Category: Rants

Rants about polit­ics or oth­er issues

Market Choice

Here’s a fas­cin­at­ing piece dis­cuss­ing how fixed prices on books in Ger­many was actu­ally push­ing prices down (con­trary to eco­nom­ic the­ory), while sup­port­ing a wide range of booksellers.

When I was last in Ger­many, apart from my usu­al beef about Ger­man book­sellers not tak­ing cred­it cards, I found no reas­on to com­plain about the range of books that was avail­able. Chil­dren’s books are more expens­ive than I’m used to here, but a lot of that is also because most chil­dren’s books are only avail­able in hard­back and thus inher­ently more expens­ive. Paper­backs seemed reas­on­ably priced in gen­er­al, and of good typo­graph­ic­al quality. 

Peter Brant­ley has some ques­tions at the end of his piece, which I think can be applied not only to books, but also tele­vi­sion, news, indeed many aspects of what is com­monly called “cul­ture”. When the mass media and mass enter­tain­ment industry are des­per­ately try­ing to increase rat­ings by cater­ing to the fads and whims of the mass mar­ket, is this a “race to the bot­tom” as has been pos­tu­lated? Is the long tail suf­fi­cient to enable people with diverse interests (and that’s all of us at some stage or anoth­er) to have those needs met, those itches scratched? How do people find those groups, if they don’t know what to look for? 

Choice is import­ant, know­ing that you have choices is even more import­ant. It’s a bit like free speech.

Musings on Copyright

I know why it happened, but it still strikes me as odd, the fact that the goal­posts kept mov­ing, as it were, with copy­right. And it’s weird no mat­ter wheth­er the copy­right is there to give oth­er people rights to use, copy and modi­fy the work, or rights to the author to pro­tect and profit from their work. In oth­er areas of the law, the gen­er­al rule is that what counts is the law at the time. It’s only illeg­al if it was illeg­al at the time the offence was com­mit­ted, for example (the major excep­tion being crimes against human­ity). Even pat­ents are val­id for a set peri­od of time, and com­pan­ies know how long that will be when they apply for the pat­ent (hence all the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al tricks with minor modi­fic­a­tions that they hope will be just enough to get a new pat­ent on). Only in copy­right, that I’m aware of, has it been the case that the peri­od of valid­ity has been so massively changed and applied ret­ro­act­ively. From 21 years (see His­tory of Copy­right to the death of the author plus 50–75 years, depend­ing on the coun­try you live in and some con­vo­luted depend­en­cies. And then there’s the fam­ous exten­sion by which Mickey Mouse would have been in the pub­lic domain by now, but won’t be for a while yet. 

It just seems odd to me, the fact that copy­right is the excep­tion to the gen­er­al rule. But maybe it just seems odd to me.

UPS Rip-Offs

I’ve writ­ten in this blog before about UPS and their broker­age fees. I just today had anoth­er example. I ordered some­thing from the U.S. (knit­ting gad­gets I haven’t found in stores in Canada) and the order was $US50. Works out to about $53 Cana­dian at cur­rent rates. The broker­age fee that UPS charged me to bring it into Canada was $29.55 plus GST. That plus the nor­mal GST of $6.85 (to which I have no objec­tion) brought the total charge to $38.18. On goods worth $52.73. When I called up UPS to ask what was going on, I was told that’s the fee. Noth­ing I can do about it. Except, of course, for mak­ing sure that I nev­er ship via UPS. Oh yes, I did email the seller of the goods to warn her of the prob­lem and ask her to not ship via UPS for her Cana­dian cus­tom­ers. And my loc­al ship­ping store, which used to be an MBE and is now a “UPS Store”, will suf­fer as well, since they have to use UPS to ship any­thing out­side of Canada (with­in Canada they still have some choice). Not that I ship a lot, but when I do, it won’t be UPS if I can pos­sibly avoid it.

If you want the gory details, they’re here. $19.45 fee, plus $4.25 COD fee, plus a $5.85 bond fee because I did­n’t pre­pay the broker­age fee. Adds up to $29.55.

Unthinking Sexism

When I was at uni­ver­sity in Auck­land, one guy said to me that he had­n’t real­ized he was sex­ist until he met me. I’ve always found dis­crim­in­a­tion based on the bio­lo­gic­al cap­ab­il­ity of bear­ing chil­dren to make about as much sense as dis­crim­in­a­tion based on eye col­our. It seems much of the world does­n’t agree, pre­fer­ring pre­judging abil­it­ies to the hard work of fig­ur­ing out real, rather than pre­sumed, cap­ab­il­it­ies. A lot of dis­crim­in­a­tion is simply not think­ing, accept­ing the movie or tele­vi­sion view of the world and the roles that women and men (or for that mat­ter, people not of west­ern european extrac­tion) have in it.

There’s quite a lot of sex­ism in tech­no­logy. One woman I know hates start­ing a new job, since, as she says, it takes six months to con­vince the guys I know how to turn on the light. Shelagh Cal­la­han told me of an exper­i­ence she had doing booth duty at a con­fer­ence. She was start­ing to explain some­thing to this guy when he inter­rup­ted her, said she did­n’t know enough and he knew Dr Cal­la­han, the lead­ing expert on this top­ic, and he (Dr Cal­la­han) had a dif­fer­ent opin­ion. At which someone stand­ing next to him sug­ges­ted he look at Shelagh’s name badge. I’ve had my fair share of con­des­cend­ing males assume I would­n’t under­stand what they’re talk­ing about or be able to con­trib­ute any­thing of value to a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion. One could argue that most women would­n’t under­stand a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion, but that’s no excuse for the assumption. 

Of course, this prob­lem isn’t lim­ited to tech­no­logy. A female law­yer friend of mine takes some pains to dress dif­fer­ently to the way sec­ret­ar­ies dress, for example, so it’s clear she’s a law­yer and not a sec­ret­ary. She says it’s been inter­est­ing watch­ing the devel­op­ment of some men, who at uni­ver­sity assumed every­one was a pro­fes­sion­al and treated them all equally, but once out in the leg­al work­force star­ted treat­ing men and women dif­fer­ently, assum­ing women were sec­ret­ar­ies and men were law­yers. With the large num­ber of women gradu­at­ing from law school these days that should change. Wheth­er the prac­tice of push­ing women law­yers off into fam­ily court (“you’re so good at being under­stand­ing”) where they earn less than crim­in­al court law­yers changes soon is an inter­est­ing question.

There are lots of aspects to sex­ism, quite a few where people don’t under­stand why I find them irrit­at­ing, or even upset­ting. As an example, send­ing mail addressed to Mr and Mrs {hus­band’s name}. Hav­ing people assume mar­ried people share a sur­name is not unreas­on­able, but assum­ing we also share a first name is. To me it smacks of Vic­tori­an-era treat­ment of women, where they were an append­age of the hus­band, not beings with sep­ar­ate iden­tit­ies. I guess it seems petty to worry about these sorts of things when women in so many coun­tries have it so much worse, but on the oth­er hand sex­ism cre­ates an envir­on­ment that is not wel­com­ing. If you don’t feel your pres­ence is val­ued in a soci­ety, then you’re not going to be a full part of that society.

Shipping to Canada

I see Dave Shea has been explain­ing why he does­n’t typ­ic­ally order goods online; I’ve ordered lots of goods online and had mixed exper­i­ences. I usu­ally only buy online if 1) I can­’t find what I’m look­ing for loc­ally, or 2) it’s sub­stan­tially cheap­er than buy­ing loc­ally. I also make sure of war­ranty implic­a­tions for any­thing I buy that might need one (e.g., my Tung­sten).

I tend to give the nod to Cana­dian retail­ers because of the hassles Dave talks about and also because I like to sup­port loc­al or semi-loc­al small busi­nesses (although I have bought enough at Amazon that the reg­u­lar “you might be inter­ested in” emails give a remark­ably con­son­ant view into my cur­rent interests). I buy books at Amazon.com if I’m not in a hurry to get them and if they’re cheap­er, includ­ing ship­ping, than buy­ing the same books loc­ally. This is often the case right now since books have the price prin­ted on the back, and the Cana­dian dol­lar is cur­rently worth quite a lot more com­pared to the US dol­lar than when lots of the books were printed. 

Although I haven’t had any­thing shipped by them for some time, I agree with Derek Miller, who advises avoid­ing UPS if at all pos­sible; I’ve found UPS in the past to be very quick to charge double fees if two boxes in the same ship­ment are labelled with the total (they charge as if each box had the total value). What I do to try to get around that prob­lem is to either call or email the place I’m order­ing from if I think there’s a chance they might put things into more than one box, and dis­cuss the issue with them. The res­ult is that I haven’t had that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for a few years now. Com­pan­ies that don’t answer the phone or email don’t get my custom.

Recent exper­i­ences that I’ve had with order­ing from out­side Canada:

  • books from a couple of small retail­ers in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
  • two baby slings hand-made by a small retail­er in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
  • quite a few books from Amazon.de com­ing through Canada Post: charged GST and asso­ci­ated oth­er fees about half the time
  • books from Amazon.com com­ing via Canada Post: occa­sion­ally charged GST etc. If you request pri­or­ity ship­ping, Amazon col­lects an Import Fees Depos­it to cov­er the vari­ous charges (I guess to save time in delivery)
  • buy­ing a humid­i­fi­er from Venta Air­wash­er: this is a longer story. I called up to order rather than using the web­site, to dis­cuss the deliv­ery issues. They charged me GST and when I said I found that odd since they’re a US store, they assured me everything would be fine. And to call back and let them know if it was­n’t. Sure enough, the humid­i­fi­er (great humid­i­fi­er, BTW) showed up with no extra charges and I was pleas­antly sur­prised. Until the bill from Fed­ex arrived in the mail a week later. I called the com­pany, com­plained, they said they’d take care of it, I called Fed­ex to tell them what was hap­pen­ing, did­n’t pay the bill, and haven’t heard any­thing in the year since, so I assume Venta did take care of it.

In the unex­pec­ted-but-in-the-end-ok cat­egory: I ordered a DVD from BBC Canada, and was charged the nor­mal GST etc. The prob­lem here was that they shipped the DVD from the US, and Canada Post promptly charged me $12 for GST, duties, etc., des­pite the envel­ope hav­ing a “GST paid” stamp on it. I called BBC Canada to com­plain and they cred­ited my cred­it card with the $12. I hope they got the money back from Rev­en­ue Canada; at least I did­n’t have to pay.

Liquid Matters

I see from the TSA web­site that we’re now allowed small quant­it­ies of liquids on board flights in the U.S.A., and I assume oth­er coun­tries will also start allow­ing these items. And knit­ting needles and books are still allowed, so we’ll have some­thing to do on the flights. The thought of a long flight to Aus­tralia or Europe with noth­ing to do was not pleasant…

And you can now buy cans of drink again in the secure board­ing areas. I nev­er under­stood that par­tic­u­lar ban, I must admit. If you think about it, who­ever decided on that ban ascribed an abil­ity to plan and execute that far exceeds any­thing any­one is likely to pull off without being found out some­where along the way. To get some sort of liquid explos­ive into a can of soft drink (pop) in a vend­ing machine in the secure area would be hard enough, but then mak­ing sure the right per­son gets to that par­tic­u­lar can without any­body else acci­dent­ally get­ting in first seems impossible to me, if you pos­tu­late that the per­son who is meant to get the can has to act nor­mal so as not to attract atten­tion. And then mak­ing sure the can does­n’t leak at any stage, par­tic­u­larly when it goes thump into the tray… Over­all I think the risk of someone mak­ing a bomb out of ingredi­ents passed along in that way is infin­ites­im­al. Any­one that organ­ized would choose oth­er, easi­er meth­ods. Bruce Schnei­er calls this secur­ity theat­er; his blog should be required read­ing for whomever sets the rules as well as those hav­ing to carry them out. For the rest of us, par­tic­u­larly those sub­ject to the rules, his art­icles show clear think­ing. For example, this piece dis­cuss­ing the air­plane secur­ity meas­ures and how the Lon­don ter­ror­ists who star­ted the liquids scare were appre­hen­ded. Highly recom­men­ded reading.