Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

You have to love The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Dying a slow death as the market it serves grows rapidly, the AJC editors can’t help but deride the people in metro Atlanta who should be their target audience.

Case in point is a story in today’s paper about a pilot program at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that may bring fast-track airport security lines to the country’s biggest airport. Aimed at frequent travelers (most likely business travelers), the concept is that for a fee a traveler can be “cleared” as a non-threat through background checks, and thus be allowed to go through security in a special line for travelers who have all been “cleared” as unlikely security threats.

And despite the fact that today’s story is merely about the airport manager issuing a contract that could bring the pilot closer to reality, this is the headline AJC went with:

Ah, yes, don’t miss the opportunity to drum up a little wealth and class envy in a mundane story about a government contract. And never mind that the likely users of this program are the people who have been flooding in to metro Atlanta for the past 20 years … who you need as customers … and who already despise your product because of exactly this kind of crap. Any chance to throw out “Lexus lanes” and rile up that shrinking part of the metro area’s population who still view you as relevant - go for it. Feels good, doesn’t it?

And I was intrigued by the actual reference (in the 9th paragraph) in the story to “Lexus lanes”:

Proponents of the so-called Lexus lanes say they guarantee a trip through airport security in about five minutes. Opponents say they discriminate against travelers who can’t afford the annual fee and raise civil liberties concerns.

So if they’re “so-called Lexus lanes”, somebody’s got to be calling them that, right? Well, if you do a Google search for airport security Lexus lanes and take out references to HOT lanes on freeways, you get a grand total of 44 results. Several are still referring to freeways when “Lexus lanes” comes up, and a bunch more are tied to the AJC referring to them as such. There’s nothing at all to suggest that “Lexus lanes” is some common way to refer to these things.

I can see the flow in the AJC newsroom:

Reporter: Hey editor, the airport put out a contract for the fast-track security lines. No big deal, really. They have to do that, but it doesn’t mean it’ll happen.
Editor: You mean the rich people are closer to being able to get special treatment? Awesome!
Reporter: Well, I didn’t say that. And this is really just a procedural step.
Editor: OK, let’s headline this thing “Airport ‘Lexus Lanes’ closer to a test run”
Reporter: “Lexus lanes”?
Editor: Hell yeah. Rich people drive Lexuses, you know. So it’s like those rich people lanes on the freeways.
Reporter: We have those?
Editor: Well, no. But other places do. And editors of newspapers in those places call them “Lexus lanes”.
Reporter: This really isn’t the same thing.
Editor: Sure it is. Slap that headline on your story and file it.
Reporter: But the story doesn’t say anything about “Lexus lanes”.
Editor: Lemme see that … OK, change “Proponents of the program say …” to “Proponents of the so-called Lexus lanes say …” down here in the 9th paragraph.
Reporter: Who calls them “Lexus lanes”?
Editor: I do. Thus, they are “so-called”.
Reporter: {sigh} Whatever you say, chief.

I was reading an AJC piece tonight about the post-tornado recovery efforts in Grant Park’s historic Oakland Cemetery. And I was struck by this sentence:

FEMA, which will fund the majority of the cemetery’s renovation and cleanup, has dispatched archaeologists to Oakland for legal, as well as scholarly, reasons.

FEMA - The Federal Emergency Management Agency - is paying for most of the renovation costs of a cemetery and sending archaeologists out to survey the potential artifacts uprooted by the storm. That’s right - FEMA has archaeologists, or at least has contract diggers in its Rolodex.

How is this what happens? The federal agency entrusted to get you food and water after a hurricane, flood, earthquake or whatever is also charged with conducting archaeological surveys and pay for the restoration of non-federal cemeteries? That’s way out of line.

Even if you’d like to make the case that restoring a City of Atlanta cemetery because of tornado damage is a federal responsibility, why in the name of Michael Brown is this a task to fall to FEMA? As I wrote many moons ago, this is not the Federal Problem Management Agency. And I fail to see what is either Federal or Emergency in Oakland Cemetery right now that needs the Management of this Agency.

We’ve given up, I suppose, our responsibility to take care of ourselves and handed it over to FEMA. My sense is that originally, FEMA was called in just for disasters that were truly beyond the scope of local management. But now, any time a stiff wind blows - in rides FEMA. And nobody seems to complain. At Oakland Cemetery, FEMA kept Atlanta officials out until their crews could get by to check things out.

I guess you’ll give up a lot of freedom and independence for those federal checks.

I was cruising around this morning checking out some potential after-Christmas deals on digital cameras and ended up over at wolfcamera.com (more on why below). And on the product page”s rundown of the cost they included a big “No Sales Tax” reference.

Of course, I prefer to not pay sales tax directly on my online purchases, but rather report such purchases on my state income tax forms and pay the applicable use tax all at once. So it struck me as interesting that a real-world retailer - which must collect sales tax for purchases by people in states (such as Georgia for Wolf) where they have a physical presence - would promise No Sales Tax Checking out their sales tax policy, this is what they say:

You never pay sales tax! We are not required to collect sales and use tax on deliveries throughout the US, except where we have business locations and in those states we pay ALL sales taxes (California, Georgia, Kansas and Maryland). For customers in these states, our price includes all applicable taxes. To satisfy Maryland consumer reporting rules, we will show sales tax and an amount equal to the sales tax will be discounted from our regular low price. The order total will be the same as our regular low prices without tax.

Smart. Rather than dealing with “do you have to pay sales tax?” screens and downplaying (ala Dell.com) the fact that you may, indeed, have to pay sales tax, Wolf just absorbs the tax when applicable and gets to promote the whole No Sales Tax thing prominently.

Of course, their price was $50 higher for the same camera I was looking at on Amazon, which never collects sales tax. So thanks, but no thanks.

I ended up at Wolf, though, because of a new shopping habit I have. For a long time I”ve taken the model number of an item I”m looking at and run it through Froogle to get a price comparison. But now I go right to the “Google Checkout Stores” link to narrow my search. The promise of an extra $10 off (right now) is a strong draw to Checkout, which of course is part of Google”s strategy for taking payment share from PayPal, VeriSign and everybody else in the payment space. They”re also giving the service away to merchants for now, which may do wonders for their market share over the next year.

The last time I bought something through PayPal? Couldn”t tell you. They do fabulous things like not allowing two people (such as the wife and myself) to use the same credit card number. Sites that feature PayPal come off as amateurish and I avoid them. I don”t get that feeling with Checkout. It”s a breeze to use and feels like a regular shopping cart service. I don”t have to set up accounts at a bunch of different merchants (or give them my credit card number), and Google is better at getting receipts out and tracking purchase and delivery than a lot of online stores.

So keep an eye on Checkout. Google needs another revenue winner (I remember a time when Wall Street really didn”t like companies that relied on one source for 98% of their revenue), and payment processing is a big space. PayPal is a billion-dollar product and is a key part of eBay”s model now. Done right, Checkout could be a strong No. 2 product for Google.

I don”t mean to over-react, but this is seriously some of the scariest shit I”ve ever seen:

FBI returns to “Fake Boarding Pass” guy”s home, seizes computers . Are the feds going to come after me for linking to this?

There”s a nice opinion piece at Wired News today about how the hysteria over recent “security threats” shows the terrorists are winning. Of course, I wrote about this two years ago, but the Wired guy does a good job of framing his point in the context of recent non-threat “threats”.

Not to be a spoiler, but the last paragraph of the Wired piece sums things up very nicely:

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn”t make us any safer.

Of course, that”ll never happen in modern America.

I was going to update my stance on the new “security” standards put forth by the TSA (short answer - it”s ridiculous now since the “immediate threat” has ended), so I wanted to check what the TSA is saying on the rules today.

Problem is that over and over (I tried 6 times) when I tried to open the TSA site in Safari, it crashed the browser. Apparently this is a known thing in the Mac world, but how ridiculous is it that the government”s stupid web site is engineered so poorly that it crashes Safari?