Last meeting, we decided on a new way to do officer reports: email.

But people objected to getting eight email messages every other week. (An average of 0.57 messages per day, tending toward the last couple days before the meeting. OMG, so much email!) Sign up for the digest version of the mailing list, maybe? No, instead officers will all send their reports to the Trustee who will manually combine them into a single report (which, of course, will be as long as all individual reports combined anyway). Result: more work for Trustee, less up-to-date reports (they have to be sent to the Trustee nearly four days before the meeting to which they apply), the inability to mark individual reports as read/starred/flagged/etc., and one more important point I just stumbled over:
Our Labour Czar's report had something I wanted to reply to. I had three options:
* Not use email. Presumably this is what the technophobes who wanted the manual digestation method would have used, but that's much less efficient: our Labour Czar isn't here right now and what I have to say IS, whereas the precise details of it may flee from my mind at any moment. I may not see him all day, or only when one of us is busy.
* Hit reply, sending my reply to the Trustee who could then manually forward it to the Labour Czar eventually--possibly in time.
* Look up the Labour Czar's email address on the UT website, c/p his school address to my email client (hoping it's the address he uses, and that it's the right him), c/p the relevant portion of the original email to my reply, turn it into quoted text, and then type and send my reply.

Technophobia has costs. If you're a senior honours student at a somewhat prestigious university, I think I'm justified in expecting better.

[For non-Senecans: The Hobart LX-18 is our sanitizer. You wash your dishes, put them in the Hobart tray, and put it into the Hobart when full. We have two Hobart trays so we can have one go through (which is very fast) while one is being loaded.]

Dear Senecans,
You have just washed your dishes (Thank you! You are my hero!) and now are faced with a choice. The Hobart tray by the sink is full. The other one is probably in the Hobart, full of sanitized dishes in need of unloading. Do you:
1. Remove the clean tray from the Hobart and put the new one in.
2. Pile the dishes between the sink and the Hobart tray to be loaded into the next available tray.
3. Pile your dishes precariously atop the already full Hobart tray, making it impossible to move, so that when some responsible person decides to run it through the Hobart, they must first partially unload the tray, undoing all your careful balancing.

Choosing option 1 makes you wonderful. It does lead to another choice--put the tray currently in the Hobart on the island to be unloaded by the community as time allows and needs require (leaving your dishes the same as in option 2), or be highly ambitious and unload the clean one yourself, then use it for your dishes. This makes you doubly wonderful.

Choosing option 2 is the correct choice if you lack the few seconds required for option 1 or if numerous people before you have already chosen option 3, making the tray immobile until partially unloaded (unless you have the time and inclination to be our kitchen fairy).

If you chose option 3, congratulations: you are an American! Why do more than is absolutely required for you, right?

Love,
A Kitchen Fairy

Last night, our dumpster was emptied.

However, there's been a mattress standing up behind it for a while, and apparently it fell down while the dumpster was being dumped.

Result: very wobbly dumpster on a springy mattress on raised concrete, so anyone (well, many people) could just tip it over into the street. Maybe it would fall itself once filled (as filling would mostly be toward the front, probably.)

Initially my plan was to stick a couple cinderblocks under the hanging front end, but they weren't quite the right height, and I noticed it was actually light enough that I could manually tilt the dumpster up on one edge about 30 degrees--enough to get it pretty much completely off the mattress.

I couldn't, however, pull the mattress out while holding up the dumpster. Propping it up with the cinderblock on end held it high enough, but blocked the mattress in.

Luckily, Ayla showed up, and she pulled the mattress up while I tilted the dumpster off it.

So 'lifted a dumpster' goes on my list of accomplishments for the day. Not bad.

Our Kitchen Manager has ordered 80 pounds of pasta. A gallon vanilla extract. I don't know what else.

When I bring pasta for lunch, I usually have about 0.44 pounds (precooked weight), so 80 pounds is enough to feed me for 180 workdays. The vanilla extract a good deal longer.

(Pasta from Sysco is about a third the cost of HEB [which I guess is cheaper than Costco].)

(Potentially relevant link)

Greg Mankiw's latest blog post asks (for classroom discussion) the macroeconomic stimulus difference between a bank using bailout money to pay Joe the Plumber to renovate their own bathrooms vs. lending the money to Bob the Baker to hire Joe the Plumber to do the same in his own home.

This is posed in response to Obama's complaint that the banks are using bailout money in the former, 'wasteful' way.

I don't know macroeconomics, but I'm pretty sure the point of the bailout wasn't straight-up stimulus--we use tax breaks and government infrastructure improvements for that. The point was to save the banks from going under.

In doing so it was hoped the banks would be able to loan people money in the short term, but there's more to it than that. In fact, no one really talked about that detail until much later (when it didn't happen).

If the bailouts were our screwed-up way of stimulating the economy, Mankiw's question would be relevant, as hiring people to renovating their bathrooms stimulates the economy. What it doesn't do is help keep the banks afloat. And if the money isn't being used to save the banks, maybe we should be giving the money to someone other than the banks.

To go back closer to Mankiw's question, I can tell you the difference on a less-macroeconomic level: safe loans--and nowadays they're pretty cautious about risk--to Bob the Baker results in future cash flow for the banks. Renovating the bathrooms is probably not going to bring in new money or or reduce future costs. The difference is that the former helps prevent bank failure or need for future bank bailouts, which I'm sure has some notable macroeconomic impact. I don't know how the two options differ stimulus-wise, but the loans seems like the loans would be better for increasing GDP just because more money gets handed back and forth. I just don't really see that as particularly desirable.

GM says this:

19 of our 2009 models have an EPA estimated 30 MPG highway or better2 — more than Toyota, more than Honda.

For 2009, we offer more hybrid choices than any other manufacturer. We currently have six hybrids available.

Well...yeah. Toyota and Honda made a few really good models. GM makes a million so-so models. Some of them are reasonably fuel-efficient. ('11 of our last 13 new-product introductions have been fuel-efficient cars or crossovers.' -- Okay, a bunch of them. Now stop wasting time and money on all those older models that get 6-20MPG.)

37 of our 2009 models have five-star frontal crash safety ratings.

So you have at least 37 2009 models. 19/37 = 0.513513514. But you clearly have more than 37 models or you'd say 'All of our 2009 models'. So probably far fewer than half, in the end.

From a consumer point of view, choice might be good. From a forced-new-owner of the company, it's not so good.

So, Michael (who works in the Archæology library at UT, I believe) apparently mentioned RFIDing all the books in the library to a guy there, and got a lecture on why he was stupid for even talking about it.

The recap Bryan (and I, being nosy) received was: 'Michael, there are twelve million volumes in the library.'

There are numerous reasons why this is a bad objection:

1. Firstly, have the publishers do it, or just do it as books are acquired.
   
2. Every time a book is checked out, RFID tag it. Now the most popular books, at any rate, have been tagged.
   
3. Undergrads are cheap--bordering on free. Unleash them on the stacks.
   

The benefits are many:

1. Even if you only get the 20% most popular books (see item two), you've probably covered the vast majority of activity.
   
2. You don't even need to sort the books anymore. Better, you can sort them by popularity. (Caveat: being able to browse the physical volumes is a very useful capability--just a list of metadata is frequently insufficient. You usually want to browse by subject, not browse random books.)
   
3. If someone fails to return a book, you assemble a strike team and visit its locale. 'Overdue fine? Oh, no, we figure the collateral damage to your apartment during extraction is penalty enough.'
   
4. Now you don't need an expensive television to give you cancer. The books can do it too!
   

I've proposed that we (about twenty Senecans) purchase some twelve million RFID tags and spend a night tagging every volume in the building. Naysayer heed this warning!

A friend of mine just exceeded her lifetime allotment of exclamation marks. She can try purchase more punctuation credits, but exclamation marks are in high demand, especially during the holidays.

Comma credits are volatile, due to the competing forces of texters (who avoid most forms of punctuation) and comma splicers. (This latter force also keeps the cost of semi-colon credits extremely low; frugal consumers make ample use of these under-valued symbols.)

There's a glut on the market for apostrophe credits, thanks again to under-use by the texting community.

If you want a real bargain, try buying bracket or caret credits.

(Potentially relevant link)

The Peace Corps is considered good diplomacy. Send Americans over to help community development and other countries start to like us.

Tommy Thompson wanted to send medical ships around the world to serve as roving hospitals for poor nations. Medical diplomacy.

Kiva, similarly, is about diplomacy. I don't know if donating money that way is as beneficial as donating to PATH (though you have a good chance of getting your Kiva money back to re-donate, which is pretty cool), but if pro-American diplomacy is something you support, that should be another major benefit of Kiva.

How important is it that other countries like us? Seems like if we're decent at doing good things with our foreign policy then our being popular and respected benefits everyone. If we're trying to invade non-aggressive nations based on known-to-be-false evidence, having other nations say 'Get lost'--as France did with Iraq--is a good thing. (Had Britain [and don't forget Poland!] done the same, maybe we wouldn't have gone into Iraq at all.)

For the next four years, at least, I'm guessing we'll be in the former category.

Some time ago, Austin's mayor signed the Urban Environmental Accords and now we seem to have the goal of achieving zero solid waste by 2020. Austin's Solid Waste Services has a list of suggestions (PDF) on how to reduce your waste. It includes:

[at home] Buy in bulk and leave packaging at store
[at your school/business/place of worship] Buy in bulk and ask suppliers to take back packaging

Okay, true that recycling in bulk is more efficient*, but...this is essentially just shifting your waste. Maybe it will convince suppliers to use less packaging?

* I forget what it was, but I was recently looking up the recyclability of something and learned that you have to test it to find out, and it's only worth testing if you have a huge amount to recycle.