The Tin Lizard

Why They Call It "Carfax," Not CarFacts

ABC-TV recently did a little "expose" on use and misuse of the Carfax service, which provides automated information about a used car's history.  I was shocked, shocked I tell you (NOT) to learn that (a) Carfax doesn't necessarily include everything about a car's history and (b) that dealers presenting potential buyers with a Carfax report are likely to exaggerate its comprehensiveness.

As with all such efforts to corral information on the internet, the consumer just has to be aware of the limitations of the medium.  Carfax officials point out that they can only record the information that comes to their attention, but their report can't be considered 100% comprehensive.  Just consider what that means in terms of cars that might have been in floods ... we're always told to avoid those, but how would that get reported?

Last month I traded in a car I'd bought new and owned for ten years.  Several dealers just gave me a stated trade-in value, but one actually showed me the Carfax report on my vehicle.  It's easy to see the limitations of the service.   It showed an accident within months after the car was purchased.  True enough - it was rear-ended when the driver behind me failed to stop in time for a highway slow-down.  But there was no detail - simply "accident."  Moreover, because the car dealer, like many these days, doesn't do his own bodywork and sent me to a body shop down the street (which evidently was not connected into any reporting system), there was no record that repairs had been done.  The rest of the report showed that I'd been in regularly for service over my ten years' ownership, but not even a hint of what was done.  Oil change or major problem with the drivetrain, it's all the same to Carfax.

Carfax's limitations also have implications for owners who want to trade in or sell their used cars.  The mere mention of an "accident" can affect the price or value you'll be offered, even if, as in my case, the damage was repaired and I'd been driving the car ten long years since! 

The lesson of Carfax, as usual if we don't want to be duped when buying something, is advice so old that it comes in Latin as well as in English:  "Let the buyer beware."  Caveat emptor.  It hasn't changed just because of the internet.

Newtech Becomes Oldtech Rapidly

Our standard wall plug for appliances, lamps, and the like in the U.S. has two simple  flat-blade prongs, with one prong broader than the other.   This form prevents improper polarization, which is a danger in some types of electrical devices. 

It wasn't always that way.  Plugs used to have two flat blades of equal breadth.  I still think of the current configuration as the "new" style plug, and in the back of my mind, I harbored the impression it was introduced perhaps ... 20 years ago.   Lately, though, I found out the big change in wall plugs was actually introduced in 1962, exactly fifty years ago.

How time flies!  Other changes, too have sometimes escaped me.  Care to guess about the chimsel (CHMSL - "center high mount stop lamp,") better known as the brake light in the center of the rear window on your car?  I've just checked and that's only been around since 1986.  But old habits die hard, and I remember having a devil of a time when my 2003 Volvo was telling me I had a brake light out ... yet I'd go to the back of the car and look, and they were "both" working!   I replaced both bulbs but the dashboard continued to insist a light was out.   Embarrassingly, it took a visit to the service center before I realize my problem. 

I can also recall returning from assignment in Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s and being puzzled by the electronic gas pump, which by then was common in the U.S. but not in Yugoslavia.  I had no idea how to get gas out of that thing the first time I saw it!  But try to find one of those old-fashioned mechanical pumps now.

The lesson I take from this is ... I'm old!  Well no, that is true but it's not the lesson.  The lesson is that minor technological changes in the way we do things can seem troublesome or costly at first (the CHMSL was very controversial when first introduced because it added to the cost of cars), but very quickly become second nature.  The "new" can take over from the old to the point that the "old" hardly seems to exist any longer.  This is self-evident in the case of high-tech like cell phones, but I like these examples because they demonstrate the same is true for much less esoteric changes.

It;s good news for those who advocate burying power lines to reduce outages.  If we had begun burying lines even two decades ago, in every new development and in every installation that was razed and replaced, we'd have the job more than half done by now.  We need to start somewhere.

Do You Pay More Because Of Your Zip Code?

I had long heard that in the Washington, DC area, service providers would charge more to customers they considered to be in better-off areas than to others.  Often, since I live in northern Virginia, the story was that generally people were charged more for the same job in Virginia than in neighboring Maryland.  True?  I never confirmed it.

But Washington Post columnist John Kelly seems to have found that there is some foundation for this belief.  I quote him here in full because a link might not lead you to the right spot (this is one of several items in his column of September 18):

Ratepayers

“The Potomac rate.” Until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard that expression.

What is it? It’s what happens when a plumber, electrician or other service
provider pulls up to your house, sees that you live in a nice part of town,
figures you earn a decent salary and decides to charge you more than what he’d
charge someone who lives in a different Zip code.

Does that really happen?

“I think most firms don’t do that,” said Robert Krughoff,
president of Washington Consumers’ Checkbook. “But there are firms of
all kinds.”

Some firms, Robert said, “try to squeeze every penny out of a customer, and
one way to do that is to, first of all, have flexible pricing and, second of
all, to pass judgment on the customer based on something they see. And a home is
certainly such a thing.”

The challenge with evaluating the cost of a service is that it isn’t like
buying a gallon of milk. “It’s not like going in and seeing a price on a shelf,”
Robert said. “People have to shop around.”

Getting estimates from multiple companies is critical, he said. His
organization does undercover price comparisons and often finds a huge swing
between the lowest and highest quote for the same job. For example, when it
rated plumbers in 2009, the job I needed done — reseating a leaking toilet — had
a range of $70 to $347. I paid $317.

Here’s the real kicker: “We find no relationship between quality and price in
local service markets,” Robert said.

So, it's certainly true that prices can vary wildly for the same job.  Is this geography-based?   Very possibly.  Check out the follow-up column Kelly wrote after hearing from several of his readers.  There is plenty of anecdotal evidence out there, plus at least one contractor who admits it happens.

So much data is available in the 21st century, regarding things we used to consider private; our income levels for one thing, and our political preferences for another. The former leads to variable pricing for services; the latter to ever-more-extreme gerrymandering of electoral districts.  The best advice, I suppose, is to get several estimates for work you need done.  You might also want to check sites like Angie's List, which ask their raters to indicate the prices they pay.

Even that won't fully guarantee you're treated equally if you live in a "posher" zip code.  And, it's a trend that may get worse.  Many of the smaller, family-owned local businesses who provide services ranging from plumbing to HVAC may not have full access to all the sophisticated data-plucking that bigger outfits can use; but some day they probably will.  

 

Of Drivers And Copilots

I don't spend much time reading about cars, but Warren Brown's "On Wheels" column today caught my eye, indicating as it does that the fancy new electronic gadgetry on the Ford Explorer doesn't work very well. 

Brown doesn't say much about exactly what the problem is, except that there seem to be a lot of bugs in the software, and connectivity for such tools as smart phones and tablets seems to lacking in some respects.  It all has to do with drivers' (and families') expectations about what a vehicle is for.  No longer for driving, apparently, but for its ability to provide the entertainment and constant sensory stimulation our high tech society demands.

Clearly, engineers missed the mark here.  Not a unique occurrence.  Just this week we have news about the new iPhone 5 and the problems with parts of its software, including the maps.  Brown is right in asserting that missteps of this kind can kill off demand for a popular item in a big hurry; ironically, hurry - the rush to get something to market - is usually the factor that's responsible for the error in the first place. Other times, I suspect engineers (or their corporate bosses) just don't get what consumers really expect.

I had turned to the article originally because I thought it might relate to a different problem.  Recently I saw a TV ad for this vehicle, touting "My Ford Touch," the very system that Brown finds inadequate, and showing a photo of it.  Like the Iraqi army before the juggernaut of the mighty U.S. military machine, I was shocked and awed.  

Do all cars look like this now?  (My car is ten years old so I'm not sure).  But here, right in front of the driver, is an entire panel of multicolored buttons, flashers, bells, and whistles worthy of a space ship.  My immediate impression was that Ford has presented its driver with a display that in and of itself is distracting, but even worse, presents supposedly-easy and direct links to a multiplicity of things most drivers really shouldn't be dealing with while driving. This is deliberately engineered distracted-driverism.  If you're driving one of these things, you need a copilot.  But it does seem a step backward, if a function formerly requiring one person now requires two. 

 

Bagging Trees

If your part of the country is like mine, you've probably seen a big increase, over the past five or more years, in those green bags full of water that people, landscapers, and institutions put around their trees to water them.  The most common brand is Tree Gator; online I also see others under the Oasis brand.

I've always wondered about their effectiveness, because:  

 
• Generally, gardeners and horticulturalists will advise that trees should be watered at the outer circle of the root zone to encourage a strong, extensive root system.  These bags, on the other hand, water only within inches of the tree's trunk. 
• Experts say to water deeply and extensively - really soak the ground around the tree -- for the same reason.  But the bags deliver only an average of about 20 gallons over the course of 8 or 10 hours; it sounds like a lot, but it's not much for a tree. 
• Gardening columns abhor the mounding of mulch around treetrunks to heights of 5-12 inches because it encourages rootlets on the trunk and near the surface, as well as harboring insects.  Yet the bags wrap the tree trunk to an even greater height and if left in place will very obviously cause the same problems. I've heard the bags being touted as protecting the tree trunk, but trunks don't need protection, that's why they have bark. 
• Finally: If like Joyce Kilmer you think you shall never see a sight as lovely as a tree, consider the aesthetics of these bags: they're ugly.

Naturally, given the popularity of the bags I assumed I must be missing something.  I decided to do some deductive field work, which led to this:

As this photo, taken in August, shows, watering bags make no difference. Moreover, just a few blocks away, trees in a median strip without bags make the same point in a different way:  Some are dead, some are not.  

The advantage the bags have, I think, is in timesaving for large-scale landscapes such as the grounds of an office building or median strips on a public roadway (above).  That sort of "gardener" can't expend the money for alternatives (personnel time and/or other watering methods like underground soakers).  The trend makes some sense for them.  But then the idea spread - like mountains of mulch - into the public consciousness as a way of handling trees in the home garden.  

Which in my view is wrong.  There are better ways for the residential gardener.  Just turn a hose on low and let it trickle at the edge of the root zone for an hour or two in several different spots. (For any tree larger than a  one-inch twig, the root zone is or should be well beyond the skirt of that treebag.)  Or try my favorite, the Ross Root Feeder (see link in right margin), which attaches to the end of a hose and lets you inject water and nutrients a couple of feet underground, where more of it reaches the roots directly.  Either way, you obviate watering too close to the trunk, or harming the tree by covering its trunk.  

If you already have bags, they can serve some purpose on very small trees, but reduce the problems of covering the trunk by filling them, letting them drain, and removing them right away.

 

 

Drab Rides

While driving around last week I thought how drab our personal cars are these days.   Ninety percent of private vehicles on the roads, it seems, are silver, white, or black, and now nudging into the picture a "bronzy" color that's also pretty nondescript.  In between, you'll catch sight of an occasional green, red (usually more "burgundy"), blue or yellow.  Then I noticed local columnist John Kelly's recent column on the subject, plus a follow-up piece, so I guess I'm not the only one to notice.

In the second piece especially, Kelly looks for explanations for color-avoidance but I think many of the old ones, which we've all heard, are no longer valid (if they ever were).  Were cops more likely to track, and pull over, red cars for speeding?  Even if you think this might have been the case in bygone decades, speed cameras and radar guns are color-blind now.  There may be something to the suggestion that in these bad economic times, more people pick somber colors.  But my own guess is that people may go with the basics because they don't want to stand out on the highway - they prefer not to be identifiable, for security reasons.  They know they're going to do stupid things - cut someone off, sit forever at a light while on the phone, and such, and they don't want their vehicles to be "memorable."  Dealers may also lean toward stocking a high percentage of cars that blend in with asphalt, knowing that they could end the model year taking a bath on those bright yellow models they inventoried.   Blandness spreads further if people who might like a more colorful paint job have to wait to get it.

My own color chronology has been more varied.  In the 60s, I ended up with a hand-me-down 1954 Nash Ambassador in a bright green color as my first car.  In 1968 I rammed that into the back of another vehicle, bent the frame, and had to junk it.  Next came a white Chevy.  After the army I bought my first new car:  Tan.  From there it was white again, briefly; a "blue" that could barely be distinguished from gray; burgundy, teal, and currently silver.  So I still have lots of options:  a real blue, red, or even yellow.

Especially considering that cars all look stylistically alike now (all sedans in existence nowadays share a single, boring profile, and all SUVs another one), maybe it's time to expand our palette.

Land Line Phones - An Endangered Species?

I'm sure we've all heard about the trend for people to give up their old-fashioned wired telephone in favor of cell phones.  Maybe we've even taken that step ourselves, although personally I still have both.

Now, however, phone companies are proposing they should be relieved of the government requirement that every home be wired for telephone service.  They say that with popular tastes turning to mobile phones, and business dropping off, there's no further reason to continue to provide mandatory fixed-line service to every residence.

Not to be a fuddy-duddy when it comes to new technology, but I believe we aren't quite done with landline phone service.  The requirement should remain in some form, if not universally, then possibly whenever a consumer requests it. 

First is the cost issue.  For low-income people, a cell phone is considerably more expensive than the wired line.    The companies know, but do not publicize, this fact, which of course also means that they make a lot more profit on a cell phone.  Many of them have already sold their landline business to be operated by secondary companies anyway. QED. 

Reliability is another issue.  Proponents of the wired phone point out for example that there are still remote areas where cell phone service ranges from nil to spotty.  Anyway, your location doesn't have to be remote.  Here in Arlington, Virginia, less than five crow-miles from the nation's capital, even using the nation's widest-spread coverage and best-rated sound quality, my wireless signal is often weak.  And sound quality on cell phones is often very poor even if your signal is strong; nowhere near the quality you get on a wired phone.  With increasing demand for bandwidth for phones, tablets, and the like, wouldn't it be a good thing to have some of that traffic being carried on those old-fashioned wires?

Last:  Convenience.  I think it could be quite annoying to use a cell phone as my only phone.  That would mean far too many calls coming in where I don't want them (in meetings? in theaters?  while driving?).  I know that many people who use their cells full-time just turn them off most of the time, but that's annoying too, if you're trying to reach them.

We live an era of laisser-faire, so no doubt the telecom companies will soon get their way. If so, let's hope the Supreme Court will take note that in this case -- where corporate folks are pushing it -- requiring people to buy a product they don't need (cell phones), so that they can pay their full share of a cost they might otherwise skate on (telecom company profits) doesn't seem unconstitutional at all. 

Paper Or Plastic?

These days, that question -- "paper or plastic?" -- makes us think of shopping bags.  There was a time when we might have thought it applied to how you were going to pay for your purchases.  However you pay, basic shopping is increasingly costing consumers a few extra cents or dollars, as more and more jurisdictions are imposing a tax for each bag.  The latest seems to be Montgomery County Maryland, DC's close-in, well-off, and eco-trendy suburb.  The District of Columbia slapped a tax on bags a year ago, but it includes only grocery and liquor stores; Montgomery's applies to any bag, any time.

I understand the reasons for attempting to reduce bag use:  Those plastic bags flying around everywhere (I picked up two out of my front yard this morning), ending up forever snagged in trees, adding to the ugliness of our surroundings.  And despite claims by their makers, the plastic bags aren't really biodegradable in any useful sense, particularly as most of them never make it into landfills.   Paper bags, on the other hand, not only hold more but are reused with much more frequency, and ARE degradable (you can even shred them onto your compost pile). 

Hence I conclude that the true target of bag taxes should be plastic bags only.  The fact they target all bags instead is something I attribute to a doctrine I'll call "misguided fairness."  Makers of plastic film would whine and scream if their bags were singled out, and that would just be a hassle for local governments, so they consciously choose to do the wrong thing.  (And besides, an extra nickel per paper bag won't hurt the county's bottom line, either.)   If we must use tax policy to engineer society (and I'm not certain that we must) it would be better, though more difficult, to recognize that not all bags are created equal, and to be realistic about the problem we're trying to solve.   Misguided fairness won't ever push plastic bag-makers to better solutions.

Now that the law is in place effective January 1, by the way, I'd suggest those who are acquiring reusable bags get cloth or canvas, rather than those made of all those synthetics and plastics, because you're going to want to wash these bags occasionally, and because eventually, they'll need to be recycled too.

A Crash In The Merge Lane - AT&T

How do I love it that the AT&T/T-Mobile merger seems doomed to disapproval?  Let me count the ways:

1.  The public interest will be served.  No sane and disinterested observer could look at this plan and harbor any doubt that it would constitute a serious reduction of competition.  AT&T is/was hoping to silence an annoying competitor by buying it, and not coincidentally as I understand, to acquire and monopolize spectrum.

2.  Consumers will be served.  It wasn't just the huge share of the cell-service market that the new entity would have had (effectively split only with its equally giant competitor, Verizon).  Among today's carriers, T-Mobile has been the innovator in cell phone services, offering new arrangements and lower prices that forced the "big guys" to sit up and take notice.  AT&T, by contrast, was the carrier that provided inferior services at high prices.  There is no doubt which of those business models would have had the upper hand in the planned merged company.    

3.  AT&T's arrogance may suffer a minor blow.  The company was insufferably cocky that its planned deal would go through, advertising as if it were a done deal, and chatting freely with business columnists about how it was certain of approval because of its lobbying influence.

4.  Lying was not rewarded.  Those ads the company was running were full of made-up statistics about creating 96,000 new jobs, a claim that has been largely debunked.  Most people recognize, I think, that mergers seldom if ever result in the creation of jobs; mass firings are far more likely.  AT&T also puffed up its chest with patriotic pride, claiming it would repatriate 5,000 offshore jobs because the U.S. is a great place to do business.  That wouldn't be a bad thing, and sounds as if it might have been doable; but there was that nagging question - if the company believed so strongly in the U.S. as a business environment, why were those jobs offshored in the first place?

All in all, the whole undertaking of the merger was hypocritical.  No one but AT&T execs need lament its failure (if indeed that is the final outcome).   If the merger doesn't go through, I would not be at all surprised to find that AT&T was out of the wirelesss business within a couple of years.   That might (or might not) reduce the number of players in the field, but at least it would have come about as the result of real competition.  (Ah, competition, a lass beloved and coveted by CEOs when seen from afar, yet unwelcome in their own beds.)       

Fire In The Volt

A GM Volt caught fire weeks after being tested for side-impact crash safety.  Regulators are now "scrutinizing" the fire risk of lithium-ion batteries.  I guess it's OK for them to "scrutinize," but let's hope they don't go too far worrying about this.

Instead, let's recognize that the automobile is an inherently dangerous machine.  It's heavy, it moves fast, it's mostly driven by idiots, and (until these new electric models came along) it's a rolling firebomb because it's loaded with gasoline.  We'd be fools to expect that it can be made completely "safe."

It's known that the batteries can catch fire if penetrated by steel.  But they're protected for that reason, and this test model flamed up only two weeks after the crash test in which it presumably was damaged.  If it catches fire, it will burn hot but won't explode.   So relatively speaking, shouldn't we just concede that fully electric cars, which contain batteries and not gasoline, are actually safer than the traditional combustion engine models, and leave it at that?