The last good toaster?

Toasters are a "missing middle" casualty. China wiped out all the middle and low end products, replacing them with very inexpensive and (as of two years ago) very unreliable toasters. I call this the "missing middle", because afterwords one ends up with the low end (with a great drop in average price) and the luxury/professional market. Alas, I usually buy in the "middle", so this is a bad outcome for me -- even though it's a good thing for most consumers.

In fact, with toasters, it seemed the "high end" had disappeared as well ( commercial toasters too big for our kitchen). I've visited various specialty stores, and the toasters were all made in China there too. They seemed as flimsy and unpromising as the much cheaper models sold in my neighborhood hardware store.

I figured I'd just have to wait until "made in China" came to mean quality products, just as "made in Japan" is today. Or until some retailer rediscovered the value of a "quality brand". I think brands are going to make a big comeback in the next 12 months, so that's not too long to wait.

Today, however, it occurred to me that Germany, with its protected markets and manufacturing inclination might still have reliable toasters. So I changed my toaster search to include "made in Germany". Which led to this Rowenta toaster.

It's a luxury solution of course, I didn't expect to find the "missing middle" in the export market. The electric motor is silly, and the price is steep -- though in the range of the "made in China" items sold in specialty shops. So, at least on the net, there is still a "Mercedes toaster".

Update 3/31: I struck Zeitgeist. Slate has a review of toasters out now. They found an interesting mid-range option. Some of the brands seemed to be going for "quality" too ...

Update 4/14/07: At least some of the components for some Dualit toasters are made in China, though it's "assembled in England". See the comments for more details, including this excellent comment:

Sorry to burst the bubble but the Dualit (at least the Vario 20293 Chrome) may be "assembled in England" but the parts are from China. Check out wholesale site on the internet to see the product country of origin. I bought one, the timer failed after about 3 months, when I opened up the toaster the timer clearly was labeled "made in China". I think that Dualit is assembling them in the U.K. but is using "globally sourced parts" (the new euphemism for Made in China). Buy a cheaper toaster it'll be made in China too but at least it'll say so on the outside instead of on the inside.

Amazon has complaints about early failures in the Dualit. There may simply be no escape from this trap. Maybe we'll all stop eating toast, or go back to the days of holding bread over an open flame.

Update 11/30/07: It's truly hopeless. Bigeejit writes in comments (emphasis mine):

Interesting post! I'm German, and I'm looking for a toaster not "Made in China". It's a nightmare.

Take a closer look at the parts inside of a toaster! Even it's an European or German brand toaster like a Bosch, Siemens, Krups, Rowenta, Braun, Tefal, Moulinex one... most of them look the same, and they are "Made in China".

I believe most of the toasters are manufactured in the same one Chinese plant. Each brand just gets a different plastic cover slipped over.

Well, I'm not willing to pay a high price for a German brand toaster manufactured in China.

@John Gordon: Rowenta is no longer a German brand since 1988. Today the brand is owned by SEB Group (France), and Rowenta toasters are "Made in China", too. Even the Rowenta toaster you mention.

Update 3/17/09: Professional toasters are still made in the US. From comments (Drawde):

.. There is still a toaster MADE IN THE USA. It's made by Star Mfg in MO, actually their toasters are made in TN.

These are heavy duty restaurant quality units. Our 4 slice weighs about 20 lbs, so keep that in mind in terms of storage, lifting etc.

We have the ST04 model, which I think has been replaced with a newer model designation, but I checked with the rep today and she said they are still made in TN.

They can be repaired even at a restaurant repair facility if need be, you can actually buy parts for them as well! Imagine! Of course the bad news, they are not cheap.

I think the 2 slice model is around $350 and the 4 slice $550 online. We actually picked up ours used on ebay for about $150...

Now I know what i want for my birthday ...

Update 6/25/11: This old post still gets comments. Today a vistor suggested toastercentral.com:

... the place to find and buy vintage and collectible kitchen appliances by Sunbeam, Toastmaster, Dominion, Kenmore, Arvin, Westinghouse, General Electric, Manning-Bowman, Universal and other makers from the Golden Age of chrome and bakelite...

The site appeal is primarily aesthetic, but they had a 1950s toastmaster that looked like it would be excellent. Sold of course.

Update 3/3/2012: Six years later, it all makes sense.

Why quality collapsed in the bubble years: Akerlof and the last good toaster

Six years ago, I mourned for the demise of the last good toaster. I could find lots of cheap toasters, but they didn't last long.

It wasn't just toasters. Between about 1999 and 2009 the quality of a lot of goods seemed to collapse -- even as consumer prices fell. I wrote cranky posts about the "occult inflation of shrinking quality", but I seemed to be a chorus of one. It wasn't just toasters that disappointed, we couldn't buy a decent DVD/VCR or pencil sharpener or window unit air conditioner. Similar quality problems emerged with drywall and heparin [1] and, notoriously, just about every computer manufacturer on earth save one.

For us it felt like a market failure. We were willing to pay more money for higher quality, but there didn't seem to be a relationship between price and quality. Brands like SONY and Panasonic didn't mean much any more.

A few brands kept their reputation. Canon and Nikon held on, and a phone maker led by a difficult genius made a reliable battery charger and eventually became the world's most valued corporation.

I wonder if it was Apple's example that changed the picture. Because reading John Roberts [3], it seems we fell into Akerlof's quality trap (emphases mine) ...

... Trade may break down almost completely (Akerlof, 1970). If eliminating the asymmetry of information is not possible, then buyers will refuse to pay more than the expected value of goods, averaged across the different quality levels they expect to be offered. Then the best quality goods may not be offered at all, because they command only a middling price that does not reflect their true value. Consequently the distribution of qualities that are actually offered is worse than what is potentially available. Since the selection of products on offer is not representative of the underlying distribution of quality, but is instead an adverse selection, buyers will rationally lower their willingness to pay even further. Then, even more potential sellers of relatively high-quality items may no longer be willing to sell at the lower price. The overall result may be that nothing but very low quality items are available -- only lemons are on offer -- and markets fail to exist for high-quality products, although buyers are anxious to have such goods and would willingly pay enough for them to compensate the sellers if they were sure to get what they paid for. [3]

In a world where quality seemed to be unobtainable at any price, Apple offered relatively higher quality [4] products at a relatively higher price. I think they broke the cycle [5]. It probably helped that after the debt/real estate bubble burst consumers paid more attention to the costs of unreliable goods.

It's quite a story - a textbook illustration of research that earned Askerlof a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. So why haven't we read about this from anyone but a crankish blogger? Where are the economists?

[1] The investigation continues incidentally - More Suppliers Linked to Heparin Contamination - WSJ.com.
[2] I've been told that it's now very hard to buy a reliable dish washer 
[3] Roberts, J. The Modern Firm. Oxford University Press 2004. p 82-83
[4] Apple, with a few exceptions, doesn't make very high quality products. Their software is notoriously buggy, and they made generations of laptops with flaky hinges. Compared to the competition though, they were sterling. 
[5] The cycle-breaking alone brought them success, but the mind-blowing innovation of the iPhone and iPad took them to the top.

Update: Shortly after posting this, I discovered that in 2007 I made the same connection to asymmetric information theory that Roberts detailed in his text. Maybe I should have been an economist.

Apple's battery charger, occult inflation, and the future of American industry

<rant>

This is important. Stick with me for a moment ...

Apple is now selling a battery charger. Yeah, a $30 battery charger.

Apple Battery Charger - The energy-efficient way to power your accessories.

... Each Apple Battery Charger comes with six high-performance AA NiMH batteries .... these batteries have an incredibly long service life — up to 10 years ... extraordinarily low self-discharge rate. Even after a year of sitting in a drawer, they still retain 80 percent of their original charge...

...like Apple power adapters, the Apple Battery Charger is designed with a removable AC plug, so you can replace it with plugs that fit different outlets around the world.

We used to have NiMH chargers. We owned two or three. They all failed. The batteries had very short lifespans. They discharged very quickly. We gave up.

Now Apple makes a charger and they pick the batteries. It works with the extension cables we have for other Apple chargers. It works with the international plugs we have. It addresses every problem we've had with NiMH chargers. We'll buy it for $29.

This is important.

Why?

It's important because from about 1997 through 2007, during the years when China became the world's dominant manufacturer and upset the world's equilibrium, befuddled consumers bought on price alone. Manufacturers trashed their brands in a desperate bid to shed costs, and quality plummeted on everything from toasters to heparin. The price of a VCR/DVD player fell by 50%, but the lifespan fell by 75%. Economists claimed low inflation even as they adjusted prices for "increasing" quality, but in reality quality was falling off a cliff. We had much more quality-adjusted inflation than we were measuring.

In 2008 the economies of the industrialized world collapsed, unable to adapt quickly enough to the twin shocks of the rise of China and India and the machines. Since then consumers have bought far more carefully, and the quality collapse stopped. The drop in inflation, adjusted for quality, was substantially greater than we've measured.

There was one exception among manufacturers over this past decade.

Yeah. Apple. The one significant brand that didn't die.

I have a lot of issues with Apple. Their quality, especially their software quality, is overrated. Even so, there's a reason that 8/10 of our tech money goes to them (not counting the significant portion that pays for telecomm services). Apple, led by the most eccentric and powerful CEO since Howard Hughes and Seymour Cray, behaved like a privately held company with public company finances. When everyone else squeezed margins, Apple's margins rose. Eveyone else fought on price, Apple fought on design and value. We know who won.

If Apple made a toaster, they'd own the toaster market. I'm half-convinced they're going to do that.

If Apple made a van, it would have a 100 amp generator, diagnostics posted to MobileMe with an iPad app, indicator lights that tell you what freakin' door is open, five plug/USB outlets (they'd omit the ugly cigar lighter thing of course), a non-brain-dead security system, a fantastic sound system a geezer could run, a simple key to complement your iPhone remote control app.

I'd buy that freakin' van.

Pay attention America! This ain't hard!

No, actually, it is hard. It's not the technology that's hard. It's not the marketing that's hard. It's trying to be Apple without Steve Jobs and with the baggage of a failed model for organizing work. The American publicly traded company is obsolete.

We're in aftermath (we hope) of the greatest financial collapse in 80 years. If we'd handled the Great Recession (or is it GD II?) like Hoover did GD I, we'd have work camps by now. Part of our rehabilitation requires effective regulatory oversight. Another part, a part I've more to write about, will require solutions to the mass disability of the modern era.

The last part of our rehabilitation requires an alternative to the failed model publicly traded company. We can't rely on one-of-a-kind obsessed all-powerful super-wealthy genius CEOs. We need a different form of corporate ownership. One that will produce the toasters and vans we want with the value we need.

</rant>

Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud

This morning our last modern pencil sharpener broke. We have only one that works now. It's twelve years old, I remember coming across it in the campus bookstore. Even then reliable sharpeners were hard to find, so I bought several. Only one survives. It was made in Germany. We're going to mention it in our will, it may be worth a fortune thirty years from now. By then billionaires will employ artisans to craft beautiful objets d'art that sharpen pencils, and the rest of us will be using our teeth.

We tossed the broken one in the garbage. Alas, the can was broken. Well, that's almost reasonable. One year in a house with our 3 kids would even have weakened a German garbage can. No surprise this one broke.

We can't replace it. There are no more square, tough cans that use standard cheap trash bags. There are only round cheap things that use exotic bags that will only be sold for the next six months.

Our two DVD/VCR combos limp along. One has a broken DVD player, the other a broken tape player. There's no point in replacing them -- the replacement would only last three to six months then it would break. We won't replace our crummy old toaster, because the modern modern alternatives won't last more than a few weeks.

How to explain this emergent conspiracy of globalized incompetence and occult inflation? Clearly the answer is related to Krugman and Hilton [1] and the reelection of George Bush. The American consumer is simply overwhelmed, unable to process and cope with the complexity of the new age. Consumers are repetitive and consistently making very poor choices, and the market is responding to the frailty of the consumer.

I'm hopeful that a correction is coming. It's too late for we boomers to get our heads around the new world -- we're too old and slow. We can, however, retreat into "grumpy old person" buy nothing, replace nothing stasis -- and that will give the young more leverage. It's up to their minds to absorb the new rules, and reboot the marketplace.

Go for it kiddies, we gomers are depending on you!

[1] BTW, I'm seriously starting to feel sorry for Ms. Hilton.

Story of our times - What happened to screen door latches?

This is the only screen door latch design sold in our local hardware stores:

 

The t-shaped metal bar in the center has two prongs that join the indoor mechanism. One first mounts the outdoor handle mechanism, then joins the bar to the indoor mechanism  and attaches it to the door. The bar slides into the outdoor mechanism collar. There’s no stop or spring in the outdoor mechanism, the bar can easily slide in and out. Only the two metal prongs at the tip hold it to the indoor mechanism.

After about 6-8 weeks of use at our home those prongs come loose, the bar slides deeper into the outdoor handle, and it is no longer possible to open the door. 

It’s a bad design. There should be a better way to attach the bar to the indoor mechanism, or there should be a spring in the outside handle.

This is different from the quality issues that afflicted toasters in 2006; the mechanisms are well made. It’s just that they’re well made to a hopelessly bad design.

I wonder if, years ago, a Chinese manufacturer incorrectly copied an older design. But why did it become universal?

I’m half-heartedly looking for a different design, but the market is probably telling us that nobody has a wooden screen door in 2015. We need to replace the door with something that will lose less heat in the winter.

Weird, and somehow characteristic of our times.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS): the mass mind masticates

Two months ago, Israel was protesting ...

Gordon's Notes: Israel's uprising: Is it about the failure of 21st century democracies?

... Israel is our latest example. Like the Wisconsin protests, this is best understood, I think, as a collective protest against a failure of citizenship. It's the middle class beginning to realize that the top 0.5% owns the game. I hope this movement visits America soon...

Israel's "social justice protest" grew from a small start to 100,000 participants in about 16 days. It ended about 6 weeks later. After an inchoate beginning it was classified as a part of the 2011 Israeli middle class protests.

The Occupy Wall Street protests began about 15 days ago...

BBC News - Occupy Wall Street protests grow amid Radiohead rumour

... An estimated 2,000 people have gathered in Lower Manhattan, New York, for the largest protest yet under the banner Occupy Wall Street. Demonstrators marched on New York's police headquarters to protest against arrests and police behaviour. Several hundred people have camped out near Wall Street since 17 September as part of protests against corporate greed, politics, and inequality...

Despite the best efforts of the coward cop and the champagne toasters the OWS numbers are growing slowly. The numbers are unlikely to approach anywhere near the scale of Israel's protests. Adjusting for population size a similar US protest would involve millions.

Unlikely, but not impossible. These social movements are fundamentally chaotic. Why did the Berlin wall fall when it did? Why not five years earlier? We can't say why. We can't say when.

The pressure is building though. Sometime in the next year Americans between 40 and 70 are going to do some basic math. When they run the numbers most of them will realize the lost years from 1999 to 2011+ cannot be made up. Their retirement will be very different from their current life, and very different from what they expected. The mass mind is going to begin to process what hit us all.

Maybe then we'll see some real unrest.

Update:

• Historical perspective on when protests arise. In the last depression unrest appeared two years after the great crash.
• ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ a primer -  Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

Expensive toxic toy trains from ...

Well, where do you think they come from? 

Thomas the Tank Engine Toys Recalled Because of Lead Paint - New York Times

... The affected Thomas toys were manufactured in China, which has come under fire recently for exporting a variety of goods, from pet food to toothpaste, that may pose safety or health hazards. “These are not cheap, plastic McDonald’s toys,” said Marian Goldstein of Maplewood, N.J., who spent more than $1,000 on her son’s Thomas collection, for toys that can cost $10 to $70 apiece. “But these are what is supposed to be a high-quality children’s toy.”

Ms. Goldstein’s 4-year-old son owns more than 40 pieces from the Thomas series, and seven of them were on the recall list, including the Sodor deluxe fire station, a footlong piece that is a little heavier than the average train...

Yawn. No surprises here. Lead Christmas light wiring, toxic fake flour in dog food, poisoned toothpaste, counterfeit medicines that don't work, counterfeit surgical supplies, fake glycerine that kills, etc, etc.

Not that there's a trend or anything.

Oh, yeah, and the toasters and such.

This time around the toy company has plausible deniability. That's not true going forward. Manufacturers now know what they can expect, if they're not assuming rampant fraud in China's marketplace then they're criminally negligent. Emphasis on the criminal part ...

Resolution 2011: Managing complexity

I'm good with resolutions. Mostly because I know how to pick 'em. I make 'em doable.

Consider sleep. I like to exercise, but in my life sleep is more important. So I've resolved to sleep at least 52 hours a week [1]. I think I can do that if I track the numbers and identify where I fall short.

That's one for 2011. The other resolution is about managing technological complexity.

I've been on a complexity reduction kick for a few years , but this year my focus is on technological complexity. I'm starting with the plausible assumption that we all have a personal "complexity budget". Some of us can manage more complexity, others less, but we all have memory and processor limits -- even the AIs among us.

We can spend our complexity capacity figuring out how to adjust product development to available capacity, or we can spend it figuring out what parts of SharePoint are worth using [2]. Both tasks will be equally draining.

At some points in my life I had complexity capacity to spare - perhaps because I wasn't using it wisely. That's not true now.  Gains from improved productivity techniques [3] and growth of mind [4] are offset by entropic neurons. Most of all though, my life overflows. I'm not complaining -- it's an overflow of good stuff. It means though, that I need to use my complexity capacity wisely.  I can't be spending limited firepower figuring out which of my 15 Google identities is running a feedburner bot linked to a pseudonymous twitter account.

It's not easy to reduce technological complexity. It often means making do with less; giving up tools and solutions I really like. Often it means declining new incrementally better improvements -- because a 10% gain isn't worth the learning curve and failure risk. Sometimes it means giving up on old tools that still work but are increasingly unsupported. Yes, it's a lot like software portfolio management.

Looking at how technological complexity grows in my life I can identify four broad causes....

1. Taking on too many simultaneous tools and solution sets.
2. Failure to clean up. Ex: Abandoned user identities, google accounts, etc. Creates noise and clutter.
3. Premature adoption of technologies and solutions. Ex: Any new OS X release, any new Apple hardware, trying to get Contact synchronization to work with both Google Contacts, OS X Address Book and iPhone, OS Spaces. Above all - Google Wave.
4. Prolonged use of increasingly unsupported solutions in a world of forced software evolution [6]. Ex: document-centric web tools, wristwatches, printers.

I've gotten better at the first one, but the next three all need work. The 3rd and 4th are particularly tricky. My heavy use of Google's multi-calendar sync solutions is clearly premature [5], but it's been very valuable and relatively bug free. On the other hand, I think my jury-rigged Contact integration solution may be a bridge too far. On the other hand, I stuck with Outlook's Notes feature long after it was clearly dead.

Cleaning up is the least interesting measure, but one of most important. There are 1,575 entries in my credentials database, extending back to August 1995. Sure, most of those sites are long gone, but I still have too many active identities and credentials. I need to gradually cull a few hundred.

This project should keep me busy for a while. It will, of course, suck processors in the short term, but I expect near term returns and long term gains. Feels like a good resolution target.

-- fn --

[1] It helps that recent research suggests that amyloid clearance occurs primarily during sleep, and I'm speculating that a 10-20% decline in amyloid clearance translates to 10 extra years of dementia.
[2] The wiki and, in the absence of alternatives, the document store. Don't touch the rest, even the stuff that seems to work is poison. 
[3] At my stage "GTD" is child's play.  I use a mongrel of Agile development planning methodology, GTD/Franklin, and a pocketful of tricks including calendar integration across family and work.
[4] For quite some time mind can grow even as brain more or less sucks wind. Not forever, but for a time. 
[5] The UI for configuration multiple calendars has been bizarrely obscure for about two years. This is not mainstream.
[6] It's predator-prey stuff. Software evolution was much more leisurely before human-on-human predation took off with hacks, frauds, identity theft, malware and the like. Now old bucks have to keep moving, or we become wolf chow. Software cycles are faster, products die quickly, and we have to keep buying whizzier hardware. If not for malware, the curated world of iOS would still be years away.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: tech churn
• Gordon's Notes: whitewater world
• Gordon's Notes: complexity
• Gordon's Notes: Why you will live in an iOS world
• Thunder in the Cloud: Lessons from my hacked Google Account
• Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud (6/2007)
• Are we experiencing a complexity collapse in software and finance? (11/2008)
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams (2/2009 - complexity facilitates fraud)
• Requiem for a gerserker - Gordon's Laws of Geekery (6/2009 - how I learned to look before leaping)
• Geriatric computing (6/2009 - old computers are too costly to keep)
• Tech churn: The Franklin Planner and Google Calendar
• Beware the traps of the Software World - 9/2009 - software allows new realms of complexity
• Left Behind: Ludd, Beck and the non-tribal roots of tea party rage - 11/2009 - Tea Partiers are left behind by the complex.

Emergence, unanticipated consequences, and hidden inflation

I've been interested lately in emergence and natural selection in non-biologic systems. There are surprisingly common applications in every day life. In the corporate world technical accounting rules and cash flow incentives can cause an emergent attack on an entire product line -- without anyone realizing why they're making bad choices.

In academia certain kinds of results are highly grantable, so the research program is pursued even though many believe it's misdirected. In time papers spawn papers and a new, regrettably false, dogma is born.

In all these cases the behavior is a result of incentives changing the "ecosystem", and organisms (people) evolving (adapting) to the new environment.

Which brings me to our X-ACTO electric pencil sharpener. It never worked properly, and after months of chewed up pencils we came to our senses and tossed it out. Another defective product, broken by design. Just like our DVD/VCRs, toasters, etc.

If we were to replace the X-ACTO with a similar model, our yearly cost of pencil sharpening would double or triple. Gee, that sounds like inflation -- except, of course, the price of the sharpener is stable or falling. Hmm. Rising cost of pencil sharpening, falling costs of sharpeners ... So is inflation really 3.5%, or is it perhaps 7%?

Imagine a system in which all the economic pressures that once created inflation still exist, but we've figured out how to block the traditional expression of inflation. Pressure. No outlet. Where will it go? It will find a way out, an emergent solution. A solution like products that are cheap but have very short lifespans.

The Federal reserve, of course, is oblivious. Their instruments can't spot the problem, they're looking in the wrong direction. In the meantime the cost of sharpening keeps rising ...

Now is not the time for anti-materialist Solstice celebrations

I have heard rumor that Celebrators of the Solstice are advocating spiritual observation rather than greed and materialism.

I fear our times of worry are fertile ground for such sentiment.

Alas, we're like the heroin addict about to receive open heart surgery. This is not the time to kick the habit. This is the time for a metered dose of morphine, until the critical point has passed.

Then there will a time for withdrawal and balance, though, alas, by then such sentiments will seem dull and unappealing.

Happily, there is a middle ground.

Those who have income and employment should buy liberally -- but give the goods away.

So get that HDTV, but then donate it.

Alas, I need a real economist to tell me if donating cash would work as well. Since cash is fungible donations may be a less effective economic stimulant (ok, so the opiate analogy breaks down) than toasters, coffee makers, and televisions.

Incidentally, in 86 days, on Feb 17 2009, analog tv is supposed to end.

There's a reason why that date was chosen -- after an election. The transition will not be a happy one for a nation in early stages of the Great Recession. On the other hand, it will force a significant jump in television and/or converter purchases.

So maybe we really should be buying digital broadcast ready televisions this Solstice -- for donation.

Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams

I experienced this with Sprint and AT&T alike. I now pay $5 or so a month for a the honor of tracking my son's phone use -- that includes disabling his data access.

Here's Pogue's expose

Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com:

...Starting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones...

...The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data...

...Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!..

...Now, you can ask to have this feature blocked. But even then, if you one of those buttons by accident, your phone transmits data; you get a message that you cannot use the service because it’s blocked–BUT you just used 0.06 kilobytes of data to get that message, so you are now charged $1.99 again!...

“They have started training us reps that too many data blocks are being put on accounts now; they’re actually making us take classes called Alternatives to Data Blocks. They do not want all the blocks, because 40% of Verizon’s revenue now comes from data use. I just know there are millions of people out there that don’t even notice this $1.99 on the bill.”"

For the record, here's a list of the mobile phone scams I know of ...

1. Early termination fees that exceed plausible costs
2. The time eating pointless answering machine messages
3. The "accidental" high priced data fees
4. The surprise fees and taxes with just about any transaction
5. The covert contract renewal with service changes
6. Recipient pays SMS transaction fees
7. The unusable cash card rebate fraud (AT&T settled with NY state on this one)
8. Uninterpretable cell phone bills.
9. Passive revenue from OAN Services and other cramming scams.
10. Unblockable SMS marketing.
11. Long distance interconnect fees.

Add them up and were talking billions of dollars in fraud. These scams didn't have to be planned out, all you need is fertile soil for emergent fraud.

See also:

• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams
• Regional airlines, emergent fraud and enlightenment 2.0
• 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind
• Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud
• Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam
• John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card
• AT&T “A List” – the gift that’s not
• A deal with the Devil: We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone
• The Empire Strikes Back: complexity, mobile phone plans, and Apple defeated
• Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies
• Phone company posted rates are completely meaningless
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show

Update 11/17/09: More on how complexity attacks are used by mobile phone companies (and, incidentally, by health care insurance plans).

• Why Economists Love to Study Cellphone Pricing - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
• Looking for a Method in Cellphone Price Madness - NYTimes.com

Update 10/4/10: Verizon gets caught.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)