The difference between "er" and "ing" could cause a flood.

OK, so my wife and I are probably going to disagree on this one, but there's got to be a better way to distinguish between dishwasher detergent and dish washing detergent.  Please look at the following picture...

One of these bottles meant for dishes contains a dangerous substance, that when exposed to water in a washing machine, causes it to create more bubbles than 1,000 Lawrence Welk episodes.  There should be a big warning, like on a pack of cigarettes.  An overflowing dishwasher is far more likely to cause sudden cardiac arrest that a couple of smokes.

For goodness sakes, put a picture of hands on the bottle meant for hand washing, and a picture of a machine on the one meant for machine washing. 

When I'm grabbing a bottle that says dish washing detergent, I think to myself "That's what the machine will be doing, so this must be the right stuff".  It's common sense, right?

You know how this sad story ends so we'll skip that part.

Back "in the day", the stuff for the machine used to be in a rectangular cardboard box, and the stuff for hand washing in the sink was in a clear curvy plastic bottle.  It was so much easier then.  Now, I either need eyeglasses, or to hold both side by side so I can figure it out.

Thank goodness cooking oil and car oil don't come in similar containers!

She could have been a biological terrorist...

What better example to prove the point the Common Sense isn't so common?  The following story was covered by various media over the past couple of days.  What follows is from CNN: 

Florida TSA incident – The Transportation Security Administration is standing behind its agents in Destin, Florida. Agents forced a cancer-stricken 95-year-old woman to take off her adult diaper after they patted her down at an airport security checkpoint, the woman's daughter, Jean Weber, told CNN. The TSA denies that the screeners required the elderly woman to remove a diaper and that they followed proper procedures. The incident follows the videotaped pat-down of a  6-year-old girl, a move which outraged some lawmakers and the public.

It's hard to keep up with the almost daily barrage of news stories with 95 year old terminally ill cancer patients who are hijacking planes and crashing them into American cities while they hold the passengers powerless to act with the biological hazards hidden in their adult diapers...

Seriously though...  Is there a single rational human being who thinks that this old lady represented any kind of security threat?  This would be nothing more than a regrettable disrespect to a senior if only the TSA would have admitted their mistake, and taken steps to both discipline the microcephalic agent who chose to subject the poor woman to increased scrutiny, and to establish procedures so that this could never happen again.

But of course the TSA is a government agency, so this didn't happen.  The TSA went on public record defending the actions, and there is no indication that the agent was even reprimanded.

How can a government that sees a 95 year old terminal cancer patient as a threat to national security be trusted to manage anything, let alone health care, social security, monetary policy, national defense or the national debt?

Can it Really Be That Complicated?

On a recent trip to Washington DC, we chose to stay in Alexandria Virginia.  Our hotel was located just steps away from the very upscale office campus depicted in the picture below.

It turns out that this 2 million square foot, 4 building complex is the home of the US Patent and Trademark offices, and houses fewer than 10,000 employees.  Really?

When someone says patents to me, I picture some old building, smelling of 200 year old paper, with an inspector wearing a visor and coke-bottle eyeglasses, who makes marks with a pencil, and has a big stack of applications in front of him.

Obviously I am truly disconnected from reality.

At the end of 2009, there were 6,242 patent examiners in this complex.  The office grants approximately 150,000 patents per year.  Now, if my geriatric, bespectacled examiner was the one processing the paperwork, I would be impressed, but again, I am wrenched from my hopeful world view to the realization that each patent examiner ends up granting a patent once every 2 weeks.  Each examiner averages less than 26 patents a year.

In this day of modernization, it's ludicrous to me that our tax dollars would support the inefficiencies of an organization like this.  Two weeks to process a patent?  Seems to me that a person with an above average IQ could do a few LexisNexis searches and a bit of googling to determine the validity of an application.  But perhaps slow and steady wins the race, and protects the integrity of the patents granted?

Nope

Some of the patents granted by this slow moving group of comfortably lodged employees include the following examples cited in Wikipedia:

• U.S. Patent 5,443,036, "Method of exercising a cat", covers having a cat chase the beam from a laser pointer. The patent has been criticized as being obvious.
• U.S. Patent 6,025,810, "Hyper-light-speed antenna", an antenna that sends signals faster than the speed of light.
• U.S. Patent 6,368,227, "Method of swinging on a swing", issued April 9, 2002, was granted to a seven-year old boy, whose father, a patent attorney, wanted to demonstrate how the patent system worked to his son (aged 5 at the time of the application).
• U.S. Patent 6,960,975, "Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state", describes an anti-gravity device and a perpetual motion machine.

If this organization were in private hands, and the cost of processing patents was exclusively borne by the applicants, there is no way that production of 1 patent every 2 weeks per examiner would be tolerated, let alone issuing a patent that describes how to exercise a cat with a laser pointer.

This is the type of government agency run amok that needs to be reigned in.

ROT1 (Rule of Thumb #1) – The Acid Test

From time to time we’ll blog about some of the foundational underpinnings of the sense we find so appealing.  We’ll call these Rules of Thumb (ROT).

Our first Rule of Thumb can be widely applied to business, family, or even the Federal Government.  The Acid Test asks a simple question.  If the answer is affirmative, then proceed with further investigation.  If the answer is negative, then stop.  Here’s the question:

“Do I have the right to take this action”

Notice that the question says nothing about ability.  Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should.  Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Let’s say I run a farm, but in order to get my crops in and make money, I need to hire people that I can take economic advantage of, due to some disadvantage they have (illegal aliens, criminal record, handicap, etc).  Could I do this?  Yes.  Do I have the right to do this?  No.

Let’s say I’m a really safe driver who’s never had (or caused) an accident.  Do I have the right to drive as fast as I want?  No

Rights are usually protected by or spelled out in laws.  The law that governs our government began with the Constitution, so when we have a question about whether the government has the right to do something, we should look to the Constitution for the answer.

Does the government have the right to collect money from the wealthy and redistribute it to those in need? It does not.  Should people be concerned with meeting the needs of those who are less fortunate?  Absolutely, but it should be done through avenues other than the government.

Should everyone have access to sound medical care?  Absolutely, but it is not the role of Government to do it.  It’s up to We the People, and the last time I looked at the Constitution, we never gave the government the responsibilities that they’ve taken. 

When you next hear about something that the governement wants to do, take a moment to ask the question "Do They Have The Right".  If the answer is no, then we give up our freedom and liberty by allowing it to happen.

Why the intersection fairy ignores some people...

It never ceases to amaze me that people who have had their licenses for years still don’t know how to stop at an intersection.  I’ve watched people either pull too far forward or stop too far back at a traffic light with a sensor.  You can tell when you’re at one of these lights when you see a black line in the shape of a rectangle cut into the pavement, usually the size of one or more cars.  If you don’t stop at the right place, the sensor won’t sense you’re there, and the light won’t be triggered.  By the way, they're hardly ever weight activated - it's usually induction that triggers the light.

These same people probably don’t notice that almost every controlled intersection around has a thick white line, called a stop line.  Oddly enough, this stop line is where you’re supposed to stop.  It’s before you get to the pedestrian crosswalk, which is before you get into the lanes of traffic that cross your path.  If you stop on the stop line, everything works the way it’s supposed to.

Sure, you could go on believing that the intersection fairy will change the light quicker if you keep nudging forward every few seconds, but just for kicks, try applying that inconvenient common sense, and allow your car to be sensed. Please!

Welcome!

The idea for this blog has been germinating for a while, but came to fruition during a recent trip to Washington DC.  We saw things that made us scratch our head and wonder why, and we saw things that made us admire the way in which they were executed.

We'll keep this first blog short, and avoid some of the big issues that we'll get to soon. Let us share one of the head-scratchers with you...

We planned a lot of our trip using our smart phones.  We were able to plan travel routes, investigate tourist spots, look at reviews, and in some cases, buy tickets online.  We love the convenience of being able to check in for our flights 24 hours ahead of time, and get a boarding pass sent to our phone.  No more paper boarding pass or standing in line at the airport ticket counter - simply show the boarding pass on your phone to security, and you're through.

If the big leviathan-like airlines who so frequently miss out on making customers happy can send QR codes for boarding passes to your phones, then anyone should be able to do it, right?

Wrong!

We wanted to book a night-time trolley tour of DC online.  When we went to the site, we were surprised to find that if you booked online, you would need to print out a receipt to bring to check-in, whereas if you called the trolley company directly, you didn't need to bring a printed piece of paper!  Where's the sense in that?  How about letting me save you money, Mr. Trolley company, by using my time and resources to book online.  The you send me an email (with a QR code) that I bring on my phone for check in.  You merely have to scan the code (or enter the confirmation number), check my ID, and let me go on my way.

Instead, we booked with a person, and then had to arrive 45 minutes early in order for a sole employee of the tour company to look up our reservation up and print a piece of paper for us to give to the driver.  It was a slow process in an unconditioned space, and obviously was designed by someone who never gave any thought to the customers or even to how they could streamline the process to save them money.

With just a little more common sense, the tour company could have had happier customers/referrals, and increased their bottom line.

Apparently common sense was an inconvenience at the time the company came up with this process.