Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I finally got new glasses. My laziness made me pass up nearly two years worth of eye ware credit from my medical benefits. Google has really good benefits through VSP, but since it’s VSP they have a large collection of smaller providers. So places like Lens Crafters aren’t eligible.

I didn’t think it would be that hard to find nice glasses, but it was surprisingly hard. Crissy and I went to a bunch of stores and everyone tried to sell me the same stupid black plastic frames that everyone wears. Most places didn’t even carry men’s glasses that weren’t variants of the black plastic look. And most of the stores closed at 5 pm and weren’t open on Sundays. That meant we had to use precious Saturday time for shopping!

Yuck. We finally found some nice frames. They weren’t perfect as the frames tilt in towards the middle slightly. Apparently this is the new style or something. The saleswoman claimed that she couldn’t see the tilt, but I think she’s delusional.

I’m pretty happy with the glasses, except that they get smudged all the time. If you just look at them they get smudged!

On the plus side, I discovered that Kleenex with lotion does indeed have lotion in it. If you wipe your glasses with these Kleenex, you leave behind a thin film of lotion on the lenses.

Hmm… they say knowledge is power, but I think the fact that “Kleenex with lotion does indeed have lotion in it” isn’t very powerful. It’s probably just taking up precious space in my brain. :-)

I had the opportunity to take a public speaking skills workshop recently and decided it would be a useful exercise. I’m a decent speaker with lots of experience from high school and college, but not that much recently. The main thing I knew would be useful is getting a video recording of myself speaking. It’s really painful to watch yourself speak, but it’s very informative.

The main things I wanted to work on projecting more likability. I don’t want to change my speaking personality or anything, but ever since Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” speaking style went to the national level, the art of public speaking changed drastically. It is less about ideas or logic, and more about making the audience think, “I’d like to be buddies with that guy”.

I’ve seen a lot of people that go to speaking workshops and come up as almost robotic where they do every little thing they have been taught and it’s almost too perfect. The end result is that it is almost disingenuous. So I wanted to keep my current style and personality in my delivery and make some minor tweaks.

Based on my analysis of my recording and some feedback from the coach, here are the things I need to work on:

• What I do when I’m thinking - I’m used to speaking from a brief outline, so even when I don’t have notes I glance down as I organize my thoughts for my next point. This can be a liability, because looking down sends an unconscious message of submission. The instructor recommended looking slightly to the side for this. I’m not sure if I like that as it looks a little unnatural.
• Longer eye contact - Normally when speaking I look around the room at different people in the audience. The main thing I’m looking for is interested expressions and nodding heads. If I don’t see this, I know I need to make some adjustments. The instructor mentioned that the new style of speaking requires the speaker to make eye contact for 3 to 5 seconds per person before moving on. This is a more intimate, personal eye contact; one that, presumably, would help improve likability.
• Voicing - I noticed that towards the end of my sentences, I tend to eat my words a bit. This is partly because I’m already thinking about the next sentence. To fix this, I need to (1) speak more from the gut, which will project my voice more, (2) move my lips more to increase crispness (and increase facial expression) and (3) try to restructure my sentence so some of the “money” is closer to the end. This will force me to enunciate through the sentence.
• Stand straight - I noticed that I was leaning to the side a bit while talking. Though no one else noticed it; maybe the camera tripod wasn’t level. :-)

The instructor told me that these things would help me go from “good” to “great”. It was nice to know that I wasn’t a total failure. :-)

Continuing on the discussion of politics and primaries: I went to the Republican caucus yesterday as a mild mannered Indian dude, and walked out as a Precinct Committee Officer and a Delegate to the county convention.

Before going into the details, I found the results of the Saturday’s primaries and caucuses pretty interesting. Obama’s strong performance was not surprising, I continue to expect to see him and Hillary stay neck and neck in the race. The Republican events showed that the party really dislikes McCain. Huckabee dominated Kansas, won Louisiana, and may win Washington once the votes are counted. Based on what I saw at the Washington convention, I don’t think most people voted for Huckabee, just against McCain.

Despite what the media is saying, McCain doesn’t have this wrapped up. He needs to get 42% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination and today he got 42%, 26%, and 24% in the three states. Not at all on the pace he needs to be.

The Washington caucus was really interesting. My first impression is that the caucus system is completely broken and full of opportunities to game the system. While I still don’t understand how the whole system works, here’s what I think happens. First at the general precinct level caucus we elect delegates to represent the precinct at the country level. At the county level, we pick and elect delegates to the state convention. And at the state convention you elect national delegates. Those delegates go to the national convention to vote on who will be the party’s candidate. At all the levels it seems like a lot of the delegates are appointed by party officials. They can, of course, pick whoever they want and will usually support the establishment candidate.

So we aren’t actually voting on candidates, we’re voting for representatives. These representatives, in theory, can vote for whoever they would like. That’s why all the media outlets have different delegate counts, no delegate has actually voted yet. They are just bound to candidates. And in most cases there’s nothing completely “binding”. Plus, once we get the national convention, the delegates can do whatever they want if the first ballot doesn’t have a winner with at least 50% of the votes.

The first thing that was interesting about the caucus was the huge attendance. I think there were probably 400 people, while the organizers were expecting at most half of that. The make up of the attendees was old, retired people (including many veterans), party officials, and lots of young people. In fact, I think young people may have made up 50% of the attendees.

Also, there weren’t many minorities, aside from me and maybe two other people, every else was white. I’m curious what the make up of the Democratic convention was, but I imagine in this area most of the minorities are on visas, so they can’t vote anyway.

The Ron Paul campaign clearly instructed supporters not to identify themselves as Ron Paul supporters. There has been a lot of disenfranchisement reported in the caucuses and primaries so far. Around the country, there have been lots of reports of people showing up with a Ron Paul shirt and being forced to use a “provisional ballot” since the officials “couldn’t find” their registration. So, the campaign told supporters to write “undecided” in their presidential preference when signing in, and then, if possible, update their preference when leaving. Based on my experience, most of the “Uncommitted” vote in Washington is really Ron Paul supporters.

Thankfully, I didn’t see that many shenanigans. When everyone was finally checked in, the large group had to elect a “Presiding Officer”. The temporary facilitator opted to do a vote count (”aye”) and despite the two choices getting equal votes, he quickly declared, “The chair is not in doubt…” and claiming victory for a party official. Which was weird, but the Officer didn’t really do anything as far I as could tell.

Then we broke into districts to elect delegates and vote on the party platform. Districts are roughly the size of city blocks. As luck would have it, my district is basically a little more than our apartment complex and I was the only one that showed up from it. So, unsurprisingly, I was nominated for Precinct Committee Officer and won one of the delegate spots for the precinct. Additionally, I got permission from the party officials and approval from my precinct to nominate my wife to be the other delegate from our district. So Crissy is a delegate too.

I filled out the paperwork and the platform questionnaire and was chatting with some people when a guy from KIRO showed up and asked us for opinions. I said something along the lines of, “We have a recession and the economy will only be getting worse. This is due to our foreign policy and runaway spending in Washington. Only one candidate in both parties is addressing these things in an intelligent and logical way, so I’m a Ron Paul guy.” The sound guy didn’t seem too happy with the answer and asked the next guy. He said (roughly), “I came here supporting Huckabee, but after talking to this guy [me], I’m thinking of Paul.” The next two guys said “Ron Paul” as well.

Finally the KIRO guy found a Huckabee supporter and said, “What do you think about all these Paul supporters?” The Huckabee guy looked confused, shrugged, and said “I don’t know. It’s a big tent.”

I chatted with a few more people. It seemed like anyone under 50 was a Paul supporter, new to the party, and this group made up around 40% of the crowd. There were a number of Huckabee guys, but most of them were really “Anyone but McCain”. Lastly, the McCain support was party officials and some veterans who only knew that McCain fought in Vietnam and not much about his platform.

Also of interest, every Ron Paul supporter I talked to said, “I’m never voting for the lesser of two evils again. I’m voting my conscience from now on.” For me, when it comes to voting, I firmly believe that “the lesser of two evils” is still evil.

I just noticed the Washington results; though it has been over a day, only 87% of the precincts have reported and the party declared McCain the winner. But there is only a 242 vote difference between him and Huckabee. And Paul is just 427 votes behind. Definitely seems a little sketchy.

The other day I wrote about some bad service I had at Honda of Kirkland. Someone mentioned to me that if the dealership was smart they would be watching the internet for unhappy customers and try to make them happy. But could they even find my stupid blog? Surprisingly, yes they could. Using Google to search for “Kirkland Honda bad” returns my previous post (though at the bottom of the page).

But I definitely don’t expect this to happen. First of all, the Internet is full of whining people. Is it worth chasing down each of them? And second, the same guy owns both Honda dealerships on the Eastside (Kirkland and Bellevue). He has the market wrapped up and is probably doing quite well.

In that last post, I also mentioned good customer service I got at Enterprise Rent a Car a while ago. And if you look in the comments, you’ll see that not only did an Enterprise rep find my post 24 hours (and 6 minutes) after it was published, she even read it. And since she read that we will be buying a new car soon, she referred me to Enterprise’s car sales department.

I must say, I’m impressed. This is how to run a business.

While discussing the primaries, I mentioned that it’s unlikely that things will be decided before the national conventions and it’s likely we’ll have brokered conventions for both parties.

On the Democratic side, unless something big happens, I expect to see Obama and Hillary both stay around 50% through the primary season. When a very divided party meets at the convention, they will need to compromise. Neither Hillary or Obama will want to be VP for the other. So what will the party do? They will bring in the one person that unite the whole party, energize the base, and bring back all the people that have been disenfranchised with the party: Al Gore.

Gore keeps saying he’s not interested, but with the Republican party falling apart and a strong 3rd party offering, he can win easily (more discussion below). I’m not sure who he would take as a VP though. Probably a moderate governor who until then had been out of the spotlight.

On the Republican side, I was pretty sure we would see a brokered convention a couple days ago. And with Mitt Romney “suspending” his campaign, I’m actually more convinced that this will happen. I think this is a really smart play for Mitt. If McCain does “wrap” things up and the party picks him, Romney sets himself up as a clear VP choice. He is in 2nd place so far and was willing to put aside his ambitions for “the good of the party”. Plus, McCain is likely a one term president. So Romney, in this case, is the clear nominee in 2012.

On the other hand, if we go to a brokered convention because the Republican base won’t accept McCain, Romney is in position to be a compromise candidate.

Mostly likely, Ron Paul will form a new party or coalition and run as a 3rd party with a slate of Congressional candidates aligned with him. If McCain is the Republican candidate, look for the all fiscal conservatives to vote for Paul or stay home. As the economy goes further into recession, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Perot type numbers for Paul.

If Gore is the Democratic candidate, billionaire Bloomberg is unlikely to run as a 3rd party. It would be hard to pull the big government vote from Gore. If somehow Obama or Hillary gets the nomination, expect to see Bloomberg run and pull around 5 to 10% of the vote.

A four way race could be cool: McCain or Romney for the Republicans, Hillary or Obama for the Democrats, Bloomberg as the big government candidate, and Paul as the fiscal conservative. Add the recession and it could actually be a very good thing for America.

The two party system has polarized the country into a simple black and white world where thoughtful and thorough analysis is a liability. Having the major parties vulnerable on both flanks from legitimate candidates could shake up American politics for decades to come.

How sure am I about this? As I think about it, I’m getting more convinced that Gore will be appointed if the Hillary / Obama deadlock continues to the convention.

And I’m confident that Ron Paul will create a coalition of independents with the endorsement of a few 3rd parties, and a small slate of congressional candidates. Given the trouble the economy is in, I can see Paul carrying 10% of the popular vote.

Are all elections this interesting? Or is it just due to the unprecedented access to news and opinion due the Internet and the chatterbox?

Update: I just realized that I may have used the wrong terminology. On the Republican side, I don’t expect a “brokered convention”, rather I expect that enough “McCain” delegates will not support him on the first ballot, so he won’t win that first round. Then it’s completely wide open. I’m not sure what that situation is called.

Despite having my new car for just over 10 months, it just had its first oil change. Apparently, I don’t drive that much: 5000 miles in 10 months, means I drive 500 miles per month. I guess that’s the advantage of having a short commute. :-)

So I needed to get the oil changed and decided to go to the closet dealer, Kirkland Honda, to get the service. Normally, we take our cars to the trusty Goodyear close by, but while not required, it’s better to get the new car service done at the dealer in case there are warranty issues down the road.

The downside of this is that a simple oil change costs twice as much. The only difference is that Kirkland Honda washes the car while Goodyear doesn’t. Oh well, you can’t win all battles, I can just deal with the higher price.

So I go to pick up my car and discover, that it’s not only just unwashed, but somehow dirtier than when I dropped it off (despite only half a mile more on the odometer). I’m slightly annoyed and since I’m not in a rush, I ask them if they forgot to wash it and if they could run it through real quick.

The guy helping me seems confused and checks lots of clipboards to see what was signed off for and by whom. Finally, he apologizes halfheartedly and says he’ll have it ready in 10 minutes. I watch him fill out a bunch of paperwork and then attach some paper to the keychain and hang up the keychain on the wall.

I go and sit down. Twenty minutes later, he hands me the keys and apologizes. I go to the car to discover that the sides and back are washed, but the hood and roof clearly are not. I decide it’s not worth it and drive home.

So… Crissy’s going to get a new car by the end of the year. You know we’re going to buy a Honda; and I can tell where we’re not buying it from: Kirkland Honda!

I’m not upset, but mostly amused. Kirkland Honda had a opportunity to make me a happy customer. When I asked for my car to be washed the following things should have happened:

1. The salesman doesn’t waste time checking the clipboard. Whether someone signed the paper is irrelevant, the car is dirty. Just take my keys apologize, and get it done.
2. Don’t fill out paperwork and hang the key up for someone to get. Hand deliver the key to the guy that drives the car to the car wash.
3. When the car is back, at least glance at it to make sure what was necessary got done.

And for bonus points, make up for the inconvenience to the customer. It would have cost the dealer very little to wax the car, vacuum the interior, or give me a small dollar off coupon for my next visit.

Contrast this to my experience with Enterprise Rent a Car. Last year, I needed to extend my car rental by a few days. When I returned it, I realized the total bill would have been cheaper if I was billed per week instead of the per day from the original reservation. I stopped by the counter and asked if there was a way to fix this. It wasn’t that big of a deal; something like a $30 difference and it was completely my fault.

The sales rep at the counter said he couldn’t change it since the transaction had been closed out. He was very polite and apologetic. I thanked him and started to leave when he stopped me and wrote out a “25% off next rental, plus 2 free upgrades” coupon for my next rental. That was really good customer service. Enterprise won a loyal customer and even honored the deal after I lost my coupon!

It’s a wonder that more business don’t treat customers well. If you treat someone well on a small deal, like an oil change, you will get their business in the future, like buying a new car. And in the long run, you come out way ahead.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, this will be a another rant about stupid government. And if you read closely, hopefully you’ll be tickled by my clever use of the word “tackle” in the title. :-)

A quick summary in case you weren’t paying attention to thePatriots cheating scandal and associated drama that’s sweeping through the NFL:

• In September, the Patriots were discovered breaking NFL rules regarding filming an opponents sideline during a game.
• Then, the league commissioner slapped the team and coach with one of the larger fines in league history.
• The Patriots responded with an insincere apology.
• The commissioner went on national TV basically accusing the team of dragging its feet in handing over evidence and threatening them with even more fines.
• A few days later, the NFL announced it had destroyed all evidence and refused to say what the evidence contained.

Basically since then, the league won’t answer anymore questions. It seems likely that the cheating was much worse than originally thought and the league decided that the PR cost of stonewalling is less than the PR cost of coming clean.

Which means to someone like me, I want to know what happened! Especially since I don’t like the Patriots due to their lack of sportsmanship. All season long they would run up the score after the game had been decided, by keeping their starters in and trying to get more and more points. It’s just shameful.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Congress is now threatening to get involved similar to the Congressional Hearing about steroid use in baseball. And that raises the questions of “Why should Congress get involved?” and “Don’t they have anything better to do?”

Let’s start with “Don’t they have anything better to do?”. Well, yes. But politicians would rather do easy things that generate headlines than actual useful work like balance the budget or end the war. It’s sad, but true.

The next question, “Why should Congress get involved?”. I’m assuming that the justification is that NFL is a government created and allowed monopoly and is heavily subsidized (stadiums, broadcasts, etc). Even though strictly speaking no laws were broken, just NFL rules, the broadcast license stipulates that anything presented as live competition can’t have any “pre-arrangement” or “cheating”. In other words it can’t be fake.

And of course, the kicker, “Why is the federal government granting monopoly license to entertainment?” It’s not really sanctioned by the constitution unless you have a liberal reading of the interstate commerce clause. It probably comes down to the same reason a lot of things happen in the government, rich owners (team owners) needs something and the bribe Congress (”lobby”) to make it happen.

So sad. On the upside, maybe the investigation will show that the Patriots are really bad cheaters and they will “lose” some of their Super Bowl wins. Bad sportsmanship and cheating should never be rewarded.

This whole primary and caucus system is really complicated and silly. Take Washington State, we have a primary and a caucus. Which one counts towards delegates? Well, for the Democrats, the primary vote doesn’t affect the delegate allocation. The caucus decides all of them. And since the primary is after the caucus, the primary is completely meaningless.

So for the Democrats, they aren’t being democratic at all. The primary, where real people vote, counts for nothing. Everything is decided by the few party insiders that know about the caucus and can “qualify” (pass all the red tape) to participate.

The Republicans, on the other hand, at least pretend to care about what the people want. 51% of their delegates are determined by the caucus and 49% of their delegates are determined by the primary. But still half of the delegates are awarded by the party insiders.

On top of that, you can see all sorts of wheeling and dealing during these caucuses. Take the West Virginia convention today, after the first round, Romney was beating Huckabee, with McCain and Paul far behind. Since no candidate had the majority, everyone needed to vote again, this time without the lowest placing candidate.

Now, the McCain people realized that they weren’t going to win, so they decided that all that mattered was that Romney didn’t win. So the McCain voters decided to go to Huckabee. The Paul folks also went to Huckabee as they negotiated 3 of the 18 total delegates in exchange.

It was a win-win-win, Huckabee got the win, McCain prevented Romney from winning, and Paul got 3 delegates as opposed to 0. So technically, Paul took second in West Virginia. Poor Romney got outmaneuvered.

The way things are going neither party nomination will be decided before the conventions. So we’ll go to a brokered convention and see all sorts of wheeling and dealing like this.

Some of the more amusing (and frustrating) discussions Crissy and I have are about the cultural differences between Indians and Americans. Lately, we’ve found lots of humor in some of the simple linguistic differences. One of my favorites is the usage of the adjective “simple”.

In India, “simple” means humble, honest, easy-going, and a host of other similarly positive adjectives Here though, “simple” basically means “simple-minded” or “stupid”. Obviously a situation that will lead to all sorts of amusement.

Two of our friends from India are getting married and they described their brides-to-be as “simple”; all the Indians listening nodded and the most of the non-Indians looked shocked.

As we cleared up the confusion, we realized that lots of people have had the word “simple” cause tension: from the manager praising an employee (”you a good simple person”) or the father-in-law praising his son’s wife (”I’m glad my son married a nice, simple girl.”).

I wonder what other things like this we’ll discover. (Aside from the pronunciation of “paint”, of course.)

While we were grocery shopping the other day, I noticed this new addition to the cereal aisle. It’s a “On-The-Go Pack” for Cheerios. This sort of makes sense; we already buy water, chips, and all sorts of things in small and easily transportable containers.

Crissy astutely pointed out that this is targeted at busy moms who just want to quickly grab a snack for the diaper bag. In fact, Amazon is branding these as a “Toddler Pack”.

But upon closer examination, I saw that price was a little over $2. The canister is 1.1 ounces; for comparison, an 11 ounce box of Cheerios would be at most $4. That’s quite a premium. And it wasn’t just the store I was in. Amazon, second only to Walmart at squeezing margins, sells 12 containers for $20.85, while the traditional 14 oz box goes for 25.72 for 6.

A little math comes up with the toddler pack at $1.58 an ounce, while the boxes ring in at $0.31 an ounce. So what’s the 5x markup for? Cheerios’ website says, “it’s pour-able, shake-able, refillable and is designed to fit in your purse, stroller or diaper bag.”

Call me old-fashioned, but the plastic baggie my mom used to carry Cheerios on trips did all of these things, but for much, much cheaper.

I would have loved to be in that product development proposal meeting: “I propose we sell Cheerios at an additional 5x markup by putting it in a small container with cute fish on it. We don’t have to worry, since (1) most people don’t look at prices in grocery stores and (2) we’re selling this product to people with more money than brains. By taking their money, we’re restoring the proper balance between money and brains and actually doing them a service.”

So why is the cost so high? Even considering the very inefficient use of very expensive shelf space and more expensive packaging, I can’t believe the blow up factor is 5x. Especially for a new product; you usually want to subsidize new commodities while you’re optimizing the supply chain.

Unless the package is made out of gold, the price should drop. Or the product get pulled. I’m curious how it will go.