Author Archives: anachostic - Page 10

The Absurdity Of Auctions

Posted by anachostic on August 22, 2020 No comments

eBay. There’s nothing else quite like it. Which is probably for the best. Although monopolies are bad, it would actually be worse for everyone if there were multiple auction sites. It benefits both the buyers and sellers to have consolidation and concentration.

But anyway, I do like auctions, both as a buyer and seller. As a seller, I prefer to use an auction in cases where a) I don’t really care about the item being sold. That is, the trash is just as good as selling it. And b) when I don’t have any idea of what it’s worth. I’m fine with letting the market decide.

As a buyer, I like auctions because I very rarely lose at them. And that is where the focus of the absurdity in the title is from. There are people, still, who do not know how to effectively win an auction. It’s not that hard. The only thing that should stop you is someone who is willing to pay more. And that is the only time I lose, and I am not a sore loser at all in those cases, because I would not pay what the winner paid.

Here’s stage one of bidder dumbness. Making the first bid and that’s it. Or making one of the first bids and that’s it. These happen early in the listing’s lifetime. The auctions I participate in are for collector-grade CDs, so that’s going to be my references. Apologies to those who don’t really understand. So you have a lot of 10 CDs that’s ending in 6 days and you can generally assume each CD would fetch at least $5 individually. So you can predict the final price is going to be north of $50. These people who bid $1, $3, $4.45, and nudge the price up are doing themselves no favors. They are helping the seller, though. If the number of bids (albeit tiny) gets high enough, the listing is considered hot or popular and gets a little extra promotion. But the fact they expect they are going to win and never do any follow-up bids is just dumb.

In reality, auctions really are 6 days of waiting and 1 minute of real bidding. Today I was wondering if there could be a format that could exploit that design. Maybe I’ll write something up later. But yeah, everything leading up to that last minute is just play. The people that really want the item are going to be lurking and will jump in at the end. And most, if they are smart (like me), will not have made their presence known through "Watching" the listing or making a previous bid.

The second stage of bidder dumbness is not using eBay’s Max bid feature. Ideally, you should only make one bid on an auction. You should know exactly how much you are willing to pay and stick to it. Why people don’t use this confuses me. Maybe they think there’s a way to make your bid jump to the max right away? I’ve seen this in live auctions with absentee bids and it infuriates me. "We have an absentee bid of $10. Who’ll start the bidding at $11?" But eBay doesn’t work that way.

Let me explain my technique in opposition to how the other bidders operated. In this most recent case, I returned to the auction with 15 minutes to go, and the current bid was $60. So I was correct about the price ending north of $50. I didn’t visit the listing at all since I found it and I put the listing close time in Outlook to be reminded instead of using eBay’s "Watch" feature. As an aside, what I do use the Watch feature for is to get a better deal on Buy It Now items. If you Watch an item, eBay will sometimes send an email to the seller saying someone is watching the item and you should try to close the deal by offering them a special price. If the seller is motivated, then I get an email saying I can buy the item at this new, lower price, which in most every case, I accept.

Back to the auction. It’s at $60, 15 mins left, and has 20 bids. I scan the bids and I see the dumb initial bids that can be ignored. Looking at the last bidders, there are 2 active, interested bidders that I will have to compete with. I can see that one started at $40 and was currently the leader at $60. He had clearly set a Max bid and was automatically outbidding the other person as they increased their bids. Now, was $60 his actual max bid or was it higher? No way to tell yet.

As time ticked down, the price changed to $61. A new bidder has joined in. This exposed that the previous high bidder’s max was $60 and exposed another dumb bidder move – bidding in round, even numbers. I’ll explain that when I bid, but time is still ticking. It’s silent until 20 seconds left to go. That’s when I make my move.

I place a bid for $86.80. The most I’m willing to pay for this lot is $85, and the extra $1.80 protects me from anyone who tries to bid (or had a max bid) right at $85, a fairly round, even number. I’ll explain that here. First, the new bidder is shown to have a max bid of $65. I beat him with my max bid. I’m leading at $66. The former high bidder jumps in and shows his ignorance. He makes a bid, which is outbid by my max, then bids again and is outbid again. The new bidder tries to get in a bid in the final second, but is outbid by my max. I win the auction.

So let’s review those final seconds. Both of those bidders were not committed to their max price. They kept upping it as they went. This probably really hurt them to lose this auction because they kept making sacrifices to their commitment. But also from a practical standpoint, every bid they fail to make, they have to make a new bid. That is valuable time they are losing. We’re in the final 20 seconds of the auction. There’s no time to make mistakes like that. That is why I bid odd amounts. If I automatically outbid someone by 80 cents, they lose the same amount of time as if I outbid them by $20. It’s just one extra delay for a small amount of insurance.

And the guy who bid in the last second? Again, he didn’t have a max bid in mind. There’s no time to evaluate, "Am I willing to pay more" when you’re down to seconds. So he bid a max of $65 earlier, then made his last pitch at $77. That last bid was smart, as the current bid at the time was $74. If my max had been at $75 (a round number) and I was outbid, I might have rebid by the minimum $1 increment, which he would have automatically outbid and made me lose time. But it wasn’t to be. I won the auction at $78, a price under my max of $85 and only $1 more than the other bidder.

So my strategy boils down to only a few points. Stay quiet, bid late, bid once, bid with enough buffer to delay minimum upbidders, and use an odd bid amount to possibly get one extra delay in. Go win some shit now.

Is Isolationism Spreading?

Posted by anachostic on August 13, 2020 No comments

In any other year, I would have simply rolled my eyes. But in the current sociopolitical climate, the message raised my eyebrows.

I have had a hard time finding an online home. Online forums are full of nothing but toxic and bitter people. Everywhere you go, you run into people who just can’t help themselves from cutting other people down for whatever reason. The anonymity of the Internet gives them the power to do so without recourse. I’ve wondered more and more lately if it was a good thing to make the internet accessible to all.

So, I had been settled into a new forum. It had a very, very strict rule about not bringing up politics or religion in any way. While that boundary was pushed occasionally, it was a line no one stepped over. And the forum seemed to thrive for it. There was some bickering over tastes and preferences, but that goes with my previous observation about general Internet usage.

This particular forum has no advertising and runs an annual donation drive for its expenses. Maybe a little unusual, but it seems to have been working for a long time. I did donate last year, maybe $20. This year, I don’t know. As ironic as it was, a pinned message was posted just above the pinned message for the donation drive with a new order from the owner.

The order was: if you are going to write a review for others to read, you must publish the review in the forum. You may not link to a review posted on your personal blog. If you do, the post will be flagged as spam and removed. If you continue to do it, your account will be closed.

I can’t really express the feelings I got when I read that. Maybe it doesn’t sound as bad here, where I’ve paraphrased it, but the literal words that punched me in the gut were, "directing us away from the forum".

Let me start on the positive. I sort of understand. This is a very popular forum. I suppose the owner would not want people simply joining his site and taking advantage of a large audience to get some ad revenue and traffic to their own site. Maybe that feeling is amplified because the owner doesn’t have advertising of his own, so why should others get the benefits of his site’s popularity? And also, he didn’t specifically say you couldn’t copy your personal work into a post on his forum, because well, that’s what a forum is. He’s not demanding exclusivity (unlike those fuckers at AlbumArtExchange).

So then, where’s my problem with it? It’s that wording. Posting a link isn’t taking any traffic away from you. They have links set up properly where they always open in a new tab – you aren’t losing your place. Second, this is the way of the Internet. It’s how it was conceived and how it should be. You link to related and relevant content. You don’t try to be authoritative for everything. Yahoo and AOL tried that and look how it worked for them. The Internet is meant to be open and free and exploratory. It’s not healthy to stay stuck in one place and get all your information from one site. Some leaders are attempting that now and look how well it’s working for them. Actually, don’t look at how well that’s working. Look at the consequences of how well that’s working.

"Don’t leave" is never a good thing to hear from someone. There’s the pleading, "don’t leave", then there’s the threatening, "don’t leave", and when you can’t tell the difference which one it is, that’s the worst of all. And that’s unfortunately when you really should leave.

I Love My Country

Posted by anachostic on August 11, 2020 No comments

Yeah, that title is a tough one right now. But I suppose it’s true. It’s not that I love the country right now, but I love what the country can be. Things change, things get worse, but there are still bright spots to focus on.

Anyway, remember a while ago when it was really fashionable to protest something by supporting a business? Well, that wasn’t really it, but remember when a bunch of people did a bunch of virtue signaling by making a particular business really profitable? Weird? Yeah it was. I’m referring to the religious people spending tons of their money at Chick Fila because of something that Chick Fila was taking heat for. I’ve forgotten all the details of it.

Who would’ve thought I would have a cause to do a similar thing? My cause is the US Postal Service. I did a little griping in my last post about them and while I am inconvenienced by the situation, I understand it’s not their fault directly and they’re being played for pawns. And when that sort of injustice happens, you have to step in and help out.

Now, just as an aside, I have no problem with trying to make the USPS financially solvent. That’s something for another discussion. But, I do have a problem with what has been instituted recently. And even completely setting aside the conspiracy nature of it all, for all of the supposed business acumen of the people in charge, there could not have been a worse time to implement these changes.

I mean, aside from impacting the next election, which they swear it won’t, but uh huh. This is going to impact the Christmas shopping/shipping season. Not to ignore the fact that it’s impacting small businesses right now. And we know how much the government loves to promote how they love small businesses. I haven’t heard anything yet about delayed social security checks or medical deliveries, but I suppose that will come soon enough. No, I’m not a business guy, but even I can see this is a poor decision, especially for someone who just walks in to a job and says, "Here’s what we’re going to do".

First off, new kid on the block should have taken a couple of months to learn about the internal workings of the business and formulate a plan, even if the plan was to fuck everything up. Then the best time to implement the plan would be at the beginning of the year. First off, it’s a great timeline marker. Second, you don’t fuck with the election or holidays.

But, is there ever a good time to slow mail? At the beginning of the year, there’s going to be arguments that the mail is being slowed and it will impact tax refund check deliveries. This is a good opportunity to promote direct deposit of refund checks. Not only is that faster and better, it will save the IRS money from having to print and mail checks. But what about the unbanked? They can’t get direct deposit. Well, remember that story from a while ago about how the USPS was considering becoming a national bank? Remember how it was going to raise money for the USPS? Well, this seems like the perfect time to implement that.

Sorry for the major side story there. The point of the post was how to support the USPS in the present, not some fantasy future. The answer came from, of all places, Car and Driver. Their suggestion, buy toy cars from their online gift shop. Cars, of course.

This solution made a lot of sense to me. You can’t just donate money to a business. That’s weird. You don’t want to buy up a shitload of stamps just to give them money either. That’s weird, too. But buying something from them, where they get the profit, that’s fair. I get something, you get something. Actually, they get a bit more, even.

So I went to their website and to their gift store and picked out a nice little car.

It was only $6. That’s not too bad. I’ll chip in $6 to the cause.

Checking out, I kind of chuckled to myself about having the item shipped. "Whenever it shows up…" And it wasn’t lost on me that they would be shipping the product. So hey, they do get some extra. They get the shipping cost, too. Then the website calculated the shipping cost for me.

$8.45 shipping on a $6 item. Good god. It’s like buying a $2 pen from a homebrew online shopping cart site. But I do want the USPS to succeed, as much as God wants Chick Fila to succeed, so I made the purchase. I have a little 2" Jeep coming in the mail sometime.

Godspeed, USPS.

Change Comes Quick

Posted by anachostic on August 10, 2020 No comments

It was only a few days ago I had read about a new Postmaster General and the "improvements" he was implementing to mail delivery. And for the first time ever, I see this message on a package I am expecting.

The clarify that image. I had earlier gotten emails saying my package was due to be delivered Aug 7. When it didn’t arrive, I checked the website and saw this message. Ok, I figured it would be delivered the next day, Saturday. Nope. Monday? Nope. The fucking package was only 2 hours away from me 5 days ago! What the hell is happening?

I want to say, I have never seen a message from USPS saying "Arriving Late". I also want to say that my experience with USPS has been rock solid for as long as I can remember. When you read news stories about new management and their plan to improve profitability by reducing service levels, and immediately you are impacted, what kind of impression are you supposed to get?

I’ve tried to keep politics out of my blog for a long time, but I feel this gripe would be fair to make under any administration. It would only seem biased because one party’s beliefs on the topic run counter to my own while the other party would agree. And so goes politics in the black and white era of America.

Many, many years ago I had the belief that the government should be run like a business. remember Ross Perot? That was the era. And I was in support of Perot for president for that very reason. Make the government run efficiently like a business. It was years later that I realized how wrong that perspective is. And I’m sure there are many people now who felt like I did back then. Although Perot didn’t get very far, we’re finally getting to test the idea of having a business-type government. And boy are we going to pay for it.

Here is the reason is a nutshell so you don’t have to read at length: Government is about helping people, business is about making money. Those goals are incompatible. A business will sacrifice anything, especially people, in its goal for profit. Is that wrong? No, it’s just its nature. No hard feelings, it’s just business, ya know?

And at this point, I was going to lay out a bunch of differences, but it also came down to a single reason, one that is overwhelmingly obvious in these times, from the top to the bottom. It’s all selfishness.

The Race Intensifies

Posted by anachostic on June 28, 2020 No comments

Still watching the races, much to my dismay and angst. Last night I had a moment of disbelief. All those people insanely claiming, "this is all a hoax!" and "It’s all fake." For once, those people almost made sense. And the reason for that was the pure incredulous of the numbers I was seeing. I mean, look at this chart:

You see those tiny bars near the beginning around 6/1? That’s 1,000 new cases a day. Back then, that was an unbelievable number. It had me shaking my head at the stupidity of my fellow residents. These last few days, what can I say? Well, we went through multiple 1k days, then multiple 2k days, then 3k days, then 4k days. And then, things changed. There was one 5k day, but there wasn’t a 6k or 7k day. It went straight to 8k. Then 9k.

What are you supposed to think when something like that happens? If you follow the drama and opposing viewpoints, right around that time, it is claimed that the numbers are being inflated so that they can be reported lower later on. But that doesn’t make any sense to me because you still have the record of the shit days. You can say it’s better, but better relative to the worst? The worst still happened!

And it just seems like there’s some sort of disinformation campaign going on, just like everything has been in the last three years or so. But the data is still there and it’s just an argument over how to interpret that data.

While on that topic, in a previous post, I put up an image that I consider misleading. Let’s revisit that.

Now let’s compare that to how things are right now.

In that old post, I said the chart was misleading because there was a delay as to when deaths were reported, so the true numbers were at the beginning of the chart and because of the delay, it would always look like the numbers were falling. Well, look at the chart now. Looks pretty flat, except for the most recent days, where you can expect less reported deaths.

So what’s going to happen is, as the deaths are reported (later), it’s going to make the chart look like it’s climbing, but the chart only has 30 days to work with. As long as there is a 2-week delay in death reporting, that should keep the numbers pretty low. But even if not, it will still look better. It makes you wonder what a chart longer than 30 days would look like.

Good To Go

Posted by anachostic on June 20, 2020 No comments

As fate would have it, my passport expires this year. On one hand, who’s going anywhere right now? On the other hand, who wants to get the fuck out of here right now?

What seems like forever ago, I applied for my passport renewal. Forever in this case is 4 months ago, to the day. That would be February, prior to the world hitting the pause button on life. A month or so into the process, I checked up on the status. It’s actually kind of nice that you can check the status of your passport application online. I doubt that feature was around when I first ordered my passport. As expected, the status was "In progress".

Another nice feature is that you can submit your email to be notified of changes in the status. Again, things you would take for granted with modern businesses seem completely astonishing when applied to government agencies. So I submitted an email and waited. And I kept waiting. I checked up in another month and the status had not changed, which is consistent with me not getting any emails about a status change.

One thing that was different about the status page when I revisited it was that they said they were on limited staff thanks to COVID and there would be a delay of "several months" in processing applications. This is fine and not fine. I’m not going anywhere, but things are getting weird, so what if I did need to go anywhere? It’s never a good feeling to have an answer of "you can’t", even with your most remote imaginations. You grow up surrounded with the promises that "you can do anything", until you have a moment where the answer is "no, you can’t" and that’s made even worse by "you could have, but not right now". Anyway, enough of the dystopia for the moment…

Then about a week ago, I did get an email. Wow! It said my application was "in progress". Oh. In hindsight, this should have been a good sign, meaning my application has been taken off the pile and into someone’s hands, but I didn’t know this at the time. I just thought it was more of the same. I’d been waiting 4 months, what’s another 4?

Today I got another email. My application status was "approved"! Yes, finally! The email stated that when I applied, I chose routine service, so the processing time would be 6-8 weeks. What?! But then it said I would get my book around 6/24/2020. What? This doesn’t make any sense, but whatever. I’m getting my passport soon!

I got another email from USPS, with my soon-to-be-in-my-mailbox notifications. It was already aware of my passport and said it would arrive Monday. I click on the tracking link and no, it’s going to arrive today – exactly 4 months from the day I mailed the application.

The only regret I have while I was waiting for those months is that I didn’t choose to get both the passport card and book. I only chose the book. The reason I want both now is for having a backup. Of course, being involved in computers, I’m always thinking of backups and redundancy. The secure plan would be to take both the book and the card on vacation and only travel outside with the card. Let’s say you’re at a cruise port and you get robbed. Your wallet is taken with the passport card in it. In this case, you wouldn’t be able to pass back through security to get to the ship, but you could send someone to get your passport book from your room and recover.

That small regret aside, I mentioned that things are getting weird around here. It’s actually in the back of my head that depending on how things turn out later this year, my passport might actually be utilized. It’s a remote chance. but I need the reassurance that if that time comes, "I can".

Stages Part 4.5

Posted by anachostic on June 18, 2020 No comments

In previous posts on this subject, I’d been advancing my home stereo towards some goal of having big, energizing, musical sound. The "final" step in the process was buying tower speakers for the amplifier. I’ve come up with a step in between.

I was skeptical of the claims made that putting your bookshelf speakers on stands would improve their sound dramatically. I was proven wrong. The change was highly noticeable. So much so, that it made me wonder if I really needed tower speakers. At the very least, it would delay their purchase for a while. The improvements got better when I separated the speakers from the stands with silicone buttons and added the floor spikes to the stands. Both are things that audio fetishists go crazy over. Not as much the spikes, but to read about the "isolation" and "decoupling" of the speaker from the stand using (only) sorbothane balls or brass spikes gets a little weary.

And I thought I had taken things about as far as I could with what I had. One of the improvements I got with my changes was improved bass. I could hear the bass and slightly feel it, too. And you know, once you get a taste of something good, you want more. That was going to be taken care of by the tower speakers, when I bought them. But I wasn’t ready to buy them yet, because I liked what I had. Well, I guess I wanted to like what I had more, so I had a choice to make.

That choice was whether to add a subwoofer to the system for the extra bass. I read a lot of articles. I researched a lot of products. I reviewed my budget. In the end, it felt like a "fuck it" decision anyway, so yeah. Subwoofer it is.

Here’s the catch. Based on what I’ve been reading, having a subwoofer is just not enough. A very well-written article by a generally polarizing individual explained the technical reasons for subwoofer use in the 60’s, 70’s, then 80’s and beyond. And that article, along with other higher-end articles stated pretty simply: you need multiple subwoofers. At a minimum, you need stereo subs, because although it’s popular to say sub=bass is mono, it really isn’t. But as long as you’re entertaining the idea of multiple subwoofers, having four is not out of the question.

Now, four subwoofers was not and would not be my plan. But, while researching products, the subwoofer model that I settled on (due to price) did not have stereo inputs. That would mean that I would have to buy a cable to merge the left and right channels to go into the sub. I’m not a fan of that idea; it just seems wrong. So the evidence is stacking up for getting two subwoofers. The budget doubles. So which one (or which two)?

You can get subwoofers with speaker sizes of 8", 10", 12", 15", or even 18". I start small, looking at 8". I need two of them. The more I look at them, the less I am convinced. My bookshelf speakers already have 6" drivers, and the tower speakers I was looking at for the future have multiple 6" drivers. Is an 8" really going to provide the depth I should have? So, I look at the 10". That’s about as far as I will go. There’s no way I can reasonable justify having two 12" or larger subs in my little listening room. I wouldn’t even have room for them. I’m already looking at compact subs because of space concerns. But, if the future means I have a larger room for my listening hobby, then the 10" subs will be able to handle that growth. If I do go with the tower speakers in stage 5, the subs will complement them as well.

So the retail price difference between 8 and 10-inch is $229 vs $344 – $115 dollars to upgrade to the larger sub with the bigger amp. Because of sale prices, the prices are now $126 and $189 - a bigger discount on the bigger sub. Now, the upgrade cost is $63. Still, I need two. And after looking back and forth and back and forth at numbers in both my web browser and in MS Money, I reached the "fuck it" point and bought two 10" subwoofers.

Fortunately, the subs do come with cables, but I did need to buy two splitter cables, to send the low-level output from my pre-amp to both my bookshelf speakers and the subs. And what have I ended up with?

IMG_20200618_172520

Also new in this picture is a switched power strip mounted below the amplifier, which turns all four speakers on and off. Since all the controls for the subs are on the bottom of the units, and I was getting concerned and also annoyed by pushing the power buttons on the speakers each day, a single switch should help everything.

Now, how does it sound? I started my test with all knobs set to the minimum and put on Rush – Signals as my first test. I went through a few tweaks, raising the crossover, raising the input level, lowering the crossover, and back and forth between the different possibilities. The result was nice, but not earth-shattering, nor room-shaking. I was underwhelmed.

Then I thought maybe my choice of album wasn’t that great, so I put on Edgar Meyer – Dreams Of Flight. Holy shit. Now I was shaking the walls, which was actually hilarious to see the cat repeatedly alerting on the sound of the pictures vibrating on the wall. With that album, I did a few more tweaks and lowered the levels a little.

The next test was Tom Petty – Full Moon Fever. Being produced by Jeff Lynne, certainly this album would have a lot of things happening everywhere in it. And I wasn’t disappointed at all from the results. My expectations were being tempered by reality. Where I expected kick drums to hit me in the chest, that’s not how (decent) albums are mixed. But what I wasn’t expecting was the loss of the shrillness. When I would turn up the stereo before, I sort of had to grit my teeth and suffer the high end to get any power. With the subs hooked up, It was like the high end was tamed. I don’t want to say "lost", because I don’t think it sounded any duller, just less piercing.

The last test was Iron Maiden – Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. I didn’t get the sound I expected, but the sound I got was excellent and very engaging. My ears weren’t ringing at the end either, which was a blessing. And it seemed like I was able to go louder than before, probably because I wasn’t getting ice picks in the eardrums.

I’m actually thinking there may not be a stage 5 now…

Is Being Old A Liability?

Posted by anachostic on June 9, 2020 No comments

I’m not actually talking about people getting old and the risk that comes with that. You know there’s plenty of risks for old people, health, financial, mental, and on and on. Everything is dangerous. That’s not what I’m talking about. I am talking about corporations. Is it now a liability to be old?

Traditionally, it has been a great thing to have a business that’s been running for 50+ years. Some running for over 100. Amazing, isn’t it? To be that ingrained the fabric of America, to have that sort of name recognition, to have seen it all and weathered everything that came along. That last point: to have seen it all and weathered it. That is the liability – to have been there.

This train of thought is fairly new for me and is obviously based on current events, but the idea I’m basing it on was actually born quite a while ago. I was at a Dairy Queen, eating lunch one weekend. Dairy Queen is one of those long-standing institutions I’m referring to. I believe them to be generally well-loved, but every business has its detractors for some reason or another. That’s not important for the moment. What is important is having a history and being proud of it.

Yes, so Dairy Queen is an old company. They are quite proud of their early beginnings and how they’ve grown to a massive corporation that is, if not the leader, then the most recognizable company in their field. So, they want to highlight the humble beginnings of their company to, I don’t know, inspire others? And I’m sitting there at lunch eating, and on the wall are old black and white photos of early Dairy Queens with the old cars and crowds of people lining up for ice cream.

And as I studied the pictures, my thought was, "That’s a whole lot of white people, there."

Now at the time, things weren’t as crazy as they are now, but race relations were growing tense. They must have been for me to focus in on that aspect of the pictures. And further studying showed, yes, no black people present.

Let’s not jump to conclusions here. There’s lots of reasons why a bunch of photos just all happened to not show a single black person getting ice cream from an old Dairy Queen. Local demographics is a perfectly valid reason. BUT. Racial tensions are not about reason, they are about emotion. And anything that reinforces a perception… well, it’s not good, regardless of whether the perception can be explained or not.

To cut to the chase, I am wondering if it is worthy of consideration for a company that existed in the less-than-ideal era for black people to simply drop their company, drop their history, and start fresh with a new company. Radical? Yes. Beneficial? Maybe. Harmful if not done? Well, it is leaving an avenue of attack open.

I can foresee the arguments. Attack? That’s not fair. This company did nothing to foster divide or hatred back then and that nonwithstanding, this company is a diverse, fresh, modern company that is committed to blah, blah, blah. Right. And you can see how effective a defense that is. Compare that to: This company was formed and created in 2020, the year of social change, established right from the beginning with equality, inclusiveness, and equal representation in every level of management and policy. Blah blah blah. Both are corporate non-speak, but one has the distinct advantage of no historical baggage.

A company that was around in the 50’s, even if they weren’t actively employing racist policies, was still operating in the norms of the time, which is to say, likely racist. You would have to be considered extremely progressive, even radical, to have a company back then like companies are today. If you want a real eye-opener, watch the old movie 9 to 5, from 1980. At the climax of the movie, the old boss returns to the office and sees handicapped people working there and learns of many employee benefits that have been implemented in his absence. He’s furious, of course, insisting he will undo everything right away. Watching the movie now, those major advancements are like the bare minimum today.

So, if you were operating in the 50’s, you were a part of the problem. Your only excuse is that the social norms at the time didn’t consider it a problem. And that’s a problem for your company. You can say how committed you are and how changed and all that happy stuff your company is, but your company has old bones. And an old brain. And memories, posted in black and white photos on your walls. You can’t escape that past, without completely starting over.

Watching The Races

Posted by anachostic on June 3, 2020 No comments

I’ve been keeping an eye on the COVID race for a few months now. The players I watch are all standout players: FL, TX, PA, and GA. Those are the places that have people that I know, so I watch their progress.

I remember when FL was the star, I seem to recall it was in the top 5 for a while. But PA put forth a massive effort and shot right up the charts. TX was a slow starter, but it’s been doing pretty well lately. GA has always been mediocre, which I suppose is a good thing, honestly. But FL is recently finding its mojo and is climbing in rank again. Go, FL! Obviously, no one is going to take the crown from NY, and NJ is probably always going to be second to NY (in everything), so there’s only so far you can go.

For three of my players, I watch their personal progress dashboards. Two of them, FL and TX, use the same software, so it kind of gives some equal comparison of the numbers. But in both cases, they use graphs that are misleading. Well, they aren’t if you understand the data, but for casual observers and those that don’t want to put the minimal effort into understanding, the response could be either, "this isn’t so bad", or "this is great" when the reality is neither of those sentiments.

Take a graph from FLs dashboard:

Wow, that’s impressive. Deaths are falling, and dramatically at that! This is all behind us, let’s go party!

But there is a small disclaimer below the chart, for those that care to read: "Death data often has significant delays in reporting…". That means that those low numbers in the near term are low because there’s no data yet. Those numbers will rise as time goes on, but that’s just fine, because there will be newer, lower numbers to report as time goes on as well.

Here’s a graph from TX’s dashboard.

This is just dumb design: plotting two values, one that will constantly increase, and one that will remain relatively constant on the same scale. This will have two effects. First, the number of deaths per day (in blue) looks like a really small value. And comparing 20 to 1,698 does make 20 seem very small. But as the total number grows, and it will, every day, the scale is going to eventually have to be adjusted, and the daily value is going to be insignificant.

TX does the same charting with the number of cases, with the same effects.

Maybe its incompetency that made these charts, but in the current political climate, and judging that these two states have pushed very hard to justify their reopening plans, it might not be a stretch to think this is just propaganda. The numbers don’t lie, they’re not telling you anything false. It’s just being presented in a way that looks most favorable.

Stages Part 4

Posted by anachostic on May 23, 2020 No comments

In the previous post on this topic, I discussed the stereo buildup to the point where I had a good listening system. The next transitional step would be to physically prepare it for the tower speakers, which will be stage 5. I had made another post about the fortunate timing of my speaker stand purchase, which saved me around $50 or almost a third of what I had budgeted. So the items have come in and are ready for implementation.

The first piece that came in was the stereo rack. All black glass and chrome, it allowed each component a shelf of its own, but I still kept the amplifier and equalizer together. Quality-wise, the stand is a big meh. I didn’t pay a lot for it, so I can’t be disappointed, but I expect at some point, I’m going to be getting a better rack.

The next day, the speaker stands come in. Heavy steel plates and posts, which are supposedly the key to keeping bass and separation. No disappointment here. We’ll have to see how they perform.

I disassembled my setup and moved the current table out of the way for the new pieces. While behind the system, I did a little wire management for tidiness sake. This is what it looked like.

IMG_20200522_174457

What did it sound like? Well, I don’t want to get into all the audio snobbery adjectives, but I will say it sounded better. Significantly better. Of course, maybe it’s a placebo effect, I’m not going to rule that out, but I tested out two different CDs, with widely differing musical styles and both sounded more impressive to me than I remembered before. So I will call it a success.

What’s stage 5 again? Tower speakers. Well, that can wait for some time now. I’m going to have to get tired of this new sound, which could be a little while.

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