Stolen iPod

My car was burglarized sometime between Friday night and this morning. On the off chance someone happens to search on the serial number, the stolen iPod’s serial number is JQ549G67SZA. For others in similar situations, check out the Find Your Stolen iPod’s Serial Number article.

Filling out forms for $.80/hour

I read a while ago about the single-question customer-satisfaction survey, one that’s basically described here. Basically, the question is: “Would you recommend us to someone else?”. It’s simple, it’s easy to take, and it provides valuable feedback. The single question is a pleasant surprise to customers who may be used to…ah…the other kind of surveys, which I just noticed the linked document also talks about. This latter kind seems rather common in “real life”.

A week or two, I ate at Chili’s, and noticed their receipt’s bold offer to enter me in a contest–if only I visited their website and filled out their brief satisfaction survey. Although the odds may be vanishingly small, I had a spare moment, and visited the site, entered my code, and hit “go”.

A screenfull of answers later, I hit the “next” button. The survey’s progress indicator moved slightly toward completion.

A minute and another screenfull of answers later, I hit the “next” button again, and the progress indicator went up by another twentieth.

I stared in disgust at the progress indicator, closed the survey window, and got on with living my life.

I laud Chili’s for wanting to satisfy their customers. Entering them into a drawing when they fill out the surveys is a nice touch, and might raise the response rate just a bit. I question, though: why would a restaurant even want feedback from the kind of people who spend 20 minutes filling out a mind-numbing survey to get an almost-zero chance at winning a drawing? Do they really need to know that the presence of three softball teams made service a bit slower than usual, the iced tea was good (5, totally wholeheartedly without question agree), and that the experience was, on the whole…quite ordinary–but that the survey-taker has an uncontrollable urge to force a salt-shaker down the throat of the sadist that created the survey?

The next question: why would a person take the time to fill out one of these things? Wal-Mart, it seems, has followed in the blessed footsteps of Chili’s, and is printing magic codes and survey URLs on their receipts. The prize for their contest: they’re giving away five $1,000 gift cards! If we assume that the contest gets 100,000 entries (I’m guessing that number’s low, even given the torture one has to go through to enter), that’s an “expected value” of $5000/100000, or 20 cents. Wal-Mart cheerfully assures us that the survey shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes, so multiply that by 4 to get an expected value of…80 cents per hour. You’d do a lot better flipping burgers–and have a lot more fun!

It seems the dataset generated by this kind of survey has to be relatively small, and of even less worth for decision-making than its size would indicate. Only the ecstatic customers, customers contemplating Vengeance on the company, or the profoundly bored will run this gauntlet of verbiage to submit a survey. The resulting dataset must be hideously distorted. I’m not sure that one question is really all that’s needed on a survey, but to companies who want to give me virtually nothing for 20 minutes of my time: you’ve gotta be kidding!

Elephants: Myopic Fools?

As most readers are well aware, the elephant is a political symbol in the States, a symbol of a party that I once thought represented many values with which I agree. If elephants had sentience and legal standing, I’d expect them to be suing for misappropriation of their image, and for damage caused to their reputation.

This is a political-opinion post. More accurately, this is a post expressing outrage at the myopic fools in the White House and in my state’s Congressional delegation. As with any such post, balancing arguments likely exist. Please let me know what they are.

Several simple facts:

• President Bush asserts that “to reduce pressure on prices, we need to increase the supply of oil, especially oil produced here at home”.
• The EIA estimates that, through 2030, “Because oil prices are determined on the international market…any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant”. They estimate that opening up the the OCS will ramp up to an increase in lower-48-states production by 2030 of…wait for it…200,000 barrels of oil, or almost one percent of current US petroleum consumption (20.7 million barrels).
• The EIA estimates that opening ANWR to drilling would provide an additional 2.6 billion barrels in the mean case and 4.3 billion in the best case between 2018 and 2030–or 130 days and 215 days respectively of oil consumption in that time, assuming consumption stays constant. Put in other terms, this would be about 4.5% of US consumption in that time period. They estimate that production would peak in 2028. This added production, they project, would lower oil prices by a dramatic $0.75 (mean case) to $1.44 (high-production case) per barrel of oil. Note that that’s not per gallon of gas; it’s per barrel of oil, or 0.6% to 1.15% off of the current $125/barrel price. If $4 gas went down by the same fraction, it would plummet to $3.96! My gas-rewards credit card gives me multiple times that fraction!

Everyone seems to be talking about the need to reduce dependence on foreign oil. I agree fully with the sentiment; it’s ridiculous to be funding autocratic regimes with our energy dollars, and giving them a chain by which to lead us in our dependency. It’s difficult to see, though, how decreasing our dependency on imports by a few percent improves our situation substantially. It’s difficult to see how encouraging consumption helps our economy or our national security. (“Yes, those crack dealers are bad, bad people. Tell you what…here are some coca seeds and instructions for refining the cocaine; you won’t need to buy as much. And, to tide you over until the plants grow, I’ll subsidize your purchases for a while.”)

Our vehicles don’t know whether they’re using American oil or Saudi oil, and neither does our national demand for oil. We could indeed begin drilling, and add a slight amount to global supply after a few years have passed. If we do so, we’ll have succeeded in prolonging demand for oil (consuming imported oil in the meantime), and may manage to maintain consumption at close to current levels until we find ourselves in 2030 in essentially the same situation we are now. Is this reduction of dependence on foreign oil?

We could also reduce dependence on foreign oil by exploiting oil shale in the U.S. We do have huge amounts of oil shale available. However, producing oil from shale is harder on the environment in almost every way than conventional oil drilling. One specific drawback is the extraction process’s demand for water–a scarce resource in most places that’s already the subject of numerous legal battles, and which is likely to become even more of an issue in the future.

Another possible alternative would be to focus our investment on resources that won’t make these kinds of demand on our land, and that won’t run out until the sun turns cold a few billion years from now.  We could choose to :

• Build our human capital
• Reduce our “environmental load”. This is more than just acknowledging our responsibility of stewardship; it’s reducing the risk of radical dislocations for ourselves and our descendants. (Limited fresh water in the U.S. is already an issue; problems in access to fresh water and food worldwide contribute to global instability.)
• Reduce our dependence on foreign oil, both in the relatively near term and for the foreseeable future.

Wind power is one piece of the “home-grown and sustainable” energy puzzle, along with a number of other technologies. (For a review of stuff currently being explored, see Fred Krupp’s Earth 2.0). Other promising solar, even geothermal, possibilities exist, and show tremendous promise. And yet, funding for research in these areas is comparatively minuscule. Our power grid is nearly inadequate even for its current load, and we stand to gain hugely by building capacity to move power–but we hear nothing about it from those who claim the leadership of the country. And our leaders tell us that it is imperative that we open up new drilling–to reduce the cost of oil by less then two percent.

The love for oil, and the disdain for our energy future, seem to trump even “pork-barrel politics”. My state’s senators, Brownback and Roberts, recently voted against an extension of the production tax credit for wind energy, because–as Roberts replied in an e-mail when I challenged him–that credit would have come out of subsidies for “other parts of the energy industry”, specifically refineries. Even leaving aside the benefits of wind energy overall, “my” senators betrayed their constituents’ economic interests by voting against this measure. Kansas is one of a minority of states with huge potential for wind-energy development, and thus would derive comparative advantage from the expansion of the wind industry. Our senators chose to deny Kansans this advantage in favor of subsidies to oil processors, an area in which Kansas has little if any particular advantage. I’m having trouble making sense of this decision either from a “selfish state” perspective or from the perspective of our country’s long-term well-being.

We can produce clean energy, and we can do it cheaply. We can avoid subsidizing totalitarian regimes, and reduce our vulnerability to them. We can keep our dollars circulating in the country. We can solve our transmission problems.  And, our leaders lecture us on the desperate need to drill, to reduce gas prices by four cents per gallon.

I don’t have time to write more now, and I’m too incensed at the myopic foolishness currently on display to write as well as I might. Instead, I’ll link to a couple of pieces by such “green communists” as T. Boone Pickens (who sees his personal interests aligning with national and global interest in the Pickens Plan) and Andrew Grove ( former Chairman/CEO of Intel and author of Only the Paranoid Survive).

Conciseness: Not Always Good

A headline today read: “Time Warner Killed Jon Miller, Yahoo Board Deal”. Though it wasn’t hard to figure out the probable meaning, it looked for all the world as though it was an article about Time Warner’s involvement in a murder and in something pertaining to Yahoo!’s board. Of course, the article makes clear that Time Warner killed a deal in which Jon Miller was going to join the Yahoo! board.

Watch your phrasing.