I’ll be loyal to any brand that deserves it

It’s been an exciting month on the appliances front.

Our Samsung refrigerator (less than 2 years old) has been behaving badly for months. The freezer frosted up constantly, the freezer glides weren’t working correctly, and Samsung was being a real pain to deal with. Lisa and I finally did good cop/bad cop and got Samsung to send a tech to do a warranty repair, and two weeks ago the tech finally replaced a freezer glide and admitted that it was defective. Problem solved.

Two hours later, the Kenmore gas dryer (well over 15 years old) stopped heating up. Lisa’s dad (a mechanic) had been planning to visit later in the week, so we waited for him to show up to start taking things apart. The first YouTube video for the dryer model showed how to check the various electrical components in the back of the dryer for continuity, including a fuse. Bingo. The fuse was busted, Sears had the $16 part only 6 miles away, and now the dryer works.

So we decided to tackle the GE gas range (8 years old). The oven had been whooshing since the winter, and had been getting slower and slower to get up to temperature. And the burners had been pulsing if the oven was on at the same time, which didn’t look right at all. Some web research suggested that it could be the oven igniter, and some further web research turned up some pretty clear video and photos about how to replace the igniter. Amazon had the part for $26 (far better than $93 direct from GE for the identical part), and the second time they shipped it to us the igniter arrived intact. And now our range works.

Yesterday we discovered that the large Frigidaire window air conditioner (7 years old) taking care of our entire first floor had gotten its drain plugged up, and had damaged some floor, some wall, some carpet, and the window. We’re not fixing the air conditioner; replacing it seems like the better plan.

A house can be unending problems, and that can get terribly overwhelming. But the satisfaction of reducing the list of problems and fixing some of those problems ourselves is enormous.

Solar, part 3

A company called SolarFlair is doing the Solarize program for Newton and Brookline, and offering much better base pricing and a 10-year labor warranty rather than SunBug’s 5-year labor warranty. The base pricing goes down to $3.69/watt with SunBug if enough people sign up, while SolarFlair starts at $3.69 and goes down to $3.14. Of course, I don’t live in Newton or Brookline. I wonder how SunBug got the Solarize Medford contract. Perhaps the adders for better panels and other upgrades cost a lot more with SolarFlair.

Aside from the massive uncertainty built into the SREC program (a 5kW system might be worth anywhere from $8000 to $25,000 in SRECs over the next 10 years, or possibly even less than $8000), it turns out we cannot get an enforceable long-term agreement with the city to be able to trim the city-owned shade tree if it grows too tall. Any future city government would be able to unilaterally revoke any such agreement or permit.

And we’d need to add snow guards lower down on the roof to deal with the tendency of solar panels to release their snow cover in one big whoosh, since that avalanche of snow from our roof configuration would be coming straight down at our front steps and our poor abused garden.

The final numbers as I understand them: We could spend about $24,000 up front for a 4.9 kW system, get $3900 back in a state rebate, $1000 back in a state tax credit, and $6000 back in a federal tax credit. That’s a net cost of $13,100. We’d generate about $600/year to $800/year in electricity at today’s 14 cents per kWh. We’d also earn $1000 in SRECs per year, or maybe $1500, or maybe $600, or possibly less or more. Conservative numbers would be $1200 per year payback, and that assumes we don’t have shade problems. If electricity prices go up a lot and the state fixes the SREC price support to be a true floor, the payback could be much better. But the conservative numbers don’t justify the costs right now.

The way to make the economics work are to put up more and cheaper panels, and treat the credit on the roof work as a deduction from the solar. So we spend $20,000 up front, get $4000 back in a state rebate, $1000 back in a state tax credit, and $8000 back in a federal tax credit. That’s a net cost of $7000. At $1200 per year payback, that looks worth it. Barely. And that’s not worth the continuing headache.

Next year solar costs will be different, the SREC program will be different, and some of what I’ve learned will no longer apply. And so it goes, round and round the sun.

Solar, part 2

Well, we got our quote from Sunlight Solar. They are substantially more expensive than SunBug’s proposal, but I also learned a bit more about SRECs and solar finances.

Both companies agree that SunPower panels are much better than everyone else’s panels at the moment. SunBug wants to use the previous generation panels, and Sunlight Solar wants to use the current generation panels.

Sunlight Solar projects about 7% less production than SunBug, which seems reasonably consistent to me given the number of variables.

SunBug said that there’s a price floor of $300 on SRECs. Sunlight Solar says that there is no floor, because the last chance auction isn’t guaranteed to work. Turns out that’s true, which substantially changes the finances. And I’m not thrilled about SunBug lying to me on a huge issue like this. Some folks in the industry think that the last chance auction price of $300 is going to act as a ceiling rather than a floor, and that $150 per SREC is a more likely long-term price. That’s a loss of about $8000 over 10 years from SunBug’s numbers.

And even worse, the current unpredictable SREC scheme is only guaranteed to be available for systems that are approved for interconnection by December 31. After that, systems will likely earn even less with SREC 2, whose rules aren’t set. SunBug won’t guarantee installation by December 31, and is lying to customers about the implications of that deadline.

Meanwhile the city is not being at all cooperative about potential future shade problems from their tree. I would have expected them to understand this issue, since they’re pushing the solar program city-wide and many houses have city-owned trees at least in front.

I still want to install solar if it’s financially reasonable to do so and if we can clear the other hurdles. But the forecast isn’t very sunny.

Solar, part 1

Medford is doing a community push for solar, which convinced me to take another look at solar for our property. The city’s chosen installer is SunBug, and I’ve gotten a proposal from them.

Choosing an installer is tricky. There aren’t a lot, and most haven’t been in business very long. But since they are going to be messing with your roof and your electrical system, you want someone good. There aren’t a lot of reviews. You can see an Excel file of all the companies who have done projects in Massachusetts in the past few years that qualified for a state rebate program. Brightstar Solar gets great reviews, but isn’t doing installations in Medford. Sungevity was very hard to talk to in 2012, and Next Step Living has frighteningly bad reviews, so I’m skipping those two. I’ve been waiting to hear back from Blue Selenium, and Sunlight Solar is coming next week to do a site evaluation.

Direction matters. South would be optimal. On the map, it looks like our unshaded roof faces ESE. SunBug thinks it’s close enough to SE that we’ll be ok.

Pitch matters. Our roof is 45 degrees, which is a decent compromise between wanting steeper in the winter and less steep in the summer.

With both direction and pitch, I’d expect to find decent curves showing the dropoffs in production and calculators that let you see the results. I haven’t found those yet. But solar companies must be using those.

Shading matters. A little shading can have a huge detrimental effect on production since solar panels are wired in series (both within the panel and in a string of panels). The only shading we really have to worry about would be if the tree in the park next door gets much taller, but the problem is that we don’t have the right to trim that tree if it does. Perhaps the city would like to agree to trim that tree if it starts to shade our solar panels?

Roof condition matters. SunBug told us we have to redo our roof before we can install solar. I expect other solar companies will tell us the same thing. We have no leaks, so this is sooner than we would replace the roof otherwise, but roofs don’t last forever.

The electrical panel matters. SunBug told us we need to install a subpanel or redo our main panel in the basement to install solar. My idea of putting a subpanel in the attic to make this easier is apparently not a great idea because the attic gets very hot in the summer, which isn’t great for the wiring.

The choice of panel matters. We can produce a lot more power if we use SunPower 327-watt panels than if we use typical 250-watt panels. The downside is a bit more up-front cost.

Financial assumptions make a huge difference. What will happen to the cost of electricity over the next 10 years? What’s the opportunity cost of the investment? Is SREC income taxable? (At the moment there’s a good argument that SREC income is not taxable, since it’s less than the cost of putting in the panels. But it makes a big difference if it becomes taxable, since that’s the bulk of the payback over the first 10 years.) How does depreciation on the system work with my home office? Will my insurance cover the solar panels? Will the system increase or decrease the house’s value? (Looks like a modest increase in the short term, but my guess is that it won’t matter in the long term.)

Financing matters. About 2/3 of new systems are leased rather than owned. Since we may want to sell in 5-10 years, and leasing makes that harder, we need to own the system.

The roof geometry of the front of our house is terrible for curb appeal. Will a monolithic solar array on the top section make that better or worse? How will a different roof color affect the appearance, since we can choose a different color when we reshingle?

But I like the idea of having more of our electricity come from solar, and this is the step we can take towards that. It’s not an ideal site, and there aren’t ideal conditions here, but it still may pay off in about 7 years (based on some reasonable assumptions). That’s pretty good.

Not buying it

In “The Health Insurance Shell Game,” Nortin M. Hadler and Janet Schwartz lay out some of the insanities in the way we handle health insurance in this country. But towards the end of their post, they start discussing the fact that some treatment options are less effective or ineffective, and suggest a good way to reduce health care costs would be for health insurance to refuse to cover various treatment options.

We should be offered a “high efficacy option” at lower cost than an “any efficacy option” and no one should be offered an option that indemnifies for interventions that have been studied and cannot be shown to offer a clinically meaningful benefit.

There are a few problems with this line of reasoning. First and foremost is that health insurance already refuses to cover a variety of treatments, as many patients with complex or difficult conditions know, and this has not solved the terrible excesses of health care costs.

I disagree with the notion that we can clearly delineate a large new set of treatment options which “cannot be shown to offer a clinically meaningful benefit.” Evidence-based treatment protocols can provide valuable guidance in prioritizing treatment options in the absence of further information, but many patients are not approaching their health care treatment as a blank slate. You (or your doctor) may already know that the treatment most likely to help an arbitrary individual based on statistics will not be effective for you. A study showing that a treatment is ineffective for many or most people does not establish that it cannot help some specific individuals, and we often don’t have a way to determine which individuals a treatment will help without trying it. Medical studies which insurance companies already rely on to deny coverage are hardly infallible; in fact, they are rife with fraud and conflicts of interest, and results often cannot be replicated or directly contradict other studies. When studies of well-known treatment options are repeated, the measured effectiveness appears to decline without a clear explanation. And when we study placebos, a treatment option which we know cannot have any clinically meaningful benefit, we discover that placebos can have significant clinically meaningful benefits.

But none of this matters when we are working to convince you, the beleaguered consumer, that the reason your health insurance premiums are so high is that there are lots of other people pursuing useless treatments. Those other people are spending their days at the hospital for fun, and wasting your money to do it. And when you are denied coverage for a treatment, you should be grateful because it wouldn’t have helped anyway.

If you buy this argument, I’ve got a great insurance policy to sell you.

Waiting for Godot has so much talking

8:00 am: Arrive at courthouse along with other potential jurors. Building is locked. Moral: Do not arrive early.

8:15 am: Courthouse opens. Anyone claiming to be called for jury duty is sent into the building, skipping security entirely. Social worker is yelled at for trying to enter the building, having stupidly assumed that seeing people entering a building means that the building can be entered by people. Moral: Wait for instructions.

8:30 am: Court officer shows up in the jury room to check people in.

8:40 am: More potential jurors arrive, having been waiting at the front of the building since 8:20 with no instructions from anyone there. Court officer scolds them extensively for not having arrived by 8:30. Moral: Do not wait for instructions.


8:45 am: A potential juror tries to ask a question. Court officer scolds her. Moral: Do not ask questions.

8:50 am: Court officer tells us that the judge will show up at 9:00 to say hi, then we’ll watch a video, then she will send us on break from 9:30 until 10:15.

9:10 am: Judge says hi and leaves, court officer starts the video and leaves. The video trumpets the diversity of the jury pool, carefully showing racial and ethnic diversity. 19 white people in the jury pool covertly glance at the only non-white person in the jury pool.

9:30 am: The court officer does not return. Half the jurors leave, deciding we must be on break now. Moral: Do whatever the hell you want, because nobody cares any longer.

The only reading material in the room is four small signs, four romance novels, a variety of magazines from 2011 and 2012, someone’s confidential juror questionnaire, and court paperwork intended for a defendant.

10:30 am: An attorney and client enter the clearly identified jury room, stare at us for a while, and leave. Nobody speaks.

10:45 am: There is a loud despairing wail from the hallway outside the jury room. Nobody blinks.

11:00 am: Court officer pops her head in to tell us that she is not there to tell us anything.

11:15 am: I greet the person who has been sitting next to me for the past three hours. As far as I can tell, this is the first and only conversation between any of the 20 people in the jury pool. He was on the jury for a federal trial a few years ago that went on for four months.

11:30 am: Someone in the hallway outside the jury room starts sobbing.

11:45 am: Court officer reappears and tells us all to go home.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept

This is how scandals should be addressed: head-on, with clear statements and strong principles.

Customer service

I’ve had a very strange experience dealing with Citizens Bank. Someone else wrote a check for $1600 on their account, and Citizens Bank decided to take that money out of my account instead of the correct account. The check image on the statement shows a different account number on that check, so this is a rather obvious bank error.

I’ve spoken to three people at Citizens Bank about this. All three say that this is clearly an error, that Citizens Bank will fix this in a couple of days now that I’ve pointed it out to them, and that Citizens Bank will reverse the low-balance monthly fees that this caused on my account. One person who claimed he was calling from the Chairman’s Office to apologize implied that I must know the person who the check was written to, either failing to comprehend the error or accusing me of attempting to defraud the bank in a truly bizarre manner. Another person first tried to claim that the low-balance monthly fee was still my responsibility, not caused by the Citizens Bank error. And all three said that they could not possibly put the $1600 bank in my account immediately. None seemed at all surprised by the error, or particularly concerned about it.

If I were working for Citizens Bank, I hope I would take a different approach. First, apologize profusely, and say that this error is extremely rare and unacceptable. Second, correct the error immediately. Third, assure the customer that the bank will take care of any fees caused by this error. Fourth, assure the customer that the bank will confirm all of this in writing on the next business day, and ask the customer whether they would prefer to receive that confirmation by mail, fax, or email. That seems like the bare minimum. Going beyond that, I’d like to see the bank offer to waive the fee to mail printed statements on this account, since any sense of trust the customer might have towards Citizens Bank has clearly been misplaced violated. Having a reverse fee schedule for this sort of bank error would improve the sense that the bank is operating in good faith—if they want to charge me $9.99 for not having as much money as they would like in my account for a month, they could pay me $9.99 for having wrongly taken money out of my account. Assign a specific person to take full and direct responsibility for seeing that the error is corrected, and give the customer that person’s contact information. And finally, ask the customer whether there is anything else the bank can do to keep the customer’s business.

And Citizens Bank, if you really want to convey a sense of competence and restore trust, stop calling your customers and asking for their account numbers, social security numbers, or birth dates. That just shows that you neither understand nor care about helping your customers keep their personal information any more secure than you keep their money.

Baby products we have loved

Lotus Travel Crib
http://www.amazon.com/Lotus-Travel-Crib-Portable-Playard/dp/B00AKKDSNG
Lightweight, yet no weight limit. Mesh sides all the way down for maximum airflow.

Fisher Price Rainforest Jumperoo
http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-K6070-Rainforest-Jumperoo/dp/B000LXQVA4/
Stable, durable.

Tiny Love Gymini Bouncer
www.amazon.com/Tiny-Love-Gymini-Bouncer-Yellow/dp/B003GAMMN4/
Unlike other bouncy seats, the toy bars move to the sides to make it easy to put the child in and take him out.

Kolcraft Wonderbug
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00499DU1O
Seat spins. A safe place to stash a baby while doing other things.

UppaBaby Cruz
http://www.amazon.com/UPPAbaby-0071-JKE-Cruz-Stroller-Jake/dp/B0051Y1G4E/
Enormous storage basket. Seat can face forward or back.

Daydream: The Friday Night Service Social Club

Gather a committed core of 6-10 people who regularly do every component in order to get this off the ground. The core means never having too few people to make the evening a bust.

On first Fridays, the host house opens at 5:30 for a quick Friday night service starting at 6:00. (Random idea: instead of a d’var, take a few minutes before the Amidah to let everyone say something they accomplished or hope to let go from the previous week or something they are looking forward to in the following week.) Dinner to follow starting at 7:00, winding down at 9:00. People beyond the core are welcome to join for services and/or dinner as they wish.

On third Fridays, choose a service at a different shul every month (perhaps alternate reform and conservative), followed by dinner back at the host house. For 7:00 pm or later services, gather at the host house for appetizers and then carpool together. For earlier services, meet at the service. People beyond the core are welcome to join for services and/or dinner as they wish.

We get to have our own service once a month. (Anyone who wants to lead is welcome to, and I’m happy to lead as a default.) We can print off some extra Friday night service books from a local Hillel that recently put one together with full transliterations. We get to see what services are like at different shuls without ever being the only newcomer at a service and without having to make our own individual decisions about going somewhere. We get to have a group Shabbat dinner together twice a month. That would work for me.

Trying to choose a shul

Shul A
Hebrew School meets twice a week starting fairly young. More kids?
Tot Shabbat is attended by up to 15-20 tots, though I’m not fond of the person running Tot Shabbat.
Friday night service (18 people) led by the rabbi and cantor didn’t have the feel I’m looking for, and I didn’t like the rabbi’s sermon.
Saturday morning service (12-15 people) led by the cantor was passable, but inaccessible (as expected). Sermon by the cantor was good.
Shul is growing, with lots of young kids. More kid programming.
Good lay leadership.
A little closer to home, membership is significantly less expensive.

Shul B
Hebrew School meets once a week. Fewer kids?
Tot Shabbat is attended by very few tots, though I like the person running Tot Shabbat.
Friday night services (8-15 people) do have the feel I’m looking for, and good sermons.
Haven’t tried Saturday morning service yet. Once a month they have an abbreviated and perhaps more accessible Saturday morning service.
No idea if shul is growing.
Some very friendly and nice people at services.
Adult education seems more likely to be appealing here.
Nice families at the playgroup that meets here, but none seem involved in the shul in any other ways.

To be determined: Saturday morning services at Shul B? Membership count at both shuls? High holiday services? Hebrew School size?

Seeds of innovation

Monsanto patented Roundup-ready soybeans, which are now almost all of the soybeans grown in this country. Any farmer who plants Roundup-ready soybeans has to buy the beans they plant from Monsanto, and it comes with a license that says the farmer is not allowed to replant the next generation of beans.

Along comes a farmer who decides to buy his beans from a grain elevator as if he were using them for feed, with no license and no assurance that the beans are Roundup-ready (but a reasonable guess that most of them are). He plants those beans, harvests them, and keeps some to replant the next year. [Along the way, he uses an herbicide which kills weeds as well as the non-Roundup-ready plants, so the next generation is entirely Roundup-ready, but that’s not really relevant to the decision.]

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto:

“That is because, once again, if simple copying were a protected use, a patent would plummet in value after the first sale of the first item containing the invention. The undiluted patent monopoly, it might be said, would extend not for 20 years (as the Patent Act promises), but for only one transaction. And that would result in less incentive for innovation than Congress wanted.”

I’m heartened that the Supreme Court will soon tamp down the newly efficient used book market, or allow us to insist on royalties to be paid to publishers and authors on used book sales. After all, Congress has promised authors and publishers that copyrights will last for many more decades than patents. We are entitled to our perpetual profits cut of all book purchases. But the newly efficient used book market means that publishers only make money in the first year or two that a book is on the market. This is why we don’t keep old books in print, and why we put out new versions of textbooks as fast as we can, and why book prices are driven up and up. [College bookstores make far more money on textbook sales than publishers do, because college bookstores make money on sales of used books over and over.] This is clearly not what Congress intended, or there would be no reason for copyrights to last for decades. Congress wanted me to have a much greater incentive to write and publish. On that logic, the first sale doctrine clearly should no longer give consumers a right to sell used books.

On its surface, the Supreme Court is focused on self-replicating items like seeds as a unique problem. But a consistent Supreme Court cannot write the quoted passage and then insist that it could not be applied to copyrights.

And by the way, what happens when you receive a patented gene therapy to save your life, and then fail to pay the monthly (or weekly, or daily) survival fee to Pfizer or Merck for your body’s continued replication of new cells containing the patented genes? If you think that’s absurd, you haven’t been farming lately.

The Adobe trap

My objection to Adobe going subscription-only isn’t the price. It’s the fact that my files have future value to me.

I learned something from my old PageMaker files back in the day. I learned that the only thing that will open old PageMaker files is an old copy of PageMaker. So if I want to keep accessing old PageMaker files, I’d better keep an old copy of PageMaker around. And since I publish academic books, not ephemera, I do sometimes need to access those old PageMaker files.

These days I use InDesign CS5. At some point my lovely new InDesign CS5 files will be old InDesign CS5 files. And when that time comes, I’ll still have InDesign CS5 around to open them with, even though I’m sure I’ll have moved on to something new for creating new files.

Adobe has taken that assurance of future accessibility away with subscription-only software. If I use InDesign CC to create a file and I ever want to open it in the future, I’ll have to pay whatever amount Adobe decides to charge at that point in order to run InDesign CC to open it, because I won’t have any way to keep InDesign CC working on my computer on my own. And if Adobe decides to stop licensing InDesign CC at any price? I won’t have any way to open the file at all.

I do core workflow processes using several different versions of Acrobat because Adobe has added, removed, and changed important features with different versions of Acrobat. If I always had to use the latest version of Acrobat, some steps in my workflow would be much harder and some steps would be impossible. Subscription-only software is a disaster for anyone trying to set up a consistent complex workflow, because that workflow is vulnerable to whatever changes Adobe decides to push out in their software. Why invest resources in creating a workflow that could literally become wasted effort at any moment?

The marzipan experiments, part 1

Odense marzipan: slightly starchy and a little sticky, not very sweet.

Mixed with dried grated orange peel: nice orange flavor, but the gritty/chewy texture of the peel threw everything off.

Mixed with orange extract: stronger orange flavor, great orange nose, integrated well, but a little bitter. (Might be better if the alcohol evaporated longer.)

Mixed with ground cardamom: flavors didn’t really mix, so I’d only recommend if you particularly want to taste cardamom by itself.

Mixed with orange extract and ground cardamom: both flavors brought out the bitter in each other, and the result was terrible. Never try this again.

Mixed with orange extract and granulated vanilla sugar: the vanilla sugar barely cut the bitterness of the orange extract, and added a graininess that didn’t help the mouth feel.

Mixed with maple syrup: a nice sweetness balance, very nice flavor mix with good integration, great maple nose, and distinctly different from marzipan by itself. Hard to mix together. You have to like both marzipan and maple syrup individually, of course. It might be worth comparing this to simple maple cream.

MA Senate primary

Feels like we’ve had a few Senate elections in Massachusetts recently. The 2013 version of the Senate primary is tomorrow, and I’m voting for Markey—he will be a much better Senator than Lynch would be. What I find exciting, though, is that I can then vote for Carl Sciortino in the fall to take Markey’s seat in Congress.

Most importantly, though, go vote on Tuesday!