Futures and Options

All data accurate as of the time of this post:

Airline Miles Earned:  110,244
AmEx Charges:  $28,882.35
Total Days YTD:  229
Days on Road YTD:  136 (59.4%)
Days on Road During Current Project:  136 (80%)

Told you I’d continue it someday.

This is not so much a “thing” in the sense of a named event or entity, but it’s still a situation that baffles me:

For the past several years, I have been receiving E-mails intended for someone else due to a similarity in our addresses.  Mildly annoying because the majority of these misdirected E-mails have been the result of this other person mis-typing her own E-mail into form subscriptions or contact lists, so it’s not like strangers are making the typos; she should know her own E-mail address.  Yesterday she enrolled in online banking through Wachovia.  Using my E-mail address.  Ponder the consequences of that for a moment.

All of that, however, is mere background to the upcoming absolutely stunningly illogical event that is about to occur.

Being a (relatively) nice guy, I forward the welcome message to Wachovia’s customer service department notifying them that I did not have an account with their company and that I should not be receiving information about someone else’s bank accounts.  (It might just be me, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing for strangers to receive each other’s banking information.)  I received the following response from Wachovia:

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

That’s right.  Because I was not a customer, they refused to stop sending me E-mails containing someone else’s account information.

In the meantime, while waiting for their reply, I received a “daily balance notification” letting me know how much money was in an account that didn’t belong to me.

I notified Wachovia again.  Same response.

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

After receiving several more E-mails from Wachovia containing information about an account that did not belong to me (and notifying Wachovia each time), I finally received a reply from a higher-level customer service manager.

I have contacted the customer who had your e-mail address on file. I have found that there was a typo in the e-mail address. I have taken care of this issue.

A few minutes later, I received an E-mail from Wachovia’s automated online banking system:

Our records indicate that you recently added or made a change to one of your email address(es). This notification is to confirm that you initiated this change.

All it took was repeated pushing on my end to get them to correct the issue.  If I had given up after the first response, I would still be receiving information about an account which I do not own.

It should not take repeated notifications on my part for a bank to stop sending me the account information for a stranger.  They should have suspended the account’s automated E-mails immediately after my initial notification to them and then contacted the account holder about the mix-up rather than doing nothing until I harassed them enough to get it kicked up to an upper-level representative.

Wachovia, I have a suggestion for a new slogan:

Online banking security; we’re doing it wrong.

You aren’t Hank Rearden either.

If you’re female, it’s pretty much a dead cert that you aren’t Dagny Taggert.

Really.  I mean it.  At best you might be Eddie Willers or Cherryl Brooks, but you’re not motive power.  If you were, you wouldn’t be striking up  superficial conversation with someone in an airport strictly on the basis of the book he’s reading.

Just saying…

The rural Australian town of Bundanoon, an otherwise unremarkable bedroom community for Sydney, made a desperate grab for news headlines today by supposedly banning the sale of bottled water within the town’s boundaries.

While ostensibly enacted to combat what the town feels to be a waste of resources (in bottling and shipping water that is more efficiently delivered straight from the tap), it should be clear to any thinking person that the ban’s true motivation is simply good, old-fashioned, selfish NIMBY-ism.  A few years ago, a bottled water suppler proposed to build a water extraction plant near the town and, like all good bedroom communities fearful of industrial developments harming their presious property values, Bundanoon has resisted the proposal tooth and nail.  The supplier’s proposal is still fighting Bundanoon’s obstructionist legal challenges and the passage of this new law ultimately represents little more than petulance on Bundanoon’s part.

The fact that this “ban” is ultimately a mere “feel-good” measure is patently obvious to anyone who reads far enough to see that it carries no penalty whatsoever for non-compliance.  That’s right boys and girls, compliance with this so-called “ban” is entirely optional.  The same people who got on a moral high-horse about the inefficiencies and wastefulness of bottled water have, in their woefully misguided zeal, gone through the inefficient and wasteful process of creating an unenforceable law when the same outcome could have been obtained more efficiently simply by going door-to-door and asking the businesses to stop carrying bottled water.

Well done lads.  You’ve wasted everyone’s time and spent taxpayer dollars to do something that could have been done for free in less time.  *golf-clap*

Nothing like a little John Phillips Sousa on Independence Day…

Editor’s Note:  I was away from the blog and did not see this in my publishing queue until today; the delay is entirely my own fault and not that of Mr. Nebulosa.

Haven’t had a chance to read through the full ruling yet, but so far this one looks like a win for rationality.  If you’re not familiar with the case, George Will provided an excellent summary about two months ago.

I started keeping track of the raw numerical data for my travels and so far this year in numbers is either impressive or depressing depending on how one looks at it.  Numbers are slightly projected through the end of this month to capture the entire first 6 months of 2009:

• Days in year to date:  181
• Days on the road:  97 (53.59%)
• Airline Miles Earned:  76,932
• Expenses (incl. hotel/airfare):  $20,488.83
• Projects worked on:  3

H/T to Consultant Ninja for giving me the idea to track this.

The New Criterion has a lively review by Mark Steyn of Paul Rahe’s book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift. The central idea of the article (and presumably the book, although I haven’t read it) is summed up by this two-hundred-year-old passage from Tocqueville, who was musing on ways in which a free republic could, on its own, collapse into a despotic state, quite apart from the coercion of a nineteenth-century-style despotic monarch:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Sound familiar? The problem is that the transformation to “soft despotism” occurs stealthily, perhaps imperceptibly. The key to retarding its creep, according to Steyn and Rahe, is the vitality of the institutions that traditionally served as intermediaries between the individuals and the sovereign state: family, church, school board, township, county, and the like. These are the institutions that are on the ground, that are actually capable of observing and responding to the problems of individuals and communities, and in which individuals can feel genuinely invested. But that ideal is increasingly forgotten as the federal government assumes greater and greater responsibility for our everyday lives.

Steyn offers this current anecdote in support of Rahe’s thesis:

Today, the animating principles of the American idea are entirely absent from public discourse. To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. The can-do spirit means Ty’Sheoma Bethea can do with some government money: A high-school student in Dillon, South Carolina, Miss Bethea wrote to the President to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress. Imagine if Miss Bethea gets her way, and the national bureaucracy in Washington becomes responsible for grade- school paint jobs from Maine to Hawaii. What size of government would be required for such a project? And is it compatible with a constitutional republic?

Can you imagine a schoolgirl in 1793 sending a letter to George Washington asking the federal government to please do something about the leaky roof on her local schoolhouse? And can you imagine President Washington actually inviting said schoolgirl to come to Philadelphia and sit behind him as he read her letter during an address to Congress in an attempt to shame them into sending a check to Dillon, South Carolina (as Obama did with Ms. Bethea)? We have been sliding down this slope for a long time; perhaps the slippage has accelerated enough during this new administration that people will finally notice.

Couldn’t resist passing along this nicely put bit of exasperation:

I keep hearing about how smart Obama is because he has the wisdom and judgment to implement policies that contradict his campaign positions now that he is in office and has all the facts before him. I agree — that is evidence of his intelligence. It makes him almost as smart as the people who believed what he now believes back when he believed the opposite.

You know, I actually have more respect for those folks who complain that Obama isn’t liberal enough than those who celebrate the wisdom of his fickleness. The former at least have some consistent political opinions; the latter (including a distressing portion of the press) are apparently just mesmerized by the sound of our good President’s voice.

…”liberalism” used here in the modern-day sense. Please watch this fascinating discussion between Peter Robinson and Charles Kesler. All five parts of the interview are worth viewing, but I found this segment particularly enlightening. Kesler’s thesis is that the progressive notion of economic rights that came alive under Wilson and especially FDR had the effect of liberating citizens from what were formerly considered core virtues — what we today call “family values” — which were largely indispensable in exercising one’s economic freedoms (providing for yourself and your family). Indispensable, that is, until the government took it upon itself to provide those basic economic necessities to everyone. With old-fashioned individual virtue no longer a prerequisite for economic survival, individuals were free to explore beyond the bounds of traditional morality. In short, the New Deal made the Sexual Revolution possible.

As Kesler acknowledges, some of the evolution of traditional “family values” is attributable to changes in the overall economy that made it more conducive for women to earn a living.  But the Sixties, he argues, went far beyond mere recognition and acceptance of changing economic realities; the progressive movement at its core was an outright repudiation of traditional morality, made possible by the creation of the welfare state.  Much to think about there.

I suspect that libertarian-minded readers might disagree with this analysis, as it posits a definite link between traditional morality and economic freedom.  But I would note that Kesler’s worldview does not require a government-imposed morality (which libertarians find repugnant).  Rather, traditional morality was and is a tool to cope with economic realities when those realities are not taken care of by the government.  So government need not impose moral virtue; it need only keep its nose out of individuals’ economic business, and individuals will turn to virtue of their own accord.  The perversion of progressivism is that it removes the need to deal with economic reality, and so we find traditional virtues cast aside as no longer necessary to survival.

Incidentally, I find the Uncommon Knowledge series to be one of the best things on the web. Robinson doesn’t try to hide his conservatism, but he nevertheless elicits some challenging and enlightening commentary from his always impressive guests. Never a waste of time to watch his interviews.