Not A Mystery

A few years ago when talking with a Brit friend I learned that the UK’s equivalent of our IRS, known as the Inland Revenue, filled out his tax returns automatically without even asking his permission.

Wow, I thought, this is socialism to the extreme!

But when you think about it for a second, perhaps it’s not so bad at all. This article in the NY Times by Randall Stross explains why, we in the US could learn something from other countries.

I don’t know about you, but my goal in filling out my tax forms is to work hard and make sure what I put on my 1040 form agrees with information the IRS already has. The only kind of notice I get from them can be paraphrased,

“… the information you submitted doesn’t agree with our records, so we’ve gone ahead and adjusted your return …”

Things have gotten so so out of hand, tax professionals actually recommend that if incorrect information has been submitted about you by an employer or broker that you actually duplicate that wrong information on your return, and then attach an amended return to fix the problem!

Works For Me

So an obvious (after I read Stross’ article) solution is for the IRS to just send me the 1040 and let me make any necessary corrections. It would also be really nice if at the bottom of the letter they added a  “Thank You”.

Stross doesn’t mention that in previous years one big hole in this plan was that the IRS didn’t have data on your (our) capital gains from individual stock sales. But starting this year with new tax laws, this will all be reported by your broker along with interest and dividends.

I was even more surprised to learn that California already has a pilot program, called ReadyReturn, testing this exact proposal. And guess what; 99% of the folks who enrolled in the test reported they would use it again!

There is one company, however, that sees problems with this plan. Intuit, the maker of TurboTax software, unflinchingly says,

“We’re a California company and actively participate in the political process … our position has consistently been that ReadyReturn duplicates what is already available.”

And we thought big government was all we needed to worry about.

The other thing the Brits have over us is the name of the appropriate authority. Beginning in 2005 Inland Revenue became a department within Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It has a certain ring to it, even though they are still popularly referred to as “the Tax Man”.

Some things are universal.

Milestones are, well, milestones.

And this month we mark the official 50th. birthday of Bubble Wrap. Which shouldn’t pass without mention. Although we should note that the product itself precedes the corporation it spawned by a few years. Details.

Bubble Wrap was created by two engineers, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, in 1957. The term is a brand of Sealed Air Corporation (US) which was founded in 1960 by the two inventors, and thus should only be used for products of that company. Some people use the name generically for similar products, often termed air bubble packing or packaging; Sealed Air denotes its product as a brand of “cushioning material”

It also looks like Bubble Wrap is in the same category as Kleenex and Xerox, having become a generic term for a category. Details again.

Given it’s highly addictive properties (see the picture below) it must be a gateway drug to something else. But what?

Almost Done, Just Three More ...

C’mon, sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar.

Normally what would make an interesting blog post is the connection of two seemingly unrelated events. But that’s not happening today.

Instead we have two non-intuitive findings that remain just that … non-intuitive.

Our first discovery is a conundrum. Why don’t more people who are ‘underwater’ on their mortgages, and can’t get their lender to negotiate in good faith, just mail the keys back and walk away?

It’s even got an official name, “Strategic Default”.

A provocative paper by Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, makes the case that borrowers are actually suffering from a “norm asymmetry.” In other words, they think they are obligated to repay their loans even if it is not in their financial interest to do so, while their lenders are free to do whatever maximizes profits. It’s as if borrowers are playing in a poker game in which they are the only ones who think bluffing is unethical.

Our second discovery is even more startling. It turns out that humans may be ‘hard-wired’ for altruism. I guess if you step back far enough it might seem to guarantee our survival as a species. But it does sort of conflict with what we know about survival of the fittest. More confirmation that life is not only not easy, but it’s also confusing as hell.

After trying for a bit to reconcile these two discoveries into one comforting model that would make that great blog post I finally gave up.

It would have required us to believe that the solution to the mortgage crisis was coming in the form of altruistic bankers.

In Your Dreams

Hard as it may be to believe, I had never heard of David Blaine before today.

Well, I had seen some of his stunts reported in the press, but didn’t have a name or personality to go with the news stories.

But now I do.

Blaine talked about endurance at the TedMed conference that was held a few months ago.

Click Here To See What An Endurance Artist Does For Fun

You can find out what an Endurance Artist is by watching his talk at the TedMed conference that was held a few months ago, but just made available to the general public this week.

Amazing is all I can say. He received a standing ovation, so I’m not alone in my evaluation.

Keep in mind that his lecture goes for exactly the same time that he held his breath.

It’s alway nice to be Number 1.

For example, I’m terrifically proud that I purchased my current home at the absolute peak of the real estate bubble. And I feel equally puffed up over this chart from the Economist showing that we in the US are supporting Big Pharma in their quest for profits.

Make Sure To Swallow It All

Shame on those Health Care reformers who want to take us down a peg in the world wide standings by actually negotiating reasonable prices as part of a reform package.

We have to feel sorry, as usual, for those people in India who are able to negotiate cheap royalties with Big Pharma on their drugs because of their simple negotiating stance. Give us a great deal, or we’ll just manufacture and sell generics and pay you nothing.

It’s a negotiating stance that has legs.

Sorry, It's Only Available In China

I discovered today that if you access the Interweb from China you can get free music from the major record labels. From a NY Times article back in April:

Can global music companies make money by giving away songs in China, where piracy is rampant?

They certainly hope so. Last Monday, the world’s biggest record labels, including EMI, the Warner Music Group and Vivendi’s Universal Music, said they would seek to profit here by working with Google and offering free downloads of music to anyone inside China.

The music publishers get a ‘cut’ of advertising revenue on the music site that gives away their music. So they can say they are getting paid, but it’s the same situation as with Big Pharma in India. They have no choice. And even with all that nobody is making any money; including Google who has subsidized the site to compete with rival Baidu who links to pirated music.

In both cases Big Pharma and Big Music are getting paid virtually zero. But now they can say to those of us at the top of the food chain that everyone else is paying also. So stop your complaining.

Who’s stupid here?

Last night I made Pasta.

And whenever I make Pasta I thank Ron Popeil, Pitchman Extraordinaire who perfected the Infomercial and made pasta a part of my life.

There's More! Click Picture to Play Video

I knew I loved Ron Popeil, but I didn’t know how much until I read the first chapter in “What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell. The title of that chapter says it all; “The Pitchman – Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen”.

Gladwell begins by describing one of the world’s oldest professions:

You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to  to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” – the perilous, crucial moment when he goes from entertainer to businessman. If, out of a crowd of fifty, twenty-five people come forward to buy, the true pitchman sells to only twenty of them. To the remaining five, he says, “Wait! There’s something else I want to show you!” Then he starts his pitch again, with slight variations, and the remaining four or five become the inner core of the next crowd, hemmed in by the people around them, and so eager to pay their money and be on their way that they start the selling frenzy all over again.

He then gives a bit of background to let you know Popeil didn’t just stumble upon success:

Ron Popeil started pitching his father’s kitchen gadgets at the Maxwell Street flea market in Chicago,in the midfifties. He was thirteen. Every morning, he would arrive at the market at five and prepare fifty pounds each of onions, cabbages, and carrots, and a hundred pounds of potatoes. He sold from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, bringing in as much as $500 a day. In his late teens, he started doing the state and county-fair circuit, and then he scored a prime spot in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington, in the Loop, which at the time was the top-grossing Woolworth’s store in the country. He was making more than the manager of the store, selling the Chop-O-Matic and the Dial-O-Matic. … “He was mesmerizing, … there were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking. He would go into the turn, and people would just come running.”

Ron Popeil’s success came from hard work, and the design of unique and compelling products. When coupled with his unmatched ability to “pitch” them to TV audiences the resulting sales were staggering. His crowning achievement, The Showtime Rotisserie is set to soon surpass $1 Billion in sales! Unbelievable.

But I’m much more interested in the Ronco Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker. I mean anyone can Rotisserie a chicken, but when you have your peeps over and make fresh pasta for them right before their eyes, you are a hero! And Ron made me a hero many times over.

After serving faithfully for many years, my own Ronco Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker finally gave up the ghost a while back. When I tried to purchase another I was stunned to find out that Ronco was out of business and there was no joy to be had in my personal Pasta World. Drats.

So I tried to replace it with an Italian machine whose brand I won’t mention. Disaster. It didn’t hold a candle to my beloved Pasta Shooter. As fate would have it some friends had purchased a Takka Pasta Maker from Macy’s about 20 years ago and had never opened the box. They were gracious enough to pass it along to me and when I opened it I discovered that it has a virtually identical mechanism to Popeil’s version. The only difference is that my Takka is built like a Russian Tank with lots of heavy metal where the Popeil used plastic. This baby will be with me until the end!

Here is the video I filmed last night. Bob The Pasta Maker is back! I think of it as my homage to Ron Popeil. The first section shows the ‘mixing’ part of the process. Add oil olive and eggs to 50/50 semolina /white flour.  Then next the breath-taking extrusion phase where the pasta is actually ‘shot’.

And although I make this look easy in the video, knowing how quickly to add the liquid and exactly when to extrude the pasta really does take some skill. It’s me and Ron on this one; but while I can mix with the best, I know I can’t pitch like the Master.

Finally as an extra credit bonus, if you want to see a typical Ron Popeil price countdown (and you should), here’s your YouTube link.

Time flies.

It’s the Economist Big Mac Index for 2010.

That’s pronounced “Twenty-Ten” F2u Rio Linda.

Just to review, The Economist has been publishing their (not so tongue-in-cheek) Big Mac Index since 1986. It’s a reality check on world-wide currency exchange rates, based on the concept of Purchasing-Power Parity.

Purchasing-Power Parity (PPP) says that exchange rates are correct when the price of similar goods are the same in each country. The Big Mac survey compares the price of a Big Mac all over the world. The Big Mac is, after all, a basket of standard ingredients put together in a consistent process.

Ronald The Economist

Anyway, this week’s 2010 survey says that should the Big Mac price in a country translated into dollars be above $3.58, its cost in America, the currency is overvalued; if it is below that benchmark, it is undervalued.

But our Burger-In-Chief seems to be causing a few upsets.

Last year the best deal in town was Hong Kong. This year they don’t even make the chart; wassup? Did the mainland hackers get into the Economist gMail account?

And perhaps more disturbing, Wikipedia has compiled a comparison chart of Big Mac stats worldwide, which seems to indicate it’s not quite the Gold Standard of Standard.

Are Not All Big Macs Equal? We're Shocked ... Shocked!

And I’d say that Wikipedia has certainly Earned Their Chops on this one.

I’m a huge fan of the author Lee Child and the character he created, Jack Reacher. (By the way Reacher even has his own Wikipedia entry.)

And it turns out I’m not alone. A [for the moment] better known author shares my taste.

Stephen King put a Jack Reacher Easter Egg in his new novel “Under The Dome”.

A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game … It draws a parallel with … the last Russian imperial family’s tradition of giving elaborately jeweled egg-shaped creations by Carl Fabergé which contained hidden surprises.

And I Thought It Was Just Between Stephen And Me

I thought for a second there might be a chance that I was the only person in the world that would get King’s allusion, but that was pretty naive; if you Google some combination of Jack Reacher and Under the Dome you’ll find a number of references.

So for you Jack Reacher fans, here are the relevant quotations (with Kindle locator);

Under the Dome: A Novel (Stephen King)

- Highlight Loc. 11788-91 |

“Wettington was given a citation for helping to break up an illegal drug ring operating out of the Sixty-seventh Combat Support Hospital in Würzburg, Germany, and was personally recommended by a man named Jack Reacher, the toughest g****m Army cop that ever served, in my humble opinion.”

==========

- Highlight Loc. 12573-76 |

“Well, that’s not exactly true, Sarge. By order of the President of the United States, you’ve been stop-lossed. Welcome back.”

“Sir, I don’t know whether to say thank you or f**k you very much.”

Cox laughed without much humor. “Jack Reacher says hello.”

“Is that where you got this number?”

“That and a recommendation. A recommendation from Reacher goes a long way. You asked what you can do for me. The answer is twofold, both parts simple. One, get Dale Barbara out of the mess he’s in. Unless you think he’s guilty of the charges?”

==========

By the way, “Under The Dome” is a great Kindle value and a good read.

Lots Of Characters, And Surprise, They're Not All Nice

Lots of characters with a provocative plot and a haunting world-view.

Great news for NotAMysterians with smart-phone addled brains (like me).

Not A Mystery works perfectly on mobiles!

Kind of takes your breath away, n’est-ce pas?

Did You Notice The Picture-Of-The-Picture...?

How do they do that you might wonder? I’ll go with this saying:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961

Actually it’s done for us behind the scenes by the WordPress Wizards. They do it with something call CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. In any case WordPress can see what you are using to browse our blog and delivers up the content in a mobile optimized format.

List of Posts

I’m prejudiced, but I think it’s quite attractive. And while I’d like to say WordPress does this just for us, the truth is that all WordPress-hosted blogs enjoy this feature. Just another reason to go with WordPress.com in case you are thinking of starting your own blog.

Comments And Everything

Our mobile world is populated with all the usual suspects … oops, I mean, features!

Question: What has Big Auto learned from Big Tobacco?

Answer: Nothing.

We now know that Big Tobacco knew of the addictive and harmful medical properties of cigarettes for years but kept that knowledge secret, while publicly denying the facts. That story didn’t have a happy ending for either the Tobacco Industry or their customers. The only group that came out a winner were the Trial Lawyers.

Cut to the present. We find the Auto Industry on the verge of introducing a range of new products that will no doubt cause serious injury and death to many of their customers. To say nothing of innocent bystanders (can you say ‘second hand smoke’). Meanwhile they are taking a public position claiming the exact opposite; improved safety.

This week at The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the New York Times reports that

… to the dismay of safety advocates already worried about driver distraction, automakers and high-tech companies have found a new place to put sophisticated Internet-connected computers: the front seat …

Sir, Please Keep Your Hands On The Wheel, Where I Can See Them

Some people in the auto industry are publicly claiming that they can design complex interactive systems for the automobile so well that safety will actually be improved. While driving, you’ll be able to look up restaurants at your destination, get a stock quote, catch up on email, and even (so help me) tweet your latest thoughts. All without “taking your hands off the wheel”.

If you have some free time you can watch a video interview with Alan Mulally the CEO of Ford Motor Co. discussing these new systems. Before taking over the reins at Ford, Mr. Mullaly was CEO of the Boeing Company where he began his career as an engineer and helped design the avionics in virtually all of Boeing’s commercial jetliners.

Click to Watch Interview With Alan Mulally

Here are some Alan Mulally quotes from that interview:

I really believe that just like in the airplanes, by organizing the information and making it so intuitive and so simple … we are actually increasing the safety, and reducing the distractions.

[On the subject of Heads-Up Displays] … we’re finding out that if you put the information Heads-Down and really simple … that you get 90% of the benefit and it’s better than going Heads-Up and [then] Heads-Down.

The industry believes that the differences between a [highly trained] pilot/cockpit system and an [untrained] driver/dashboard system can be overcome with good engineering and lots of technology. It’s also clear that they are doing significant human factors research to support that assertion. But, inevitably they will have reams of data showing that much of the time that’s not good enough.  Even with both of your hands on the wheel.

And if you believe that just by keeping your hands on the wheel those activities are rendered safe, you must also believe that Pigs Can Fly while they talk on their iPhones.

There Really Is No App For That

To me this sounds like the Big Tobacco story all over again; so come back in 10 years or so after the class action suits have begun and the Attorney Generals are wading thru all that (subpoenaed) human factors data and doing statistical analysis on accident reports.

Where oh where can I buy stock in the Trial Lawyers?

I’m late to this party and probably over my head but that’s never stopped me before.

Let’s talk about Art and Celebrity.

What got my attention the other day was reading the lyrics to a Nora Jones song. I can’t remember which particular song, but it doesn’t matter. The point was that the words themselves were brain-dead. Maybe worse. But out of those terrible lyrics Nora Jones created an incredible work of art. Most of the time I don’t appreciate the genius of this kind of artist because they make it seem so natural.

Next let’s jump to acting. Once again we start with a script that has dialog, story line and stage direction. But when you look at the finished product from a great actor it starts to become clear how much talent is involved in creating the character. OMG, that character was created from virtually thin air. Once again the good ones never make it look hard, so I don’t appreciate how much work and talent went into the role.

In the world of art-art, like painting or writing there isn’t much confusion between the artist and their work, but in the realm of Actors and Recording Artists it’s different. Also, Actors and Recording Artists are usually a whole lot better looking, reinforcing the fantasy.

Which brings me to my friend Tony (not his real name). I used to work with Tony. By a quirk of fate Tony looks exactly like Viggo Mortensen’s character Aragorn in the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. And I don’t mean kinda looked like him, I mean exactly, specifically, unquestioningly looked like him.

Tony worked out at our local health club and was really buffed, so the physique was Aragorn’s. He had the same day or two beard growth, and his hair was long and once again perfect for the role. He was also a modest kind of guy so the personality wasn’t hugely off base either.

When I asked him if he was aware of his likeness he said yes he guessed he was, since people in the street would do a double take and then say something. At this point I need to point out that Tony looked like this before LOTR, and still looked the same after the clamor for LOTR died down.

Last month Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road” was released to theaters starring Viggo Mortensen in the lead role. When I saw the PR pictures that were promoting the film I was shocked. Shocked!

Because I expected to recognize my friend Tony in those pictures, but instead it was Viggo Mortensen in a different role. Didn’t look anything like Tony!

Point being that Tony looks like Aragorn, not Viggo Mortensen. There’s a big difference.

Which leads us to the 12,775 women that spent some quality time with Warren Beatty.

But I’ll stop here.