the trunk was my window squeegee, the first aid kit that came with the car, the one I already had, and the spare wiper blades. The first aid kit that came with the car was stowed in a compartment on the side of the trunk, behind one of the rear wheels, along with the spare wiper blades. I took all of this out of the trunk, started up Traveler and took it for another drive up I-83.
The rattle was gone. Absolutely gone. Back was the cozy quiet I’d fallen in love with the first time I drove the car from Baltimore to Washington. I drove a short loop up I-83 and back and the inside of the car was as quiet and serene as before.
One at a time I reintroduced the items back into the trunk, exactly where they were before, and did the same drive up and back on I-83 again. Eventually I discovered it was the spare wiper blades. They’re made of a very flexible rubber/plastic compound and they’d wedged themselves into a position where they were vibrating against the metal walls of the storage compartment they were in. In Mercedes’ defense, that’s not where they were when I bought the car. When I bought the car the spare wiper blades had been stowed in the front passenger seat map holder. I didn’t think that was an appropriate place for them, so I put them in that side compartment in the trunk with the first aid kit.
From now on, the spare wiper blades go in the Rubbermaid container.
Going into the home stretch in in the Kentucky gubernatorial election, the Republicans appear to have brought out one last card: Paranoia against gays.
The state GOP is now sending a robo-call throughout the state featuring none other than Pat Boone, warning that as a Christian he is concerned that Democratic nominee Steve Beshear, who has been way ahead in the polls, will work for "every homosexual cause."
"Now do you want a governor who’d like Kentucky to be another San Francisco?" Boone asks. "Please re-elect Ernie Fletcher."
And at a campaign stop last night, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor made a direct attack upon the Democratic ticket: "Do you want a couple of San Francisco treats or do you want a governor?"
(Emphasis mine) So the republican candidate gets way behind in the polls and he starts waving the Gay Menace. This is what republicans do to win elections, and never mind how many gay Americans it gets killed. Talking Points Memo has a recording of Fletcher’s robo call. You may recall that on April 11 of last year Fletcher, declared Diversity Day in Kentucky, and on the same day eliminated anti-discrimination protections for gay state and local government workers.
I wrote a post a few days back about wanting a door I could walk through from time to time. Don’t assume that means I’m not just as pissed off at all of you as I was. In fact, I might even be More pissed off now then I was. Because it just never stops with the republicans. It just never stops.
I don’t expect everyone who knows me to agree with me on every political issue. But if you can vote republican while they’re doing this to gay people to win elections then you are not my friend. It really is that simple. I’ve got a bullseye on my back, along with ever other gay American citizen, and it’s not gutter crawling maggots like Ernie Fletcher who put it there, it’s all of you who told the republicans they can incite passions toward gay people as often and as crudely as they like and you’ll still vote for them.
So don’t ask. Just…don’t.
When the roll call of the gay bashed for this election cycle is read and I’m lucky enough not to be on it that’ll be no thanks to the likes of any of you.
(Union City, New Jersey) Two workers at a Burger King in Union City have been charged with assault and a hate crime in connection with the beating of a gay couple outside the restaurant.
Christopher Soto and Angel Carbaballo, who have since been fired by the chain, are scheduled to appear in court this week.
The victims, both in their 40s, have not been named.
When the couple asked for a refund for a menu item that the counter person discovered was not available, another counter person then asked who wanted the refund – “The faggots over there?”
The couple left the restaurant, but a group of Burger King employees allegedly followed them to a side street and beat them mercilessly, though not fatally.
The employees made repeated anti-gay slurs during the beating according to the indictment.
For people like me, Senator Craig is, in a very obvious sense, an enemy: he has been a solid functionary of the system of hatred which has used people like me as a wedge issue to frighten people into acquiescence with other, and far more serious forms of evildoing. A system of hatred which is, thank heavens, far less strong in this country now than it is in the United States, and far less strong than it was in this country as recently as fifteen years ago. I say this, since there is an obvious sense in which I, as a child of my culture, am tempted to rejoice in the discomfiture of my enemy, to depict Senator Craig as the “not me” which gives me a tidy little identity. It was in this context that I was very moved to read a piece by one of the gay-bloggers in the US, fairly shortly after the Craig story broke, which helped remind me of the truth of the Gospel.
This blogger, whose name I cannot now remember, showed me something which enabled me to see sameness rather than difference.
He pointed out that Senator Craig was born in 1945, in rural Idaho. When he was ten years old, in 1955, there was a scandal in Boise, the Idaho State Capital, not too far from where young Larry lived. It was the big tabloid gay scandal of the 1950’s, coming just as America was in the grip of the McCarthy witch hunts, themselves helped along nicely by at least two self-hating gay men, “killer fruits” as Truman Capote wrily called them: Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover. It was revealed that in Boise, of all unlikely places, there was a network of public officials and influential citizens employing the services of a group of rent boys. Well, you can imagine what sort of impact the news of all this, the sensation of it, the hatred it revealed, might have had on a ten year old boy. It might well have taught him that if he wanted to grow up being good, then the one thing, above all else, that he was not, was gay (or whatever approximation to that word existed in his milieu at that time). A boy like that might well have been taught by his culture, just as he came close to puberty, simultaneously who he was, and who he was not; and faced with any little boy’s desire to grow up to be good, he may have been locked into a form of denial and self-hatred which could then perpetuate itself for many years thereafter.
I can’t be sure, but I think that nameless gay blogger was probably me, Here. At the time I was seeing some references to the issues Craig’s generation faced, but I’d also previously seen announcements come around one of the gay news lists I’m on about the Fall of ’55 Documentary, which reminded me of the book, Sex Crime Panic, about another one that happened, also in 1955, in Soux City Iowa, and I did a quick mental calculation of how old Craig probably was at the time of the scandal in his home state and sure enough there he was, just at the threshold of puberty when all of this was going down. That generation had it a lot rougher then mine even, I’m about ten years younger then Craig, but some gay kids growing up in some parts of the country back then had it worse, if that’s possible to imagine.
The web’s a big place and who knows how many other gay bloggers, knowing about that documentary or about that scandal independently figured out its link with Larry Craig’s life and posted their thoughts for Alison to read, but nobody else I’d read up ’til I posted my piece as the story was developing had, or took the time to figure exactly how old he would have been. I don’t get the kind of hits per day that Sullivan gets, or even the third or forth tier gay bloggers get, but I have have regular and semi-regular readers here, and many others who stop in via Google every day, and I see lots of email links in my server logs, as people find things here on the blog, and on my cartoon pages, that they want to share with others. The point is, who knows where a thought that you put down in writing will go here on the web?
This is what the Internet has done for us, for the political and cultural dialogue among the everyday folk. With so many active and curious minds roaming around the web to stumble across and behold the links between people and events that animate our times, we don’t have to wait for some Old Media gasbags to tell us what the connections are. We find them, and ponder them for ourselves.
My brother and I were talking last night about the sub prime loan whirlwind and the housing market drop. He’s a home improvement contractor and business where he lives is actually still very good for him (he has a good name in the market where he does business). But he’s been renting now for ages and he’d like to buy if home prices would just come down a little. Unlike a lot of folks, he wasn’t the type to be suckered in by any of the creative financing schemes that are currently causing people to loose their homes, and CEOs to loose their jobs.
Anyway…I just thought he (and you) would appreciate this little blurb today from Atrios…
Deep Thought of the Day
Nobody could have predicted that it might not be such a good thing if the issuers of loans have little incentive to issue good loans.
-Atrios 09:27
There’s a big part of the problem right there. The other big part, is that the anti-government republicans are in charge, and they could be reliably counted on to look the other way while Wall Street went crazy with other people’s money.
I was scanning my server logs last night and saw someone had hit this post of mine with the Google search string "can’t pull out key mercedes". I hope their problem was as absent minded as mine was, or more charitably, that I’d forgotten how you park a car with an automatic transmission. (Hint: you put it in ‘Park’). But as I was scanning the Google hits on that string (my post was forth in the list), I got to thinking about the anti-theft technology in it the key itself.
I posted this shot of my new car’s key the night I made a deal with Valley Motors to buy it. I’m wondering how many others reading it had the same first impression I did when I first laid eyes on a Mercedes-Benz key… That’s a car key??? It’s more of a dongle then an actual key, which makes sense given where automobile anti-theft technology is going. The Honda had something in its key too, that the on board computer authenticated it with. But it was also an actual key, in that it had a ridged steel shank like most keys that moved tumblers of some sort in a lock you turned to actually start the car. Mercedes just took the next logical step and did away with the steel shank and tumbler lock part altogether.
I’ve wanted one of these cars ever since I was a teenager. But when I actually took mine home, I found myself stressing out every night about it getting stolen while I was asleep. I’d wake up at random moments and trudge over to a window and verify the car was still there. A small, but non-trivial reason why I’m not leaving the car at home and walking to work every morning like I normally do, is because I’m still a bit afraid to leave it alone. The neighborhood I live in has enough retirees in it that there are always a set of eyes somewhere keeping watch over things. But I still stress about it. A few months ago a small SUV was stolen from a guy just a few houses down from me. But he’d left his doors unlocked, and an expensive tool kit set in plain view. Still…I read about car thefts and attempted car thefts in the local police blotters for my district. Lately, I’ve actually started mapping them out to see where the car thieves are most active.
Mine isn’t the only expensive car in the neighborhood…there’s others scattered here and there, and if you count some of the the big SUVs and pickup trucks there are actually quite a few vehicles within a few blocks of mine costing at least as much if not more then Traveler did me. But a Mercedes sticks out. I didn’t buy it for that…I really wish it didn’t, but last Halloween I had several dads walking their kids around complement me on the car, and ask me if they could check it out inside. Of course I happily let them…I know the feeling, I had it myself for decades. I gave them the whole tour of the car. But afterwards it worried me that the car sticks out like that. It’s bound to attract the attention of car thieves.
I’ve found that the best cure for the worries is to learn as much as you can about what’s worrying you. So that Google hit prompted me to do something I’ve been meaning to do, to ease my worries a tad about someone making off with my new car in the middle of the night. I started looking around for information about the anti-theft technology Mercedes is using now. In the process, I got a bit of an education about modern automobile smart, or "VATS" keys.
The GM system, for example, uses a set of fifteen different precision resistance chips that can be embedded in a key. The onboard computer knows which resistive value is supposed to work on its car and if you put a key with the wrong resistance chip in it in the ignition lock, the car cuts off fuel to the engine and starts a four minute clock that prevents the car from starting even if you insert a key with the right chip in it. Ford on the other hand, uses a small transponder embedded in the key that transmits a code to the on board computer. Some Japanese automakers use set of passcodes between the key and the car that rotate each time the car is started.
I was gratified to learn that Mercedes-Benz has a key so complicated it requires its own set of instructions. Sometimes complexity is a good thing. The moment you insert the key in the ignition a dialogue takes place between it and the on board computer, and the key’s digital passcode is verified and a new randomly generated passcode is assigned to it by the computer.
At that point, the steering wheel and ignition systems are unlocked and the car is made ready to start when you turn the key. I can hear the steering wheel being unlocked the moment I insert the key in the switch, as well as other very faint, gentle whirring sounds coming from somewhere inside the dash that I’m assuming have something to do with the climate control system powering up. So even before I turn the ignition on and proceed to start the car, it already knows that a valid key is in the switch and its unlocking things and starting up other things. It also grabs hold of the key slightly…not so much that you can’t pull it right back out again, but enough to make that something you have to deliberately do. And the moment you pull the key back out the steering wheel re-locks and the faint whirring sounds stop. So the car is, in a sense, unlocked and switched on the moment you insert what it determines is a valid key for that car.
My car came with two keys…I’m not sure if there is an upper limit on the number of keys you can assign to an individual car…but the on board computer keeps track of the keys that belong to that car, and which passcodes it has randomly assigned to what keys. There’s a set of button batteries in each key that are user replaceable. Not sure what happens to the passcode a key has when its battery dies, but hopefully its kept in some sort of flash memory.
Other luxury car makers such as BMW also use this system, but Mercedes is unique apparently in that it did away with the steel shank portion of the key altogether. Given the technology being used here, the shank part is now a tad redundant. You can probably expect to see steel shanked keys slowly disappear from cars altogether as the on board computer takes on more and more responsibility for preventing theft.
Hence, the current popularity of car jacking. If car thieves have to have the key in order to steal the car, then obviously they’re gonna try and get the key. Usually that means getting it away from you. So now I can rest a tad easier about the chances of my car getting stolen when I go to bed at night, or when I’m away from it. On the other hand, now I have to worry more about dealing with a car thief face to face. Ah well. This was why I was bullied so badly in junior high school…so I could grow eyes in the back of my head for thugs…
Thoughts that crossed my mind as I was doing lawn work this morning….
Even if your property consists merely of 1 tenth of 1 percent of 1quarter of 1 acre, nine-tenths of your work around the house will consist of biomass control.
Ivy must come from some other planet. It grows even in a drought. The rest of your lawn could be dead, it could be turning to dust, and the ivy will still be growing. And it always grows in the direction you don’t want it growing toward, and will reliably ignore the territory you are willing to let it have.
Adjusting the anti-squirrel defenses on your bird feeders only raises the intelligence level of the neighborhood squirrels. You are not keeping them away from your feeders, you are training them to solve complex problems.
[Update…]
Bird spit is amazing stuff. That’s Spit, not Shit. Bird SPIT. Ever wonder how those tiny little nests made of nothing but small sticks and twigs manage to stay intact during a thunder storm? It’s the damn spit they use to hold everything together. The barn swallow nests in the parking garage at the Institute are amazing things…tacked literally on the concrete walls by nothing more then dirt and swallow spit. Never mind bird droppings, try cleaning a bunch of old seeds all stuck together by bird spit off the bottom of your bird feeders. It’s Work! If humans could spit glue like birds, we’d probably never have invented nails.
A traveling collection of liturgical stoles will grow by one during its stop in the Toledo area this weekend.
Each of the 1,100 stoles represents a person in one of 26 Christian denominations who was either banned from ministry for their sexual orientation or who feels too threatened to publicly acknowledge that they are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
The exhibit, called the Shower of Stoles Project, started in 1995 as a "witness of faith" by the Rev. Martha Juillerat, a Presbyterian minister in rural Missouri whose career ended after openly acknowledging she was a lesbian.
The local addition to the stole project is from the Rev. Michelle Stecker, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the only cleric in the local presbytery, or regional body, to openly acknowledge she is a lesbian. A second minister was to donate a stole but changed her mind at the last minute.
Although Ms. Stecker remains ordained and in good standing with the denomination, she said she cannot get an assignment because churches are wary of defying the denomination’s ban on gay clerics.
"Since coming out in the media in 2004, there’s no way that a Presbyterian church would call me right now," Ms. Stecker said from Chicago, where she is working for a nonprofit organization. "I know God called me to be a minister, but when I finally realized I had to speak out on social justice issues, I knew it was the end.
"It’s been very sad for me," she said. "I’ve lost my livelihood. I mourn that loss and continue to mourn that loss. I’ve had to retrain for a new profession and I’m starting all over again."
The Shower of Stoles Project will be on display from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. today [This article ran on Saturday November 3rd in the Toledo Blade. -Bruce] in the Wintergarden of the Main Branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, with members of the local clergy on hand to answer any questions.
"We wanted to have it in a public place where people might just stumble across it, not just those who were planning to see it," said the Rev. Cheri Holdridge, pastor of Central United Methodist Church.
After the library display, the collection will be divided up and stoles will be displayed in 16 churches in northwest Ohio, including those belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist, Unity, Episcopal, and Presbyterian Church (USA) denominations.
Ms. Holdridge said the number of churches participating this year is encouraging to people who support the ordination of gays and lesbians. The last time the exhibit came to town, in 2001, only three churches were willing to display the stoles.
"At least we’re making progress," she said. "Central [United Methodist] is on the far edge of being totally accepting. A gay couple can walk in and breathe a sigh of relief and know they can be themselves, but there are more churches at least trying to be welcoming."
Trying. Trying. Trying. Amazing isn’t it, how the simplest most innocuous of words can have such a bitter aftertaste in the mouth…
I’m still trying to figure out what the separate little compartment just ahead of the armrest compartment is for. It’s about the size of a pack of cards, but a tad thicker It’s a bit too short for my iPod or iPhone, and I doubt most other cell phones would fit in it either. But it’s just right I think, to hold a pack of cigarettes. The car has a real ash tray and cigarette lighter in it…a thing that most other car makers are phasing out now it looks like. Are Germans that obsessive smokers that they put compartments in their automobiles specifically to hold their cigarette packs?
Someone calling themselves Mrs du Toit responds to my post yesterday on the Nazification Of The Western Male. I’ve no way of establishing the authenticity of the commenter, but I reply back in the comments.
So I’m out of the break-in period, and taking the car a little more and more into its upper ranges. Bear in mind that for years, decades, I’ve been a stick driver and absolutely hated automatics. Also, that I’ve never owned a car with anything under the hood that could even remotely be called a high performance engine.
I’ve finally encountered the issue people are complaining about out there, with the new seven speed automatic down shifting too aggressively. But I’ve been taking Traveler slowly up and down the speedometer and tach and learning how it behaves and I think I know what the problem is. Most American drivers, especially drivers of my generation, learned on automatics that made you stomp down on the accelerator in order to down shift. You do that in this car and it will behave like it thinks you’re doing some kind of emergency maneuver and race down the gears when that’s not what you want. In this car, in normal driving, when you just want to rapidly pass someone or accelerate out of a situation, you don’t stomp down on the gas pedal. You have to back off your old habits a tad, learn to just firmly press the accelerator forward. The car will figure out what you want and down shift in a more normal manner. And then…trust me…that speedometer needle will climb like you won’t believe. The car won’t slam you back in your seat…it’s a luxury sedan not a Lamborghini…but the effect of the smooth urgency with which it takes you into loose-your-license territory is…amazing. At least to me. I guess that’s what high compression, plus variable valve timing does. Which is why it only drinks expensive premium gas. I’ve driven big V-8s that had less authority then this six. But they were 1970s V-8s. I can’t imagine what the engines Mercedes puts in its S class cars nowadays must feel like. Anyway…the transmission will behave itself, but you need a calm foot on the pedal. You don’t stomp the pedal down. Just ask it politely. It’ll deliver.
I’ve never owned a car before, that was actually and seriously designed to be driven at speeds above 100 miles per hour, and taking Traveler up the speedometer makes me feel like I’m suddenly in a completely different world now. The car is way too comfortable for my own good at speeds well in excess of anything you’re legally allowed to drive on any highway in the lower 48. You know you’re going fast, it just doesn’t feel like you’re driving beyond the limits of the car, or even close. Road noise is minimal, the car doesn’t feel squirrelly, but tight on the road and perfectly, happily content. If anything, it feels like it’s waiting for me to ask it for more. That’s scary. I feel like I really need to take a course in high speed driving. There are places that offer it. Not that you’re supposed to be doing that on the highways, or that I plan on doing that. Even if it were legal, American driving habits would make an Autobahn here much, much too dangerous. But like Stan Lee said, with great power comes great responsibility. The tires may be rated for those speeds, but the driver isn’t. That’s a whole different kind of driving. I need to learn it.
I’m getting a tad over 25 miles per gallon average. It’s not awful, but not great either. I’m used to getting in the low thirties, and that’s on regular. Now I have to buy premium and while my bill hasn’t skyrocketed, it’s something I have to pay attention to more now. Figure my total gasoline expenses have about doubled. But as work is just a mile down the road, even if I drove it all the time, which I don’t, my gas bill was never all that much to start with. Right now my usage is high because I’m still in new car love and I’m busy driving Traveler here and there after work just about every day, just for the shear pleasure of driving it as well as the practical matter of getting to know it. At some point that’ll taper off and then the big cost will be when I take it on road trips. This year my drive to Memphis, Topeka, Portland and Oceano and back cost me about $725 in gas. Double that isn’t an easy figure to swallow all in one go. So I have to make a point to save up for it. I put a hundred bucks or so every month into a road trip kitty and I can still do them. But I just can’t petty cash my gasoline anymore like I used to be able to. Now I have to pay attention to it. I have three savings accounts scattered here and there that I’ve just been putting random spare cash into. I’ll make one of these my road trip kitty and then just use it for road trip gas and miscellaneous expenses.
First, understand that there is no social security crisis. That’s a right wing scarecrow of the same substance as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. There is no crisis.
Which is not to say it couldn’t be shored up a tad. Fine. But Joshua Marshall has it exactly right about even opening up a discussion on that at the moment…
When it comes to the policy and number-crunching nitty-gritty of Social Security I’m definitely an amateur. But I think I’ve got a decent sense of the political-economy of the question. We need to remember that now and for at least a decade into the future Social Security is actually subsidizing the rest of the federal budget. The program brings in much more than it pays out. As we all remember from the voluble debates two years ago, the surplus is being used to buy US government bonds which go into the Trust Fund. And that socked away money will keep the program solvent through the middle of this century as the baby boomers retire, and revenues in no longer cover promised payments out.
We’ve been doing that for about a quarter of a century.
The problem on the political side of the equation is that the enemies of Social Security have spent a couple decades arguing that the Trust Fund doesn’t exist or that it is simply a bookkeeping device with no true financial meaning. If that’s true, it means that American workers have spent the last twenty-five years using their payroll taxes to subsidize general revenues and make it easier to float big tax cuts for upper-income earners without getting anything in return.
If we start pumping a lot more money into Social Security coffers now it will by definition go into more government bonds, which is another way of saying that it will go toward funding our current deficit spending. In fact it will enable more deficit spending and probably more upper-income tax cuts because it will make the consequences of both easier to hide.
If we want to push the buffer of the Trust Fund further out onto the horizon, then fiddle with payroll taxes when Social Security would need to start dipping into Trust Fund. In other words, in a decade or so. I see no reason why this approach doesn’t work just as nicely then as it would now.
As Paul Krugman noted in the interview I did with him a few weeks ago, the window of time we had to seriously pare down the national debt to prepare for the retirement of the baby-boomers is close to over. Still, though, our best way of ensuring the future health of Social Security is to stop running up the national debt now. So I’m very reluctant to put more payroll taxes in the pot while we’re still running big deficits because of the Bush tax cuts. The money will just go to subsidizing that irresponsible fiscal policy.
If there is any sense in which the ‘Trust Fund’ is not ‘real’ it is that it must be paid back from general revenues. And that will only be harder the more other debt we’re running up. So rather than solving the problem, I think we’re actually enabling it.
You gotta love the republicans. They’ve maneuvered the nation into a place now where any honest, good faith attempt to tweak improvements into the system can only make matters worse. Until they’re out of power, the best course is to not only do nothing, but to not even discuss doing anything.
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