A winter morning

 
 Photo by Michael

Recommended maple syrups

First place: Gingerbrook Farm, Vermont Grade A Dark Amber, 2012 season

Produced by Robert Machin and Family, South Washington, VT 05675. I found this maple syrup at Upper Valley Coop in White River Junction in 2012. I didn’t try the other grades.

Second place: Merck Forest and Farmland Center, Vermont Grade A Medium Amber, 2010 season

Produced in Rupert, VT. Organic. Excellent flavor for a medium amber, which I usually find too mild. Their dark amber and grade B both had a distinct aftertaste in 2010, which is why I chose the medium amber.

Free at last

Parking signs

NYC has unveiled new parking signs, which are being heralded as a triumph of information design.

Wow! White space!

The new signs make the days and times smaller, so they’re harder to read at a distance. When you’re driving around looking for parking, you want to be able to read the sign quickly. What leaps out? 3 and 6! Is that helpful?

The new signs still don’t provide the key information that parking is free with no time limit at all times not posted.

And the new signs are organized by restriction, rather than by time. It’s Sunday at 2 pm, and you need to decide whether you’re allowed to park. You have to read everything to decide there are no restrictions.

Why not organize the signs by time, and make the unrestricted times explicit:

And if you really want to save space and continue to keep the free times implicit, you can leave those parts out:

There are a lot of possible improvements here, including making the times larger so they can be read more easily at a distance. There may be other restrictions that make this layout cumbersome. But if you’re rethinking the signs, why not actually rethink the signs?

Why your W-2 is late

Having trouble logging in to the Social Security Administration’s Business Services Online website at https://secure.ssa.gov/acu/LoginWeb/loginHandler.do? Try putting your user id and password entirely into lowercase. Yes, their system may display it in uppercase. Yes, they may mail you an uppercase or mixed case user id or password. Yes, you may have been able to log in previously with uppercase or mixed case, and you may still be able to. They aren’t really sure what’s happening.

Having trouble with the SSA BSO site removing services from your employer account? That’s because their back end doesn’t believe you should pay wages unless you also receive wages, so they periodically go through their accounts and remove the ability to submit wage reports.

Having trouble with the SSA BSO site not letting you add services, and sending you in an infinite loop? That’s because they believe you have some other account already active. You can create as many accounts as you want, but you can’t do anything with them.

Having trouble with the SSA BSO site locking you out? Don’t click on “forgot password” or they will freeze your account, mail you a new password in 2-3 weeks, and not allow you file your wage reports until that turns up. And try not to go so long between logging in. You may only need to file wage reports once a year, but they’d like to see you more often than that. Hurt their site’s feelings and they may disable your account.

Having trouble with the SSA BSO site’s security questions? Give up. They’ve told me that it’s impossible to have an account without security questions, that my account has no security questions, that I can’t log in without correctly answering the security questions that aren’t on my account, that it’s impossible to add security questions, and that it’s impossible to delete an account and start over.

Having trouble with the SSA BSO site and not getting help from the regular reps? Try calling 888-772-2970 and ask for technical assistance. Want to fax them a letter authorizing yourself to file wage reports? Try faxing a letter to 570-706-7875, and don’t think too hard about the security theater. They have no idea what they are trying to accomplish or prevent, but they know they want to impress you. So sit back, relax, and let your mind go empty. They have.

Updated to add: They now auto-expire passwords after 90 days, even though many users only need to log in every 12 to 13 months.

Amazon and sales taxes

Amazon has agreed to collect sales tax in Massachusetts starting next fall. This is supposedly good news for local businesses.

Except that the prospect of being forced to collect sales tax is what stopped Amazon from building local warehouses and offering cheap overnight or even same day delivery. How will local businesses compete then? Local businesses don’t have many advantages when competing with Amazon, but actually being local was one of them. So much for that advantage.

Surprise! Lactaid milk contains lactose (if you buy the wrong Lactaid milk)

Here’s an example of the lies that Lactaid (McNeil Pharmaceuticals and Hood Dairy) is spreading:

“No matter what type of Lactaid Milk you buy, you are getting 100% farm-fresh, delicious milk with all the nutrients and none of the lactose.”

The reason why Lactaid’s statement is false is that Lactaid makes a milk that isn’t lactose-free. Their “70% lactose free” Lactaid milk contains lactose. You may not have seen this milk, since many supermarkets that carry the “100% lactose free” Lactaid milk don’t carry this badly-labeled alternative. But sometimes it turns up, looking like Lactaid milk, fooling customers.

No big deal, right? Some lactose is probably the same as no lactose. Except for people who are actually lactose-intolerant. Since those folks are the core demographic for Lactaid, I’m baffled as to why Lactaid would risk the health of their customers in order to sell a completely unnecessary product. Why does Lactaid want to make people sick? How does Lactaid benefit from people asking “Why did this Lactaid milk make me sick?”

Lactaid wants people to believe that their brand means “100% lactose free.” They want people to believe that so much that they write advertising copy saying so. They don’t even admit that they sell a Lactaid milk containing lactose on their website where they supposedly show all of their products. Lactaid lies about it on Facebook and on the telephone. And all for what? So that Lactaid can fool people into buying a product that will hurt them?

Lactaid’s 70% lactose free milk contains lactose, and not just trace amounts. This isn’t cross-contamination. This is market segmentation at the cost of people getting sick because they trusted Lactaid.

My local supermarket this morning said that they do not want to carry the 70% lactose free Lactaid milk, and their working theory is that Lactaid is deliberately shipping it to stores that haven’t ordered it in an attempt to move the product. If that’s true, then Lactaid is lying to stores as well as hurting consumers.

Milk straight out of the cow contains approximately 5% lactose. I haven’t yet heard from the FDA whether I can legally label regular milk as “95% lactose free.”

Update: I have had the following correspondence with Lactaid.

• Hi Michael,
  Our Consumer Care Center informed me that you have concerns around our LACTAID® 70% Lactose Free Milk. This item was actually our original LACTAID® milk product. At the time it was launched, the technology was not as advanced as today, and it was possible to eliminate only 70% of the lactose found in regular milk. Lactose intolerance varies greatly among individuals and experts agree that most people with this condition can tolerate low levels of lactose in their diet. We’re now able to provide milk that is 100% lactose free. The product you contacted us about is clearly marked as 70% lactose free and the packaging looks much different from the 100% lactose free options.
  
  I apologize if your original inquiry was met with some confusion, and hope that your questions have been answered. Please contact us again if you would like any additional information.
  
  Best,
  Maureen Conway
  Director, Nutritional Affairs
  
• Reply from Michael
  
  The phrase "70% lactose free" makes no sense to anyone I've spoken to, since milk straight out of the cow is 95% lactose free.
  
  Lactaid's own reps on the phone and on facebook do not believe that the "70% lactose free" product exists. They have told me flat out that Lactaid does not distribute a milk containing lactose.
  
  Lactaid's own website avoids any mention of this "70% lactose free" product.
  
  The FDA clearly says that the phrase "lactose free" should not be used on a product that contains lactose. This product contains lactose. Why not use the phrase "reduced lactose"? And why market it under the Lactaid brand, teaching customers not to trust your brand?
  
  And the excuse about the product being clearly marked on the packaging is truly hard to swallow. People with food concerns are taught to read the ingredients list and nutritional info box, not every word everywhere on the package. Furthermore, your company has spent a fortune advertising your brand of milk as universally lactose free, and you splash your brand name all over this packaging. If your advertising is effective at all, customers concerned about lactose may justifiably see "Lactaid" at the top and stop reading. Your advertising supports that decision. Your information for health care providers says that all of your milks are lactose free, leading doctors to tell patients to choose Lactaid milk.
  
  I have personally been buying Lactaid milk for many years. I have never seen this "70% lactose free" milk in a store until this fall, because my local stores did not carry it. Until this fall, I had no idea that it existed. Until this fall, I believed that all Lactaid milks were 100% lactose free. (And you clearly want customers to continue to believe that lie.) When a friend or family member wanted to use milk as in ingredient in something I could eat, I told them to buy Lactaid milk. As it turns out, buying the wrong Lactaid milk would make me very ill.
  
  You are expecting every person who is trying to avoid lactose for themselves or for someone else to disbelieve your advertising, disbelieve your information for health care providers, ignore Lactaid's own employees, read every word on every grocery item they purchase, and figure out that "70% lactose free" does not actually mean lactose free. You expect every potential customer to be fully literate and to be fully numerate. And you are comfortable with the notion that people who trust your brand will be made ill if any of those expectations are not met. I am appalled.

German citizenship for children born outside of Germany

If you’re a German citizen, your child also has German citizenship. Unless the child is born outside of Germany and you fail to register their birth with the appropriate office in Germany before the child is 1 year old.

I don’t know what the rules are for adopted children, where the finalization or even the placement sometimes does not happen until the child is more than a year old.

Every three seconds

Too many numbers

We have an opportunity to rethink our phone lines and phone numbers, since it's no longer urgent if an agency can't reach us. We also have a prompt to do so now that our home line is going up in cost from $240/year to $600/year.

Our current setup feels overly complicated. We have two landlines at the house. One is for home ($600/year) and one is for business ($720/year), but really we have two lines so that we can both be on the phone at the same time. I have a Chicago-based number ($25/year) through maxemail to receive voicemail for home when calls are forwarded there, and a different Chicago-based number ($15/year) through maxemail to receive voicemail and faxes for work. I have a remote call forward number ($348/year) which was my advertised business phone line, and a different one ($360/year) which was my advertised business fax line. Plus two cell numbers ($50-$100/year each), though we don't really use our cell phones much, and three Google Voice numbers (free) that we're not doing anything with yet. That's $2218/year in total, and we don't have smartphones. Sigh.

For actual phone numbers, I need to keep the remote call forward numbers around somehow. I'm asking maxemail if they can port the remote fax number over to them, since $84/year through maxemail would be better than $360/year through Verizon. That seems like an obvious step to take. It reduces costs, even if it doesn't reduce the total number of lines.

If I could port the remote voice number directly over to my current business landline, I could save another $360/year. Verizon won't let me do that. I may be able to port it to a forwarding service like Google Voice, if I can convince Verizon to let me port the number over to a cell phone first and then port it from the cell phone to Google Voice. All so that Google Voice can send my phone calls straight to my business line. I'm nervous about what happens if my remote number gets stuck on the cell phone and can't be forwarded back out.

If maxemail allowed conditional messages based on the forwarding line, I'd only need one maxemail account instead of two or three. But that's not going to happen any time soon, and their service works really well as it is, so I don't want to mess with it.

If at some point you try to reach us and can't, try email. We have no current plans to mess with that. But any of our phone numbers may suddenly stop working as expected, or go away entirely, because 11 phone numbers is too many when only 2 of them are important. It's not that we don't want to talk to you on the phone; apparently we REALLY want to talk to people on the phone.

Update on November 27, 2012

STEP 1: I've ported the remote fax number to maxemail, which went very smoothly.

STEP 2: I've signed up for a FIOS installation, which should take over our home phone number as part of a package where the phone line basically costs nothing for at least two years. We'll lose the home voicemail that we're used to, but supposedly FIOS can forward voicemails to email just like maxemail has been doing. We'll also lose our good international calling from the home line, so any international calls will have to go through the business line. (I realized that the $2218/year total didn't include our separate long distance bill of $120/year, which could in theory drop by $40/year if we move all outgoing domestic long distance calls over to the FIOS line.)

STEP 3: I'm considering porting the remote voice number to maxemail. This is the public work number which is on every book, catalog, user manual, and postcard I've created in the past 18 years. If I do this, the number would always go straight to voicemail.

If step 2 works, I'll have reduced the total from $2338/year to $1462/year, which is more reasonable. Step 3 would bring it down to $1198/year (or persuading Verizon to replace my home business number with my remote business voice number would bring it down to $1114/year).

STEP 4: Replace the business landline with a smartphone, since the cost of a smartphone is not a lot higher than the $720/year cost of that landline. Open question: keep the copper line open with few features, useful for extended power outages? With a small child and a dog, how long are we really going to stick it out around here during an extended power outage anyway? Small added savings would be only needing 1-line phones in the house (saving $200 when I replace the dying cordless phones next year), not needing my $50/year basic cell, and perhaps not needing the $120/year long distance service at all.

Update on January 30, 2014


STEP 5: Home and work landline numbers now go to two smartphones (one for me, one for Lisa), and the landlines have been disconnected. Both smartphones use maxemail for voicemail. Cost is similar to what the two landlines cost.


STEP 6: FIOS took over the remote voice number, and that now goes to all of our landline phones. Savings: $360/year.

STEP 7: Our long distance account has been closed, since we no longer have any lines where we can choose a long distance carrier. Savings: $120/year.

Notes for the future: If we need to replace phones in the house, we can get 1-line phones. It’s hard to imagine needing a second landline as long as cell phones keep working. If David needs a phone, he can get a cell phone.


Current cost for cell phones: $1080/year. Voicemail lines: $40/year. Fax line: $84/year. FIOS business line: free, since we have television and internet with FIOS anyway. Total cost right now: $1204/year, including data on our smartphones. And we had to buy smartphones.

Otter Point

I’m really torn between these two approaches to this wave sequence at Otter Point in Acadia National Park. The series above focuses on a single enormous splash, the shape forming and unforming. The series below adds an anchoring foreground, a sense of a vantage point, and the balanced timing of the foreground splash receding as the more distant splash explodes. If printed large and hung at eye level, the bottom sequence should still allow the viewer to focus on the more distant splash.



I think the top sequence is more successful because of its simplicity, and the bottom sequence is more interesting.

Five identical visits to the chiropractor

Billed in different combinations, processed for varying amounts.

7/25
98942: $40
97012: $0

7/3
98942: $40
97110: $0

6/28
98940: $32
97110: $15

6/13
98942: $40
97110: $15

5/9
98942: $40
97012: $10

So 98942 (adjustment of 5 or more regions) is worth $40, and 98940 (adjustment of 1-2 regions) is worth $32. 97012 is worth $0 or $10 at random. 97110 is worth $0 or $15 at random. For any given trip to the chiropractor, there’s no way to tell whether I’ll be billed for a 98942 adjustment or 98940 adjustment. The billing could theoretically turn up as 98941 and just hasn’t recently. There’s no way to tell whether I’ll be billed for 97012 (mechanical traction) or 97110 (therapeutic exercise). Neither seems related to reality, but one of them is always billed. The total could be $32, $40, $42, $47, $50, or $55, all for the same basic visit to the chiropractor with the same adjustment done.

Since I’m within my deductible, I actually pay all charges after the insurance company rolls the dice. This isn’t just an exercise in theory. 20 visits a year should total $640, but can actually total up to $1100. That’s a bit of a difference over time, and makes it difficult to plan for.

It’s a relief to have this figured out even this much, because it had been a black box for ages while the billing codes were entirely hidden.

Amazon and the Out of Print lie

Amazon is listing some of our books as “Out of Print” when they are not out of print. This misinformation has both business and legal ramifications to the extent that anyone believes Amazon.

“Out of Print” is a long-standing publishing term meaning that a book is no longer available from the publisher and is not expected to become available again in the near future.

Amazon is free to say that they do not have copies of a book. They are free to say that they don’t want to have copies of a book, or that they don’t like a book. But they are not free to lie to customers by saying that a book is out of print when it isn’t. That lie can cause a customer to give up on finding a way to buy the book. That lie can damage the reputation of a publisher who keeps books in print. That lie can convince an author that the rights should be reverting back to the author if the contract allows for that when a book goes out of print. That lie can cause someone to think that photocopying or scanning the book is ok if they believe that they are allowed to do so (or should be allowed to do so) with out of print books.

I have seen this same misleading behavior from Amazon before. I talked with someone in their legal department many years ago, who agreed that Amazon should stop doing that and who promptly made sure that our books were not wrongly listed as being out of print. And yet Amazon is back to the same old dirty tricks (or perhaps never really stopped).

One of these banks is not like the others

I’ve received five letters from banks in the past five days:

American Express: Sorry about Sandy, let us know if we can help in any way.
Capital One: Sorry about Sandy, we’re here to help.
Citicards: Sorry about Sandy, we might help somehow.
Citizens Bank: Sorry about Sandy, here are some specific ways we could help.
Elavon: That bogus one-time fee that we shouldn’t have charged? We’re making that an annual fee.

One of these companies has a bigger lock-in on their customers than the others.

Tuesday

At the county and state level, the only contested races on our ballot on Tuesday will be for State Rep and for Middlesex Sheriff.

I’m delighted to be voting for Carl Sciortino for State Rep—he is caring, smart, and honest, he listens to his constituents and his conscience, he talks to people, and he works really hard. I can’t imagine anyone better for the job.

The Middlesex Sheriff’s race is between Koutoujian, who was appointed to the job recently, and Petrone, who is a corrections officer who touts his lack of political experience. They both seem ok. I’m voting for Koutoujian, who has been proactive in the job about working with more communities to help clean up graffiti and vandalism.

I’m voting yes on all three ballot questions. The folks behind Q1 (right to repair) reneged on the deal they struck to get a compromise bill passed by the legislature, and I’m unhappy about that dishonesty. But their ballot question is good for car owners and independent repair shops, and my mechanic (who I trust) is in favor of the measure.

Q2 is the physician-assisted suicide question. I wish nobody ever wanted to use this option, and maybe someday we’ll make enough strides in pain management and palliative care to remove the need. We’re not there yet.

Q3 is medical marijuana. The arguments against it sound like paranoid fantasies.