Why is COVID-19 still a valid excuse for poor customer service?

by philg

In addition to six wall-mounted TVs, the previous owners of our house left with us a $2,000 Wine Enthusiast wine cooler (there is a compressor inside, not a Peltier cooler). Since this isn’t made by LG or Samsung, of course it quickly failed (it looks brand new, but is presumably at least a year old). An email to the company’s customer service department yielded no response. So I called the company and the robot said that due to COVID-19, people were working from home and therefore wouldn’t be able to answer the phone quickly. I recognize that we’re still in Year 3 of our state of emergency, but how much longer will consumers fail to consider that it is just as easy for someone at home to answer the phone as it is for someone in an office?

Separately, I think this shows what a great business it is to sell stuff to people who drink a lot of wine. The sticker on the back says it is 6 cubic feet in volume and “Made in China”. Home Depot will sell you a 7.3 cu. ft. fridge, not designed for winos, for $275. Maybe the answer is to buy Wine Enthusiast products from Costco and get support from Costco? From the Costco site:

How did the Costco customers enjoy their Wine Enthusiast fridge combined with Costco support?

  • Nice looking but temperature controls and lights don’t work…out of the box!! Tried calling their warranty number but on hold for over an hour and cutoff twice.
  • we ordered one and we couldn’t get it to hold the temps and the blue back lights we not working / we figured well maybe it’s defective we will order a 2nd one. The 2nd one was more trouble than the first!
  • A beautiful, quiet wine refrigerator; however, the controls do not work and the lights do not work. Very disappointed.
  • Beyond junk. Can’t control temperature
  • Very disappointed to get this all set up in the location but then it didn’t cool and neither side got below 66 degrees. Called the manufacturer and after 2-3 minutes on the phone, they said that it was broken beyond repair.
  • Stopped working after 2 weeks.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I need to give a shout-out to Baldwin Hardware. Our front door came with a 19-year-old Baldwin Prestige Pistoria handleset. The latch wasn’t working perfectly anymore so I called them up to see if I could buy a new latch mechanism. Baldwin answered the phone quickly, did not mention their inability to get off their sofas and put down their Xbox controllers due to COVID-19, and decided that the issue would be covered under their lifetime warranty. They sent out a brand new replacement that arrived within a few days of the call.

On the third hand, maybe I should be inspired by companies like Wine Enthusiast. I can say that COVID-19 is responsible for the low quality of my blog ideas!

[What ultimately happened once I got through to Wine Enthusiast (by phone; they never did answer the email)? They said that they couldn’t look up any information regarding the refrigerator based on the serial number. There was no way for them to determine whether the fridge was within warranty, for example, so they would refuse to honor their 1-year warranty. They gave me the name of a local appliance repair service. That company came out, said that the problem was “probably with the sealed system” and that it would cost $500 to do a test of the system, which would take about two hours, and after that another $1,000+ to perform a repair. The ultimate cost to fix the $2,000 fridge would therefore be about $1,700 and they recommended against it. I called Wine Enthusiast and they suggested buying a new one from them at full retail price, plus shipping… $2,200 (no cheaper than switching to a name brand such as LG or Samsung; who sticks with Wine Enthusiast after experiencing a failure like this one?) The good news is that we will be able to free up some space in the living room because we were not passionate about wine to begin with. Because of our Massachusetts heritage, we consider (“essential” during lockdown) cannabis to be far more important. And that raises the question of when we will be able to buy a $2,000+ stainless steel refrigerator to keep cannabis at the ideal temperature for consumption.]

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The true spirit of Oshkosh

by philg

I’ll be writing about EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) over the next few weeks, but today is the last day of the actual gathering. The true spirit of Oshkosh, I think, is best captured by this story from EAA:

Ken Swain, EAA 102241, flew his VariEze, N4ZZ, into Oshkosh for the 45th year in a row this year. From life in the Air Force to flying for United Airlines, and now in retirement, Ken’s aircraft has been a constant.

Ken has proudly owned his VariEze since Burt Rutan first released it, even flying it into Oshkosh just two years after the prototype was shown.

“In 1976, Burt showed up in the homebuilt prototype,” Ken said. “Once, again, he was mobbed. The plans were out there, and a couple of really fast builders showed up in 1977 along with Burt, and in 1978, there were at least 14 … and I was one of them. That was my first time [at Oshkosh].”

“The first three years I stayed [at UW-Oshkosh], and every year since, I’ve stayed in the campground,” Ken said. “I’ve seen the way the campground has evolved …. That’s changed a lot, and yet it hasn’t changed. The society of campers is its own extra convention separate from the daytime convention. It has to be experienced, and not just one or twice, but over a number of years to understand. It’s a whole other vibe.”

This guy hits every note. He built his own airplane from plans. The plane is a Rutan design. He camps with his plane. Let’s just hope that he came in on Sunday rather than a day early. The weather for the event was perfect, sunny with highs around 80 degrees every day. Saturday, July 23 was a different story:

What it looked like in the Garmin Pilot app around 7 pm Central:

I’m not sure when they arrived, but here are a couple of guys who got two tents and two full-size bicycles into an A36 Bonanza:

Also a candidate for the True Spirit of Oshkosh award, a family that rebuilt a 1938 Staggerwing… twice (second rebuild necessitated by a hangar fire):

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Mighty brains of academia and non-profit figure out why Americans are homeless

by philg

There is a new book from some of America’s smartest people. First, the credentials…

GREGG COLBURN is an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. … Gregg holds a PhD and an MSW from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Northwestern University. … Gregg is also a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Family Homelessness Evaluation Committee and co-chair of the University of Washington’s Homelessness Research Initiative.

CLAYTON PAGE ALDERN is a neuroscientist turned journalist and data scientist based in Seattle. … A Rhodes scholar and a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.

What have these mighty brains learned? From Homelessness is a Housing Problem:

the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness.

The higher the rent, the higher the rate of people who can’t afford the rent:

In other words, we aren’t wealthy enough to build and maintain the housing to which we believe ourselves entitled.

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 people come over the southern border every month to claim asylum (US CBP stats) and common decency demands that, regardless of whether any can or do work, all be provided with reasonable quality housing. According to a book that I recently finished, The Swamp, there may be a limit to how many of these newcomers can come to South Florida. From a legal point of view, we can’t keep robbing the federally-protected Everglades of water. Our abuse of the animals who live there has some limits.

From a newspaper that passionately advocates for expanded low-skill immigration… “The Housing Shortage Isn’t Just a Coastal Crisis Anymore” (NYT, July 14):

What once seemed a blue-state coastal problem has increasingly become a national one, with consequences for the quality of life of American families, the health of the national economy and the politics of housing construction.

Freddie Mac has estimated that the nation is short 3.8 million housing units to keep up with household formation.

It is not an expanding population due to immigration that drives up prices in an Econ 101 supply and demand curve intersection, but rather inequality:

Other forces like widening income inequality also worsen housing affordability, said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. That’s because more higher-income households compete for limited housing (prompting builders to build high-end homes).

Our brightest minds are working on this:

The Biden administration also released a long list of ideas this spring for boosting housing supply.

The word “immigration” does not occur in this article.

Related:

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Boston builds a ghetto for the 2SLGBTQQIA+

by philg

From state-sponsored media… “Community unites after an LGBTQ+ senior housing project in Boston was defaced” (NPR, July 14, 2022):

The road to building The Pryde, a Boston housing development aimed at LGBTQ+ seniors, has been surprisingly smooth. That’s what made last weekend’s homophobic vandalism all the more shocking.

Among the slurs and death threats covering the perimeter of the construction site, which takes up nearly an entire city block of the Hyde Park neighborhood, were messages saying, “We will burn this,” “die slow,” and “die by fire.”

Meanwhile, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also responded on Twitter, writing, “Hate & acts of vandalism will not be tolerated at the Pryde — or anywhere in Boston.”

“This affordable, LGBTQ+ senior housing development has been led by local residents, boosted by neighborhood voices & fueled by united support. We will move even faster to get it done,” Wu said.

Intolerance will not be tolerated by the tolerant!

From the developers:

Pennrose, in partnership with LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc., has been selected by the City of Boston to develop 74 new apartments for seniors 62 and older in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. Construction has begun on the 120 year old former William Barton Rogers School that will undergo a historic rehabilitation. Rent-restricted studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments will be available to households and individuals at various income tiers (30%, 50%, 60%, 80% and 100% of Area Median Income). Several apartments will be set aside for homeless individuals. A housing lottery will be conducted, and 70% of the apartments will carry a City of Boston resident preference during the initial lease up of the community.

So many questions! First, why aren’t all of the apartments set aside for those who are currently homeless? (who has a greater need for a home than a homeless individual?) Massachusetts needs to catch up to California with its 160,000+ unhoused residents? Second, if Maskachusetts is Tolerance Central, why do members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community have to live apart from those who do not identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+? Would it be okay to build rent-restricted housing for Black people? For Asian American and Pacific Islander people? If discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is forbidden under Massachusetts law, how can this new government-sponsored development discriminate against cisgender heterosexuals who want to live rent-free?

Related:

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Fix for a Bosch dishwasher bottom rack that falls off its track

by philg

Department of How I Became the World’s Most Boring Person by Buying a House…

Our middle-class mansion in Abacoa came with a 3-year-old Bosch dishwasher. The bottom rack was constantly falling off the rails built into the interior. The KitchenAid repair guy said “I can’t help you with Bosch, but call them because they may have a fix.” Sure enough, I called Bosch and they eventually answered the phone after the obligatory excuses for how COVID-19 made it impossible for anyone sitting at home to pick up the phone.

How do they describe their engineering failure to product a rack that is the correct width for the stainless steel interior, resulting in plaintive queries all over the Internet for how to fix the problem? “In some rare cases, the lower rack may disengage from the tub rails when the rack is heavily loaded.”

To their credit, they will send out an “extended lower rack wheel kit”, part number 10016657, at no charge. You snap in these wider wheels and the problem goes away.

I’m leaving this here so that people can find the solution with search engines.

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If the working class has to pay for our Teslas, shouldn’t they also have to pay for our fuel-efficient private aircraft?

by philg

“Tesla, GM buyers would get EV tax credits again under Democrats’ climate bill” (CNN, yesterday):

Under a new green energy bill agreed to by Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin, automakers like Tesla and General Motors would regain the ability to offer federal tax credits to customers who buy their electric vehicles.

Under current regulations, buyers of electric vehicles get a $7,500 tax credit when purchasing an electric vehicle, but that full credit is limited to the first 200,000 electric vehicles sold by any given manufacturer.

In other words, the working class will once again be paying for the laptop class’s Teslas. The person who commutes 2 hours per day in a 10-year-old Camry will pay $7,500 towards the brand new luxury vehicle whose owner can pretend to work from home indefinitely.

The law fits perfectly into the American system of transferism, in which government’s main role is moving money from one group of voters to another. But I wonder if it could be enhanced. Here at Oshkosh, for example, there are a lot of new private jets displayed. Like electric cars, these can be characterized as more energy efficient than older airplanes. Here’s a single-engine Cirrus Vision Jet, for example:

Every time the start button is pressed, Mother Earth breathes a sigh of relief that an older two-engine jet wasn’t spun up. Shouldn’t the working class have to pay for part of each Vision Jet?

Separately, a trip to the nearby branch of the University of Wisconsin showed the value of the college educations that, via student loan “forgiveness” (transfer to taxpayers), are now being paid for by the working class. I think the idea is that people who do real jobs will benefit indirectly from the presence of the hypertrophied brains that American universities are producing. Here’s a sign from the cafeteria that serves the young geniuses who are being funded by those who clean pools, cut lawns, crawl into attics to service air handlers, etc. It reminds those who have soaked up hundreds of $thousands in education that pecan pie contains nuts:

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico 2016), in which a Harvard professor explains, “The total wealth redistribution from the native losers [working class] to the native winners [laptop class] is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.” (adjusted for inflation, the indirect wealth transfer accomplished via low-skill immigration is probably at least $700 billion per year)
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Fix for a door that wants to close itself

by philg

Department of How I Became the World’s Most Boring Person by Buying a House…

A couple of the doors in our 20-year-old Spanish Colonial tract house were not framed precisely vertical. Therefore, they tend to fall closed, which is more annoying than you’d expect. Our team of Czech carpenters said that fixing this would be as simple as ripping out the door frame, putting it back in, re-hanging the door, repainting, etc. Perhaps $2,000 per door.

The Internet is packed with products designed for “self-closing” of doors, but there is almost nothing available to fix a door that you want to hold open. After calling a few hinge companies, I found a Band-Aid that works well: a spring that goes through the existing hinge pin. The seller hasn’t updated his pricing for the Age of Biden so these are $6 each. A single spring was sufficient to render one door more or less neutral and two springs cleaned up a tougher case.

Hidden advantages of homeownership: While renters were learning Mandarin, writing the Great American Novel, and perfecting their golf and tennis games, I embarked on a self-education program on gravity, friction, hinges, and springs.

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Florida’s crummy welfare system leads to a lot more interracial interaction?

by philg

Although I don’t like to sort people by skin color, I have noticed that we interact much more frequently with Black and Latinx people here in Florida than we did in Massachusetts. Everyone who worked on our house in Massachusetts was white, for example, while folks in the service industries here come in a rainbow of skin tones, often within the same crew. For white suburbanites in Boston, Black people might as well be aliens. They exist on a different planet and interactions are uncommon, even in service settings.

Although Florida has a higher percentage of Black residents, the difference is not large enough to explain our experience. I’m wondering if the explanation can be found in the states’ respective welfare systems. CATO’s Work versus Welfare Trade-Off 2013:

In Massachusetts, unless a person puts a $0 value on leisure time, being a successful welfare entrepreneur is vastly smarter, from an economic point of view, than working at the median salary. The spending power of the welfare recipient is 118 percent of the worker’s and that’s before considering cash income that the welfare recipient might obtain from under-the-table work and also discounts to EBT cardholders.

How about in Florida? The same chart shows that Florida is one of the worst states for enjoying the welfare lifestyle (unless you love the beach!). At least as of 2013, a welfare recipient in Florida enjoyed only about 41 percent of the spending power of a worker. Therefore, it is not economically rational to spend multiple generations on welfare unless one puts a very high value on leisure time/Xbox.

Whatever the reason, I think it is good for our kids to see that the well-paid guy who runs a paver restoration business happens to be Black while his helper is white.

Separately, we have learned a lot about pavers! Our patios, walks, and driveway are a mosaic of red bricks and white concrete tiles. Over time, the brick color had faded so that the contrast between these items was reduced. More seriously, tree roots had grown underneath and made the surface uneven. Cleaning up after 20 years of neglect required (1) picking up a lot of the tiles/bricks and removing all of the tree roots underneath, then putting everything back down again, (2) painting the bricks with “concrete stain” to restore their bright color, (3) putting new sand in between all of the bricks and tiles to hold them in place, and (4) sealing everything with clear sealer that is supposed to last 2-3 years (at which point it will just need a pressure wash and a reapplication of the sealer). Total cost to rehab 3,000 square feet of patio? $8,000. That’s 8,000 good reasons to continue being a renter!

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California is 14th in property tax revenue per capita

by philg

California has some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation. Pre-coronapanic data from the New York Times:

California kids were nearly a year behind Texas kids, adjusted for demographics, even before California urban schools shut down for 1.5 years while Texas schools remained open.

One of the excuses that my California friends give for the poor quality of government services is that the state is starved for property tax revenue due to Proposition 13. Yet in this ranking of states by property tax collected per capita, California is at #14:

In addition to a state income tax that can reach 13.3 percent of income, in other words, California has a robust property tax revenue stream and a total state and local income tax burden of 13.5 percent (Tax Foundation), which is close to the highest in the nation.

Why is this interesting? Californians are the folks who like to say that they’ve figured out how government should work!

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Oshkosh begins; let’s celebrate the Miracle on the Quinnipiac

by philg

Captain Sully, the single-pilot hero of the Airbus A320 protagonist of the Miracle on the Hudson, may have to move over because no dog was saved during the river landing. By contrast, in the Miracle on the Quinnipiac, a Bonanza pilot did a beautiful water landing after an engine failure and a Great Dane was able to exit the aircraft onto a sandbar.

From a photo album:

06/30/22 New Haven, CT – A plane flying over the city had to make an emergency landing into the Quinnipiac River near Front and Pine Sts. The plane came to rest about 200 yards from the Waucoma Yacht Club. There were two people onboard as well as a Great Dane. All were able to exit the plane and were rescued by members of the yacht club using their boats. The people and pet were uninjured. The Coast Guard also responded with a boat. New Haven firefighters made a search of the plane and found no other people on board. The plane was submerged half way and had to be refloated and towed to the dock for further investigation. The cause of the crash is being investigated by the NTSB and FAA.

From a Fox TV station:

Late Thursday afternoon, the pilot of a single-engine plane made an emergency landing on the Quinnipiac River in New Haven, which resulted in no injuries, to any of the three occupants aboard, including a Great Dane

The pilot of the Beechcraft Bonanza, whose name was not released, was calm when he realized he wasn’t going to make it to Tweed New Haven Airport for an emergency landing. … . But, while the plane landed on the edge of the channel, on a sandbar, where the water is only a couple of feet deep, the tide was rising quickly.

EAA AirVenture starts today in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. So it is a great time to celebrate the hero of the Miracle on the Quinnipiac!

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