Choice Rants

LEARNER BIKES 2/10/00

Why do people buy bikes costing thousands of dollars as their first bike? This is pretty stupid, really. If one really wants to learn how to ride a motorcycle, one should probably plan on hitting the pavement at least once. Doing this sort of thing on a bike that can easily cost a grand in a parking lot drop is ridiculous. Here’s what you should do. Buy a small bike. Small bikes say nothing about penis/ball size, they are practical. It simply is not practical to buy something brand-new just to wreck it. Figure it this way: If you buy a brand new bike and drop it, sure, you’ll have insurance. There may be a good, long wait, however, before your bike gets fixed. Then your insurance rates may go up as well. Do yourself a favor and spend less than a grand on a small (less than 600cc) bike. They’re available everywhere. It’s a good idea to learn to ride and polish your skills on a bike that you’re not going to have to re-mortgage your house for when you need to replace scuffed chrome. Yes, bigger bikes have more power and most are much more “cool”, however, they are much more expensive, and the fear of messing them up will get in the way of a good learning experience. You have to be able to trust yourself to take a risk and try new things when you learn to ride a bike. Spending 12 grand on a bike that you can’t even pick up when you drop it is not a good idea.

SELLING IT UPSCALE 3/23/00

I was driving to work this morning and I saw something that's becoming more and more prevalent and insidious everyday. When you go out and buy a house, what are you buying? A house or a HOME? "Modern" realtors would have you believe that you're buying a HOME. But are you really buying and are they really selling you a HOME? The last time I checked (today) the dictionary defined "HOUSE" as, "a building that serves as living quarters for one or a few families..." (thank you www. webster), and "HOME" as, "one's place of residence..." (thanks, again www.webster). Technically, they are selling you someone else's HOME and it will BECOME your home when you start living there. What you are buying is a house. Could we get this straight?

Another thing that really bugs me is this whole "Pre-Owned/Used" thing. I can see the reasons why someone would want to call something "pre-owned." It takes any image of usage or wear out of the semantic equation. All it's been is previously owned.

A pre-owned toothbrush hasn't necessarily been used. It could have been given to someone by a dentist, kept in its wrapper, and then sold for a quarter at a garage sale without being used (still in its wrapper). Voila! it is a pre-owned toothbrush. Most sane people would call that same toothbrush out of its wrapper (not necessarily used) a used toothbrush and there probably wouldn't be too many people eager to buy it to use it as a toothbrush. Would someone use it for a parts scrubber? Suuure, why not.

Pre-owned is just a snake's way of messing with your mind. By leaving the semantically inconvenient "Used" behind, the snake can purge any visions of wear and tear from the object being sold. "It's a pre-owned car!" What did the previous owner do with this '62 Buick? Well, he/she sure as hell didn't use it, or it would be sold as a used car, right? Someone could sell that '62 Buick as a pre-owned vehicle if it had just finished last in a demolition derby.

"A pre-owned home" is actually redundant because "HOME" implies someone already lives there. Oops, there I go implying things again. Somebody might have owned this house but not lived in it. Silly me. However, it may have been the home to 2,231 mice and 16,396 cockroaches. It was their home, pre-owned by the rat who sold it.

I think weasels use pre-owned to appeal to our inner optimist. There's always hope in the inner optimist that things are going to be better then we'd wish them to be. I think the word "used" sort of shuts any hope out. Yes, Virginia, this is a used piece of facial tissue. It's not a pre-owned piece of facial tissue. "Oh, it's just pre-owned tissue! (OH JOY!) Perhaps I can get some use out of it."

I will go on record saying that I will never sell a "Pre-Owned Motorcycle," nor will I leave any of my "Pre-Owned toilet tissue" floating in the toilet. Did I use it? I didn't say that, did I?

LIGHTBULBS 5/18/00

I'm sick of changing lightbulbs.

It seems I'm doing a lot more of this lately, and I don't think it has anything to do with owning my own home. I hear it from my friends, the Custodians of the building I work in, and various other folks. They all are saying that lightbulbs don't seem to last as long as they used to. They're right. They don't. Today, you even see commercials on TV selling "Long Life" lightbulbs. Ask Pete and Paul, the custodians of the building I work in. They'll tell you that changing lightbulbs is a major part of their job. Both guys have been in the business a few years and they just don't understand why lightbulbs have to burn out every week to two weeks. They used to last several months. The lightbulb in our stairwell at home burns out about once a month. Yes, we leave this one on quite a lot, but to have to replace it once a month is ridiculous. Why, why do lightbulbs last so much less time than they used to?

The answer, friends, lies in our Government. I'm not one of those kooks that thinks the Government is out to get me. I believe we get the Government we deserve. We elected these folks, after all. However, there's money on Capitol Hill and there's influence there as well. And so begins my rant.

A few years back, it was decided that it would be a good idea to save energy. Yes, we all can get behind this idea. It's good to save energy, right? Yep, I'm going to save my energy by sitting on the couch and drinking a beer. I'm saving lots of energy. Nope, the lawn's not going to get mowed, but just think of the energy savings! I'm not polluting the atmosphere with my gasoline powered mower, I'm not clogging my lawn with clippings, and I'm not using plastic bags to clean up the yard waste. What savings! Yes, it is rather wrongheaded to think of energy savings this way, but lightbulbs were made more efficient in sort of the same way.

Lightbulbs use electricity to heat a filament of tungsten or some other alloy. The electricity heats it so much that it throws off light as well as heat. To keep the filament from burning, the filament is surrounded by nothing. A vacuum. Yet, even though there's ideally no oxygen inside a lightbulb, the filament does erode. Not by oxidation, but by sublimination. Have you ever noticed that on a cold day when there's a little frost on your windshield--but not enough to scrape--that it will go away while you're driving. It didn't melt, because you're driving through weather that's below the freezing mark. Sublimination is when a solid passes through being a solid to being a gas without ever becoming a liquid. How is this? I'm not that sharp on molecular theory, but I think the ice on your windshield is being hit by air molecules. When these fast moving air molecules hit the frozen water molecules, they dissipate the energy contained in their velocity and create heat. On a molecular level, this might just be enough heat energy to turn one molecule of water into a gas from a solid, while subtly heating the rest of the molecules around it.

The same sort of thing is happening inside a lightbulb filament. The "energy" that hits the molecules of tungsten inside the filament is actually the electron flow of electricity. This causes the filament to heat and the outer layer of molecules get hot enough to sublimate. The wayward molecles end up floating around in the vacuum until they either reattach to the filament or hit the much cooler side of the light bulb itself. Since it's cooler, it sticks there. Eventually through this process, the filament gets thinner and thinner and will eventually break. Dead lightbulb. If you've ever seen an old light bulb that appears to have been turned into a mirror, that's what you're seeing--sublimated filament that's attached itself to the inside of the glass.

What does this have to do with energy savings? Well, the powers that be decided that lightbulbs needed to be more energy effecient. How do you do this? Well, if you have less filament, you need less power to make it glow. Less filament material is what causes the burning out  problem we all have today. I don't know who's idea it was to make lightbulb filaments thinner, but thinner they are. Thinner filaments do use less electricity, however, since there's less filament, there's less life to a bulb. Less filament means the filament can lose less of itself through sublimation to the outside of the bulb before breaking. Less filament also means there's much less physical shock resistance in a bulb today than in an older bulb.

OK, so who wins here? The consumer wins becasuse he/she uses less electricity and that is better for the environment. If this were the whole story, we'd all be happy campers.

Who's interest would it be in if the government mandated that lightbulbs burn out more often? If you said the lightbulb makers, you'd be right! You know, a lightbulb manufacturer could make an awful lot of hay with this program. It could sell lightbulbs that burn out at twice the rate of regular bulbs, sell more of them (since they're always burning out), and tout the fact that they're an "energy conscious" and "responsible" company. Call these folks winners and buy their stock.

I'm not saying that the lightbulb companies were behind this law, but they sure stood to benefit from it if it were passed. Who's really winning here? Well, the lightbulb companies, the aluminum, tungsten and glass companies are winning for sure. I think the public welfare might be winning here, but only and I mean ONLY if the energy consumed to make these thinner bulbs doesn't offset the amount of electricity these lightbulbs are supposedly saving. I don't know how this shakes out, but I do know that it takes an enormous amount of energy to mine and refine aluminum. It also takes quite a bit of energy to melt glass. I know nothing about tungsten, but it isn't used in everyday situations (they're not making cooking ware/auto bodies out of it), and therefore must be pretty expensive. This means that it's either rare, hard to refine, or hard to work with. All these things would take energy to overcome. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of lightbulbs consuming energy...

The losers here are you and me. We have to buy these crappy bulbs, and take the time to replace them at our homes. This takes money and the most important thing of all. Time. The opportunity cost in time of climbing up on top of my stair rail to change the bulb in my stairwell is paid for in time I could be doing something else.

So, what do we do?

This is a RANT, silly, I'm just venting. I don't know what to do. I suspect this situation is financially advantageous to the lightbulb makers who have the money to keep this law from changing, so I don't think we'll be getting decent bulbs for a long time. One could use "Rough Service" bulbs, but I've had nothing but trouble with these things and they seem to burn out just as fast. Halogen? Perhaps. I have 3 long-life bulbs in my garage that I paid a premium for (I'm such a sucker), so we'll see if the answer is to pay more for lightbulbs that are designed the way they should be in the first place. How about flourescents? How about not. I'll opt out of the 60 cycle flicker, thanks. What a damned unpleasant light those things throw. Yucko.