Recent Comments

1. 9 days ago on Drabble

   Good for you. I hate it when people move into a governed community and then gripe about there being rules.

2. 10 days ago on Doonesbury

   As I recall, getting more power plants built was not Enron’s goal. Enron cornered the market, which allowed it to do monopoly pricing. With monopoly pricing, the highest profit isn’t always from selling the most product, so Enron arranged to sell less power.

   The electricity market was still somewhat regulated, though, andEnron wasn’t legally allowed to simply refuse to sell power. So it did things like claim a plant had to be shut down for maintenance.

3. 14 days ago on Baby Blues

   I suffered the same dread of the dentist at that age, but don’t anymore. I’m 60.

   And it’s not because I’m older; dentistry has changed. When I was a kid, even the shot to keep the procedure from hurting hurt. And the dentist didn’t care. He once announced he was going to drill me without anaesthetic because the cavity was so shallow. When I screamed loud enough he had to change his plan, he called me a baby.

   Consequently, when my mother stopped making dentist appointment for me, I stopped going. I finally screwed up the courage to go back when I was a senior in college.

   And hygiene wasn’t very good either, so I always had cavities. I learned how to floss from that college appointment. And sealants stop cavities too now.

4. 16 days ago on For Better or For Worse

   But I doubt a dog can swim against a flood current, even without a thrashing person in tow. Dog paddle is not an especially effective stroke.

5. 23 days ago on Pickles

   I was around 18 years old in 1980 when I first heard of taking one’s shoes off — it was an Asian cultural thing. It was probably another 20 years before I heard of non-Asians doing it.

   I myself will never live in a shoes-off house. It’s just too much hassle; I’d rather clean the floors and remove the carpets.

   Actual muddy shoes are different matter – those get removed at the door and cleaned.

6. about 1 month ago on Drabble

   In the US, the ground floor is the first floor regardless of whether there is a basement or an elevator. Floors (and stories) were numbered that way before elevators were invented.

   It’s just a matter of logic. If you stack stories up starting at the ground, the first one is the ground floor and the second one is the one above that. As you enter the building, the first floor you encounter is the ground floor. The top floor of a three-floor building is the third one. To call the floor above the ground floor the first one is to define floor a little differently.

   In Europe, I wonder if a building with two floors above the ground floor is called a two-story building or a three-story building.

7. about 1 month ago on Doonesbury

   It’s worth noting before we get bothered by the possibility that a corrupt SCOTUS subverted the election that had SCOTUS ruled the other way — that the law required the recounts Gore was requesting, Bush still would have been declared the winner.

   We know this because after the election, a group of journalists undertook those recounts. It took them a year, because they were counting by hand, with lots of redundancy, and counting lots of other ways besides what Gore requested, and they found Bush did in fact have more votes. The recount wouldn’t have changed anything.

   And even if he didn’t, the winner of the election isn’t the person with the most votes; it’s the person with the most votes as counted by specific procedures laid out in law — which are a compromise between accuracy and actually finishing the count before the electors meet in December.

8. about 2 months ago on The Duplex

   Right — anyone who thinks the dead tree aspersion is a reference to an environmental problem is mistaken; dead trees are no more an environmental problem than dead cows.

   But it’s still a waste of resource issue. Growing a tree is expensive; they don’t grow on … well, you know what I mean.

9. about 2 months ago on Baby Blues

   I grew up before calculators, but I do think it is a waste of time for kids to learn how to do what cash register does.

   However, I was dismayed when I went to the checkstand with a case of canned soup — a cardboard tray with a 3×4 array of cans — and the checker had to count the cans. 1, 2, 3, 4, …, 12.

10. about 2 months ago on Doonesbury

    Voting in favor of a corporation usually means voting in favor of the constituents who are customers and suppliers of the corporation, who profit when the corporation profits.

    There is not much evidence of politicians voting for things they think are bad for their constituents in order to get a corporation to spend money to get the politician elected.

    And there is no evidence at all that politicians regularly get paid in exchange for voting against their constituents’ interest.