Month: December 2016

Jerry Pournelle:

I wish I could return all my Apple devices for refunds. Actually, that isn’t true; I like my Apple iPhone 6, and I’ll keep it; but the iPad is far more trouble than it’s worth, and the MacBook Pro, while useful, suffers from the same security mania that makes the iPad useless. I can’t even install free apps on the iPad. I tell it to install; it asks for my Apple account password; I go find that and mistype it, but eventually I get it right; whereupon it tells ,me it has sent a security number to a trusted device. I go looking for trusted devices. Naturally they have to be Apple. Eventually I remember that the iPhone is an Apple device and I trust it, and lo! I find there is a message with a code number. I type that into the iPad. It is rejected. I try again. Still rejected.

I give up. I have an iPad with almost no apps because it takes all afternoon and another Apple device to get an app for it, and that doesn’t work because – I don’t know why. It took me a while to figure out that the trusted device was the iPhone; could the delay be it.? I suppose I will have to go to the Apple Store and see if anyone can fix this, but at this season that’s not a practical thing to do, and I’m not really all that mobile at my age anyway.

I thought the Surface Pro was a fussbudget and it is, but it’s got to be better than having to own two Apple devices before you can use one of them, and then having them send you a security number that doesn’t work, with no instruction as to what to do next. Congratulations. My iPad is now so secure I can’t use it, and I don’t know what to do next.

My iPad insisted on updating to iOS 10.2 last night, so I let it.  And I think I know where Jerry’s problem might have arisen.

Apple has been insisting for several updates that 2-factor verification should be used to protect your Apple ID.  That’s all well and good if you have multiple iOS devices (as Jerry points out), but I don’t even have an iPhone (and don’t want one, thanks anyway).

I have one iPad Air 2.  I use it for little more than amusement.  I am not going to futz about with 2-factor verification for a fucking toy, particularly if it requires me to own a fucking iPhone.

But what Jerry must have missed when iOS came back from upgrading was that you can actually abort the implementation of 2-factor verification.  The link is getting smaller and less intuitive and may eventually go away, but they ARE giving you a choice (for now, and I suspect they will have to always give you a choice, because they don’t control your choice of other devices).

While I know there are plenty of hackers out there who would love to get control of my iPad (yeah, OK, I’m gonna snicker here for a moment), the fact is that I do use a very strong password for my Apple ID.  It’s got all the bells and whistles recommended for strong passwords, and I have no trouble remembering it.  If I were using “password” for a password, yeah, maybe 2-factor verification would be a good thing.  But unlike casual users, I don’t futz around with weak passwords.

So I just tell Apple “no”.  Maybe someday I’ll have a use case for that, but right now, I don’t.

Comment on Facebook

Chanukah kind of amuses me.

It’s only in the last century, and I would actually say within the last 60-70 years, that it has attained faux equivalence with Christmas.  It is a celebration of a military victory by a group of insurgent native terrorists, based on a non-Biblical, non-canonical book (it appears only in the Catholic Bible) that claims a miracle occurred when the Maccabees (the native terrorists) defeated the Syrian Greeks who’d defiled their Temple, and took Jerusalem back from them.  It is actually unlike almost any other well-known Jewish holiday in that regard.

It is perhaps an indicator of how well-assimilated Jews have become in American culture, and particularly since the Second World War, that Chanukah is accorded that faux equivalence mentioned above.  It is simply not an important holiday.  It is rabbinic rather than Biblical in origin (also as noted above) and so far as I can surmise, it just gave Jews something to do in an otherwise blank section of the liturgical calendar.*

Jews in America — particularly Reform Jews — have long been concerned about the rate of assimilation and the “threat” (scare quotes intended) of the Religious Right and (rightly or wrongly) perceived attempts to convert young Jews to Christianity.  Indeed, in the 1980’s, this was an expressed concern of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union of Reform Judaism) in biennial conference assembled.**  We literally were handed half-inch tomes full of information about how to combat the Religious Right, and curricula for same for our religious schools (I taught religious school at the time).

It was insanity.

But one way to combat the Christians talking our young’uns into marrying nice Christian girls and boys and converting (or becoming non-affiliated) as a result was to emphasize Chanukah as the holiday Jews celebrated instead of Christmas.  And yeah, the Christian kids used to be a little jealous of the fact that we got presents for eight nights instead of just one day.  But what they didn’t realize was that most of us got little stuff for seven days (like the little bags of chocolate coins, or practical things like a package of #2 pencils for school, or socks, or whatever; my sister might get strings for her guitar) and only one big thing, like they got on Christmas.  Certainly in MY family we didn’t get anything particularly expensive — we were lower middle class at best.

There’s an old SF book by Isidore Haiblum called The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders that has this great exchange in it:

I turned to the native who’d addressed us.  “Mattathias around here somewhere?” I asked, casually.

“Yeah,” the native said, “you bet, buddy; he wouldn’t miss this for the world.  He’s the old party with the long white whiskers over there.  The one with the smile on his kisser.”

“He’s getting set to wreak a terrible vengeance,” Kittelman said.  “Ever hear of Hanukkah, Tsaddik?”

The Tsaddik shook his head.  “Is it something to eat?” he asked.

The Tsaddik, you understand, is from a shtetl in Poland that’s kept constantly in the year 1452.  He would have known about the events and the miracle, and the fact that the rabbis ordained a festival to commemorate it, but not about the holiday we today call Chanukah, which probably wasn’t called “Chanukah” at that point (since the word “Chanukah” only means “Rededication” and not “Let’s celebrate because we kicked some Syrian Greek ass and the Temple menorah burned eight days on one day’s worth of oil”).  (It should be noted that, a little later in the chapter, he reacts when Antiochus Epiphanes is mentioned by name:  “Ach!  You mean that terrible tyrant?”  So yeah, he knows.)

And that’s pretty much how Chanukah came down to us until pretty much modern times.

So I don’t care if you say “Happy Chanukah” or “Seasons Greetings” or even “Merry Christmas”.  The point is, it’s a festive season and no matter what the greeting, people ought to just smile and nod and respond in a like manner.  I’ll probably say “Merry Christmas” because, doggone it, that’s what most of the people I know — including half of my family — would say.

The jerks who can’t deal with that?  More pity to them if they can’t find any reason in the season.

___________________

* The next holiday is Purim, in March, another minor rabbinic holiday that has at least some canonical basis, given that it recounts the events in the Book of Esther from the Ketuvim, the third section of the Hebrew Bible.  Winter is kind of sparse when it comes to Jewish holidays.

** I was a congregational delegate to the 1987 and 1989 editions.

Comment on Facebook

Even after 52 years of legislated equality, African-Americans like to throw their struggle in our faces with the words, “Walk a mile in my shoes.”

And an African-American did that on the timeline of one of my Facebook friends today, in the process of calling Dr. Ben Carson a token.

Back in the 1990’s, I heard that phrase a lot from my African-American boss.  Who, at that time, had lived half her life since the Civil Rights Act was passed.  In her defense, she was from Muncie, Indiana, which, like Kokomo, wasn’t exactly known as a Klan-free environment, even in the 1990’s.

But the phrase strikes me as disingenuous.  Historical research suggests that the black family in America was a lot better off before the Civil Rights Act than after, regardless of segregation issues (and of course, schools were famously desegregated in 1954 by federal fiat).  The Great Society of LBJ did finally end up turning blacks to the Democrat side, when for nearly a century they had been, by and large, staunch Republicans.*  But what blacks didn’t know at the time was what destruction the Great Society would wreak on them, both as individuals and as families.

Yet even after that destruction had become baldly apparent, African-Americans continued to vote for Democrats and the “free” handouts they promised (otherwise known as “entitlements”).  All of which were paid for by the people who actually paid taxes, like my mother and father, and later myself.  Thousands of dollars (from our standpoint; billions, in total) hoovered out of the wallets of white folks like us whose families had nothing to do with the discrimination blacks had faced since the end of slavery; whose families had never held slaves, either because we were Northerners who didn’t need slaves to make our crop (and who found the entire institution of slavery abhorrent), or because our families were newcomers to these shores long after the entire slavery question was decided (and who faced our own brand of discrimination because we dressed funny and didn’t speak English and weren’t WASPs).

The problem was, the entire War on Poverty waged as part of the Great Society simply spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money for nothing.  Well, OK, not nothing.  It bulldozed middling-poor neighborhoods full of perfectly good homes to build concrete high-rise “projects” that became little more than warehouses for single black mothers and their broods of multi-fathered children, it engendered the epidemic drug abuse problem we have been fighting alongside it for fifty years, it fostered crime among young black males who dropped out of lousy schools and could not find jobs, and it created slums worse than the ghetto it had replaced.

And blacks kept voting for the Great Society and the War on Poverty, election after election.  They’re still voting for it, even now, when it’s clear that the Great Society has been little more than a 22-trillion-dollar failure.  But that’s OK — they’re not paying for it.

I am.  My wife is.  My sister and her husband are.  My mother and step-father are.  My in-laws, my cousins, my friends — every one I know who pays taxes is still pouring billions of dollars annually that super-massive singularity** of failure.  Some of it is our actual tax money.  Most of it is probably borrowed from the Chinese.  It’s creating a debt that will take centuries to pay off, if in fact it ever is.

And blacks still make noise about “reparations” for slavery.  “Walk a mile in my shoes.”

Dude, guess what.  Don’t you even dare tell me I need to walk in your shoes until you walk in MY shoes, and see with MY eyes, what a horror has been perpetrated*** on your people at the expense of mine,

_____________________

* Remember, it was Democrats who a) were pro-slavery, b) started the Civil War and were responsible for the destruction of the South, c) were responsible for Jim Crow, and d) opposed the Civil Rights Act in the first place.

** I was going to write “black hole” but reconsidered.

*** I had originally written “perpetuated”, and posted it that way.  Not so sure if that was a genuine typo or if it was a Freudian slip.

Comment on Facebook

So the WSJ this morning has this big picture of a boulder with brass plaque on it that says “FIDEL”.  This plaque is apparently the door to the crypt inside the rock where his ashes are.

But when I first saw the picture, the first thing that occurred to me was, “So they buried the slug in the same place they found him:  Under a rock.”

Hopefully Raul will join him there in the near future.  There’s still 26 days left in 2016, after all.  One can dream.

Instapundit points out a Forbes article (warning, annoying adblock resistance) this morning indicating that “Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide”.

Which you kinda have to take with a grain of salt, if you read this article in Fortune from just over a year ago that kind of laughs it off as a stunt, saying that 70% of McDonalds’ business is done at the drive-through, where the kiosk is useless.

So the truth is somewhere in the middle, it seems.

Fortune says that “Implementing these kiosks is expected to cost franchisees between $120,000 and $160,000.  Quite an expense considering its limited advantage.”

Well, first of all, I certainly hope a McDonald’s restaurant can afford a one-time cost at that level, because if it can’t, it’s nearly out of business anyway.  But let’s think about the cost of an employee to McDonald’s.  I don’t eat there, so I don’t know or care if they’re open 24/7 or not, but let’s assume a 24 hour restaurant that needs a cashier all 24 of those hours.*  At $15 an hour, you’re talking $360/day in wages.  But that doesn’t count the employer’s part of FICA, or insurance, or uniforms, or unemployment/workman’s compensation, vacation, sick time,** etc., etc., ad nauseum.  So let’s just double that, because we probably won’t be very far off.  $720/day to keep a cash register manned (well, and do whatever else a fast-food cashier does, which can be quite a lot).

That’s $262,800 per year.  For someone (or more likely, several someones, because a) these aren’t full-time jobs and b) we’re talking three shifts/day) making $15/hour.

So if a restaurant eliminates ONE employee (or really three employees, because you’re eliminating that employee across three shifts, but I digress) because of the kiosks, they’ve already paid for the system to be installed.  And moreover, the system doesn’t require a paycheck, or any of the other employer expenses noted above.  Sure, it may fail and require a techie to fix it, or replace a part, or whatever, and sure, there are going to be ongoing maintenance and support expenses.  But they’re probably a fraction of what the employees they’re replacing would cost at $15/hour (or in fairness, closer to $30/hour as we’ve shown above).

It seems to me that even if only 30% of the business is being done at the counter, the savings involved in eliminating one cashier position (and remember, that may be three or more actual employees) still outweighs the cost of the new equipment.  If you run three positions during peak hours, and the kiosks allow you to cut that back to two or even one, you’re still saving money, and you will continue to save money assuming the usual five-year amortization of the equipment.

The alternative, of course, would be for employees to understand that their entry-level jobs are simply not worth $15/hour.  It’s always nice to dream, but the fact is, most dreams are pretty much just fantasy.  Unfortunately I suspect restaurants are already heading down the slippery robot slope that grocery and other big-box stores like Home Depot have already been driving down for the past decade.***

Businessmen will say, “It’s just business.”  And they’re right.  They want to stay in business, and they will cut costs wherever they have to in order to do that.

As a result, current liberal arts students should be on notice that their post-college jobs (the ones where they ask “do you want fries with that?”) are probably in jeopardy.  They may want to consider a different major.  Or maybe welding school.

____________________

* If it makes you happy, I know that White Castle and Steak n Shake are both open 24/7, so feel free to slot them in instead of McDonald’s.

** Vacation and sick time are either going to double cost for the worker’s shift (because of having to slot someone else in to cover) or drop efficiency because the restaurant will be short-handed.  So there is definitely a cost over and above regular payroll for that sort of time.

*** Kroger, for instance, has self-checkout kiosks, and they have them for a reason:  They’re unionized, and unionized cashiers are expensive.  So they put up (at least in our local Kroger) six kiosks and assign one cashier to oversee them.  Makes perfect sense to me.

Comment on Facebook