From the NOAA:

Sunday: Showers likely. Highs in the 40s. Southwest wind 10 to 15 mph.
Martin luther king jr day: Rain likely. Highs in the 40s. Southeast wind 10 to 15 mph.
Tuesday: Rain…windy. Highs in the mid to upper 40s.
Wednesday through Thursday: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers. Highs in the 40s. Lows in the 30s to lower 40s.
Friday: Cloudy with a chance of rain. Highs in the mid 40s.
Saturday: Cloudy with a chance of rain. Highs in the 40s.

(sobbing)

I’ve lived here almost my whole life and there still comes a time each winter when I go outside in the rain, look at the clouds and start screaming “Stop! What do you want from me? I give up!”

28 days in a row with rain. Hey, is that going to get any better?

I get to wait until Sunday before there’s a decent chance it won’t rain.

I read an argument recently that showers (and other water-consuming devices) shouldn’t be flow-constrained through legislation, and that water should just be priced much higher.

Here’s the problem with that: water, while a renewable resource, is at any time limited (unless someone invents cost-effective desalinization).

So say there’s 350 gallons of water available every morning for… five families, with four people in each.
1 makes $20k
1 makes $30k
1 makes $40k
1 makes $60k
1 makes $100k

That’s not far off the actual income distribution in the US, even though I’m fudging a little for the sake of this example.

Each house uses about 65 gallons of water a day if they’re using low-flow showerheads, toilets, and everything else. That leaves about 30/gallons a day in this random example, but everyone’s needs are met, and while the fixed cost of water hits the poorest home the hardest, it’s not as if they can’t afford to drink.

So let’s say you allow houses to use as much water as they want, and throttle demand based on the market. Set the initial cost at $1/gallon. Out of the gate:

$20k uses 65g, pays $65
$30k uses 65g, pays $65
$40k uses 65g, pays $65
$60k uses 65g, pays $65
$100k uses 65g, pays $65

With 30g left over. The richest house gets super high-flow showerheads and starts taking longer, luxurious showers, because heck, they can afford it, and who doesn’t love a good shower?

$100k uses 90g, pays $90

The surplus has already gone entirely. The $60k house then decides they’d love to have equally luxurious showers… except now we’re in trouble: we have to hike the prices on water to get another 15g in the system. The 100k house is almost immune to price hikes, of course… and it’s the 20k house that gets really beat up when you double the price:

$20k uses 55g, pays $130
$30k uses 60g, pays $130
$40k uses 65g, pays $130
$60k uses 90g, pays $180
$100k uses 90g, pays $180

And so on. The increase in water price hurts the poorest household 5x as much as it does the rich one. They’re jumping in and out of the shower, skipping days, and generally being smelly and miserable… because at the high end, the resource they need is being used for luxury items.

I know at some level that this is the way of the world. But it seems clear that when dealing with a limited resource that everyone needs to live, universal consumption restrictions are just and beneficial to the whole.

XM on the debut of Howard Stern on Sirius:

“Our content has not changed,” said Eric Logan, XM’s executive vice president of programming. “We have a platform targeted at mainstream America. There are more and more people who find Howard Stern repulsive and offensive and will go away from anywhere he is.”

XM offered Sterm a $30m/year contract, which he turned down for Sirius. It’s not as if XM wanted him to host a series of children’s programs or something.

Round-trip to San Jose this weekend:
Lowest fare: $290 SW, $312 AS
Fully refundable: $300 SW, $372 AS

I can see where you’d pick Alaska if you were hung up on frequent-flier miles and advance seat assignment (and unaware of what’s going on with them flying out of Seatac).

21st-22nd
Lowest fare: $238 SW, $258 AS
Fully refundable: $300 SW, $372 AS

…

Feb 11-12
Lowest fare: $158 SW, $183 AS
Fully refundable: $300 SW, $317 AS

Two reactions:
I’m surprised that SW is actually less competitive as date-of-travel approaches. I’d have thought Alaska would really squeeze those travelers and SW would have a huge cost advantage, but it’s not showing up. But it actually looks like you have to get further out, where Southwest’s crazy internet-only specials are available, before they start to beat Alaska on price.

Alaska’s cost to operate a flight is so much higher than Southwest’s I don’t understand how this is possible. I wonder how the two evolved in pricing to compete on this route, and why each is where they are. Also, I wish I could look up what their loads are… baffling.

I’ve flown Alaska a lot on Seattle to the Bay over the last couple years, and in particular the Seattle-San Jose route (for business, sometimes one-day but frequently multi-day roundtrips). I don’t think I ever got out of San Jose on time, and I had some bad experiences trying to get out of Seattle too.

I flew Southwest to San Jose to see my brother, and here’s what happened:
– ticket was half as expensive
– Southwest people were as cool or cooler than Alaska people (and I’ve really liked some of my Alaska crews)
– Seating was easy, even on a fairly full flight, and the seat seemed a little more comfortable than I remembered Alaska’s being
– departed on time for both flights
– arrived early for both flights
– Southwest has nice gates in San Jose, with available seating and normal airport amenities, while Alaska’s gates are pretty wretched (especially when overflowing with passengers from late and cancelled flights).

Southwest was like a machine, everything smooth and pleasant. I’ve had one Alaska round-trip that didn’t involve a cancelled flight, significant delays, or some other problem in the last eighteen months, when I started flying down regularly (though, in fairness, I may well have forgotten some).

Right now, if Alaska solved all their problems: they started to run on-time, they stopped having planes rip open mid-flight, all the rest of it, I’d still book Southwest on that route.

And I have to wonder, then — if someone like me, who’s been flying Alaska for as long as I can remember, and has always tended to chose them over similarly-priced competition (and paid a premium to book instead of United in some cases), has decided to give up on Alaska, how are they going to compete for passengers?

Fares? They can’t beat Southwest.
Service? Nothing differentiates them from United or anyone else flying around here, and Southwest’s pretty much just as good.
Routes? To Alaskan destinations, sure, but otherwise it’s not as if they have anything special compared to their peers.

The only reason I can think of is that Alaska’s fleet, since they have to fly out of Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Ketchican, are all well-equipped for really foul weather flying and their pilots, you’d expect, get more experience in those kind of conditions. But if that peace-of-mind is negated by the safety issues they’re having flying out of Sea-Tac, what’s left?

If I announced, every day, that I was going to go steal a car off of a dealer’s lot, and then I did it, and left a business card with my fingerprints on it and a picture of me stealing the car, how long would it be before I was thrown in jail? A day? Two days?

But if you’re a spammer, or a fax spammer for that matter, you can get away with this. I’m baffled as to why this is the case.

USSM got beaten up recently when a spammer (or group of them) used an exploit in our site’s software (WordPress) to send out all kinds of horrible advertisements. This required our hosting company to shut us down, patch the server, after which I had to put down the beer bottle and book I was reading and go upgrade the whole site to a new version.

In a sense, it’s like having someone break into your house — you’ve got to go fix the window, go through the inventory… except that the cops don’t care.

This amazes me. I know they don’t really do a whole lot to catch a car thief, but it’s as if they steal your car and use it to drive around holding up convenience stores, and the cops are okay with both the theft and the hold-ups.

Check it out.

It’s a great store, it’s well-integrated, the selection is good, the prices are okay, I like the presentation and recommendations, but the songs sound bad. They don’t sound horrible, and if you don’t really pay attention you might not notice, but for all of iTunes’ claims about the quality of what you’re downloading, their format at 128 sounds crappy.

Purchased songs are encoded using MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format, a high-quality format that rivals CD quality.

Bullll fucking shiiiiit. There’s no definition of rivals that covers “is obviously inferior”.

Noooww, I’m not a crazy audiophile with the $9,000 platinum interconnects. But I was comparing two songs, one off CD and the same version bought a long time ago off iTunes, and I was amazed at how clearly bad the iTunes was. For instance, the drums — the iTunes is a background dum-dum-dum, but on CD you can actually make out the strike.

So if you want to buy a CD online, you’ll probably find it for under $15 and get a strikingly better listen than the same CD off iTunes for $10. And then you can rip it, which takes all of a couple of minutes… but if the difference in quality is only $5 and it’s enough to drive me to purchase the physical version, why isn’t Apple in that business? If I could spend $15 and get a full album beautifully encoded, I’d probably do it every time, since almost all my listening is while writing at a computer or while working out and listening on my iPod.

I don’t get it. Why build a giant, beautiful storefront and stock it with shoddy merchandise? No retailer does that.

Sure am glad I booked my next Seattle-San Jose flight on Southwest. Many disturbing things from this story on a problem with an Alaska-Burbank flight. First, the obvious:

Alaska Airlines Flight 536 was 20 minutes out of Seattle and heading for Burbank, Calif., Monday afternoon when a thunderous blast rocked the plane.

Passengers gasped for air and grabbed their oxygen masks as the plane dropped from about 26,000 feet, passenger Jeremy Hermanns said by phone Tuesday.

Eek. Were passengers provided with discreet dry cleaning?

An investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said baggage handlers had bumped the plane’s fuselage with loading equipment and caused “a crease” in the side of the aircraft. The handlers are contract workers hired to replace unionized workers in May.

Oh, hey, that’s great. I guess those fears about how breaking the union would create safety issues were totally exaggerated.

Alaska saw an increase in ground-damage incidents at Sea-Tac after it replaced 472 unionized workers in May with workers from Menzies Aviation, based near London, the airline said. The switch contributed to a sharp increase in delayed departures from Sea-Tac.

So breaking the union actually caused late departures, which hurts the airline both directly and in annoyed travlers. And safety problems like this.

The real kicker, though, came right at the end:

Monday’s incident came as the Seattle-based carrier faces renewed questions about its quality-assurance procedures, almost six years after the crash of Alaska Flight 261.

In January 2000, the MD-83 plunged into the ocean off Southern California, killing all 88 passengers and crew.

Federal investigators concluded that the crash resulted from maintenance shortcomings — specifically the failure to lubricate a key part in the plane’s tail section called the jackscrew.

Now the FAA is examining Alaska’s repair practices after three incidents in the past year raised new questions about its procedures for lubricating the part, including Alaska’s oversight of work by outside contractors.

The incidents involved three planes undergoing overnight repairs at the time.

So five years ago, a problem with this one thing caused 88 people to die. The FAA issues revised guidelines for how to maintain and when to replace that part. Aaaand Alaska’s having problems doing it? Holy mackeral.

This kind of thing makes me regret flying Alaska all the time. Ugh.