tagline

I treated myself to a new laptop this week, a lovely sleek 13" macbook pro. It's to replace my current white macbook, which I'm donating to some needy kids who live in an isolated and economically deprived area.

Anyway. One of the things I really like about unpacking any Apple product is that every piece you unpack will have somewhere on the packaging the tagline "designed by Apple in California". I find this immensely reassuring.

Tax.

There's an otherwise-unremarkable story in today's Australian about the remote possibility that the capital gains tax exemption for owner-occupied housing might be scrapped. But the really great great part about it was left out of the online version. It's a picture of the young couple who are quoted towards the end of the story. They're on the terrace of their North Sydney apartment and behind them you can see the bridge and the harbor and whatnot. And then there's the caption:

Thomas and Katherine Ko, who are selling their apartment at Milsons Point, Sydney, for upwards of $3 million, oppose the idea of a capital gains tax on high-end family homes.

Well they would, wouldn't they? I don't blame the Kos for this, by the way. I'm opposed to anything that disadvantages me too. But who's the genius at The Australian who found this couple? It is the same person who finds a struggling family out in the Hills and puts them on the front page (always a front-lawn shot) when there's an interest rate cut?

Speaking of which, I expect that when interest rates start to rise again they'll have a picture of a semi-employed ex-banker on the front page, someone who's living on investment income and who welcomes a rate rise. That'd be me. They can find me at the Gazebo on a Thursday afternoon when the time comes.

Bananas.

I was walking down the street early this evening carrying a banana peel. By way of explanation, I'd eaten the banana as I was walking, and was hoping that on the way to the bank and the supermarket I'd find somewhere to put it.

I heard a woman behind me say "excuse me" and I turned around. She was in, I'd guess, her 60s. Eccentrically dressed but not - at least at first glance - barking mad. "Yes?", I said, expecting she'd tell me that my shoelaces were undone. I get that a lot.

She pointed to my hand "can I have your banana peel?", she asked. Then, by way of explanation, she added "it's for the worms".

I handed it over and crossed the road in case she was, in fact, a nutter. And as I crossed the road I realised I'd missed my chance. My chance to say something like "Banana peel? My kids get worms and I usually give them those worm tablets you buy at the chemist".

Your dog's called what?

I was downstairs having a coffee and reading the increasingly-feeble SMH and I couldn't help notice that both of the other outside tables were occupied by people who had brought their little dogs along. One of the dogs was called Brooklyn and its owners were - of course - New Zealanders.

My neighborhood's overrun with these little dogs. An acquaintance of mine was at a dinner party near here recently and was introduced to a couple who described themselves to her as dildoes, which took her back a little until they explained that it stood for "Dual Income Little-Dog owners".

Unneeded Complexity.

This morning, in between driving around to take number one son to soccer and number one daughter to hockey, and trying to schedule the thee or four other things that have to be done today, I almost ran out of gas. No, I don't mean in some figurative sense, I mean literally. (And I don't mean literally as in not literally, as it often does - see this blog.)

The car was almost empty; I pulled into a gas station (and I do say 'gas', by the way. 'Petrol' makes me wince. As, for that matter, does 'capsicum'.) I put $50 worth in the car and went inside to pay, and that's where it all started to get confusing. I told him "Pump 7" and handed over a $50 note and he said to me that if I bought $5 more I'd get 14c a litre cheaper, or something like that.

This stopped me cold. I don't really have much of a sense for how much a liter of gas costs, so is 14c lot? I asked him, and he said that on my $50 worth, I'd save about $1.50, which to me sounded like something worth investigating. But then he said that this saving only applied if I bought something in the convenience store for $5. Now clearly, if I was already going to buy something in the convenience store that cost $5 or more this is an unqualified good deal - by expressing a preference to buy the $5 item I've already said I'd rather have the item than have the $5, so having the-item-plus-$1.50 rather than $5 is a easy call.

But there was nothing in the shop that I really needed to buy for $5 or more. I could buy something I didn't want for $5, but then does the $1.50 I'd gain from the saving on the gas make up for the negative utility on the thing I wouldn't have bought anyway? Something I wouldn't pay $5 for, but which I'd happily pay $3.50 for? It's not easy.

And then I remembered than the man in line ahead of me had bought one of those protein drinks (and, I couldn't help noticing, a pack of winfield cigarettes - but he was that sort of guy) and I thought that might do it. I'd been to the gym yesterday and I need protein. The protein drinks were $4.65, so all I had to do was to buy something I didn't want at all for 35c and I'd still be up. Some gum or something, I don't know. They'd be paying me to have the gum and I could throw it in the bin as I went out. Gum, of course, being an absolute disgrace.

But this side-deal wasn't as straightforward as that. They were also offering these protein drinks as a deal: you get two for $6. I could, of course, buy 2 for $6, but then I'd probably leave the extra one in the car for a day or too and it'd get a bit too funky to drink. But I'd feel like a chump paying $4.65 for one when I could have had the extra one for only $1.35. I couldn't justify buying a second one... (This happens to me in the supermarket quite often. I need one of something, but they have some deal on where you could also buy 7 for the price of 13 or so and I end up not wanting to buy any. It's my professional training: if you can't tell who the sucker is in a deal, it's you.)

By this point my brain had just completely seized up. I meekly gave the guy $50 and walked out, feeling like I'd been defeated and had left money on the table. I should point out that I have a good undergraduate degree in physics and that for most of my professional life I've been dealing with complex financial structures. I'm not an idiot. I just behave like one.

Postcript: After wrote this, I saw the obvious solution. I was, I think, indifferent between $4.65 and one protein drink. $6 for two protein drinks is really $4.50 for two, so the second one would cost me negative 15c. I could just discard it as I left the shop. Or I could put it in the car on the off-chance that I remembered that it was there and that I needed it. I think though, that at a subconscious level I did evaluate all this, and realised that the extra fuss of having to manage this inventory wasn't worth the 15c I'd gain. I have quite a bit on my plate today anyway.

Airport Security. And wine racks.

On Badscience there's a link to a superb article in the Atlantic about how airport security is as poorly thought-out as it is annoying. Which is saying something. As an aside, last time I was taken aside for a random security check I asked the guy exactly how random it is, and he said 'continuous random'. Which means, he explained as he got out the glove and the car battery, that when they've finished doing someone they grab the next person who walks past.

Anyway, this article would be a great find anyway, but it also has this superb paragraph. Note the past sentence, the one in parentheses:

During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.)

See! (Oh, and if you don't know the colloquial meaning of the word 'rack' in American I suggest you get out more.)

What sort of board exactly?