The Binary Circumstance

I was in Seattle all day yesterday for some doctor’s appointments, routine tests and some minor surgery. That’s why there was no post. It was a really nice ride to and fro on the ferry and the weather in the city was very beautiful.

This is a potentially hot news item:

Last night I heard on the news that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston have been looking for a home on Bainbridge Island as a place to raise their family. The report showed one home that might be under consideration which looked like it’s on an island by itself right off the main island, but they quoted the owner as saying it wasn’t for sale.

Today was the huge Bainbridge Island Rotary Auction which must be–next to eBay–one of the biggest garage sales in the world. For about ten days people can donate stuff at the local middle school and on Saturday it all gets sold garage sale style, through silent action and the live auction.

All the merchandise is divided into sections: furniture, collectibles, yard furniture, exercise equipment, electronics, clothing, power tools, cars, construction materials, books, basically everything.

The prices are low to begin with and as the sale gets into the afternoon they drop the prices and when it gets real late, everything is free to whoever wants to cart it away. Anything left after that goes to the dump.

I bought a grass trimmer/weed whacker for $7. Tested it out this afternoon and it works great. They had plenty of other things I liked but but by 10:30am when I was making the rounds, most of it was sold already.

They auctioned off 500 square feet of bamboo flooring that had been donated by a business. The stated value was $3,500. I was going to bid on it but they didn’t have a sample so I didn’t know the thickness, whether it was solid wood or manufactured flooring so I didn’t know if it would work in any of my planned porjects. It ended up selling for $650.

If they had had a sample on display I think there would have been much more interest in it and much higher bids.

Had I thought it was going to go for so little, I would have bought it and FOUND a way to make it work. Any kind of bamboo flooring for a little over $1 a square foot is an incredibly good deal. Most decent laminate flooring costs a minimum of $4 square foot and real wood can be much higher.

Hundreds of people volunteer for this event, thousands donate and thousands attend. They raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for local charities and it’s really a major island event.

Maybe next year there will be a dinner with Brad and Jen in the catalog?

UPDATE 6/30/04: This Sun Link article addresses these rumors. Maybe people on Bainbridge Island just want to believe that celebrities want to live here. I don’t know what Brad and Jen would do for a social life if they moved here anyway.

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There is a very unfortunate trend in American business that I experience more and more all the time.

Increasingly, companies expect their customers, who presumably have nothing better to do with their time, to do their quality control for them free of charge. They seem to feel that their customers work for them rather than the other way around.

I made the decision last week to purchase some granite tiles for my kitchen counters. I looked at samples at a tile store in Poulsbo, WA called Shoomadoggie. They showed me a system called Granite Solutions from a company called Benissimo Systems which is based out of Seattle. Benissimo Systems produces prefabricated bullnose tiles, inside and outside corner tiles that make it possible to create a professional looking granite tile counter top without having to do a lot of onsite fabrication.

It’s such a neat idea that they’ve applied for a patent on it. (More on the possibility of a patent later.)

The only problem is that they have only a small selection of colors available in the Granite Solutions line. Because my kitchen is dark I don’t want countertops that suck a lot of light out of the room. Of the available colors there were only two that were light enough. The Venito Topaz had a lot of salmon pink in it and based on feedback from more than one person, I rejected it. That only left the Imperial Sage which is a beautiful green but I was still concerned that it might be too dark.

The saleperson let me take a sample tile home with me and in the kitchen it looked fine and wasn’t too dark. I decided based on that sample to purchase the tiles at a cost of over $1,700 including the tax.

So I drove over to Poulsbo to pick up the order today. When I got home and laid a few tiles out on the counter they didn’t seem as pretty or as bright as I remembered from the sample. I really didn’t want dark counter tops so I didn’t think I had picked tiles that dark. I put the sample next to the actual product for comparison. Here are four pictures of the comparison.

Now look at the tiles next to black and white which is a good test of their relative brightness.

Can you guess which tile is the sample? I’m not crazy. I really DIDN’T pick a tile as dark as those that were delivered. I picked a tile as light as the sample.

I MUST HAVE TOLD THE SALESWOMAN AT LEAST A DOZEN TIMES, “I DON’T WANT DARK COUNTERTOPS!”

What did I get? DARK COUNTERTOPS!

I spent over $1,700, based on the sample, not to mention the time it took to plan the project and pick up the tiles and I got a product that is nothing like the sample.

The actual tiles are much darker than the sample. That’s because the delivered tiles have much more black in them. Black absorbs all colors of the spectrum. That’s why it’s black. No color gets reflected. White reflects all the colors of the spectrum. It is bright because it is reflecting much more light energy.

A photograph is a record of light. Light areas of the photograph show were more light is being reflected and dark areas show where less light is being reflected.

The reason the sample tile is brigher is because it has much more color in it and much less black. It reflects this beautiful sage green whereas the actual tiles reflect much less of that color and absorb much more light which makes them look very dark in comparison.

It is a well-documented scientific fact that full spectrum lighting is essential for both physical and mental health. Black sucks the full spectrum of light out of a room. A lack of full spectrum light causes depression and it is well known that depression can lead to suicide. If these companies are going to suck the full spectrum light out of my life, why don’t they just stick a gun to my head and pull the trigger?

This experience is like going to a restaurant and ordering something off the menu and what they served was not what I ordered but poison. Comanies that sell darker colors to people who are being led to believe they are buying brighter colors are a health hazard and the EPA should shut them down.

At the very worst, these companies are using a sample that looks much better than the actual product to sell tiles without any regard for their customers time or their health. Alternatively, the sample is an old one that no longer reflects the actual granite being harvested from the quarry. In either case, the sample is a misrepresentation.

Who’s going to pay me for the time it takes to make this situation right? Who will pay for my gas for the tips back and forth to Poulsbo? Who will pay for me to eat more meals out now that my kitchen project as been delayed.

I have at least one, if not two houseguests, coming in about two weeks. I had hoped to have a functioning kitchen by then. Now that it is clear that “Granite Solutions” is in actually a granite problem, how will I get countertops in before my guests arrive now that I’m back to square one. Would I dare to try granite tiles now that I know the samples can look nothing like the actual product?

There is no way I’m spending $1,700 for tiles that aren’t even close to the sample, nor will I waste my time installing them. Installing them in my kitchen will make it very dark, as they will absorb much more light than the granite represented by the sample.

This problem would have been avoided if the sample looked like the tiles. Of the dozen or more tiles I unpacked, not one of them was even close to the sample. All of them are darker.

It’s not like accurate samples aren’t available. I picked up about 50 tiles today and any one of them could be used as a better sample. But maybe they don’t want the customers to know what the real product looks like.

Samples should always reflect the product being sold unless the companies involved don’t care enough about their customer to give them what they need to make informed choices, or unless companies want the samples to make the product look much better than it actually is just to make a sale.

The kindest thing I can say is that it’s just a sloppy, lazy, careless way to do business. The worst I can say is that it’s intentional deception, using misleading and flattering samples to sell a less desirable product. That’s false advertising and fraud.

Customers will not get these practices out of the market until businesses that engage in them are required to compensate their customers for the money, productivity and enjoyment sucked out of their lives. The more this type of thing happens to me, the less I believe that simply getting a refund of the purchase price is acceptable compensation. The loss is much greater than that. All you’re trying to do is make your home look better and they’re making that jub much harder than it has to be.

As for the patent application, I’m not an authority on patent law, but it does seem that patents are awarded too easily. Bullnosing and cutting tiles in special shapes has been done in the field by fabricators for a long time. Why should one company get a patent on it?

Even worse, a patent would make it more expensive for other companies, including ones with more color choices and better samples, to compete in the marketplace. A patent would only provide an additional incentive for Benissimo Systems to be arrogant and lazy in their dealings with their customers, while preventing other companies from using similar prefabricating technologies.

UPDATE 6/28/2004: I returned the entire purchase today and received a full refund from Shoomadoggie. The saleswoman said that since she’s been selling granite for 30 years she should have known to order a sample before making the order just so that I could have seen an actual tile from the current stock. I agree. There’s no way to know from those sample boards or old sample tiles that they have in the store what the current stock looks like.

This whole episode could have been avoided and nobody would have lost time, energy or money on the transaction.

Now it’s back to figuring out what to do with those countertops.

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A new book, written anonymously by a senior CIA official with 22 years of service, claims that the war in Iraq is the wrong war, that is has detracted from the war against terrorism and played into Osama bin Laden’s hand.

I’m not sure how much you can trust a person who hides behind anonymous. That said, in this interview with NBC News Correspondent Andrea Mitchell he makes some interesting comments about the failures of U.S. policy and suggests that instead of weakening Islamic fundamentalism we are in fact strengthening it.

But we are — we remain in a state of denial about the size of the organization we face, the multiple allies it has, and more importantly probably than anything, the genius of bin Laden that’s behind the movement and the power of religion that motivates the movement. I think we are, for various reasons, loath to talk about the role of religion in this war. And it’s not to criticize one religion or another, but bin Laden is motivated and his followers and his associates are motivated by what they believe their religion requires them to do.

[…]

I think the, the bureaucracy at the senior levels in the intelligence community is selective in what they take to the president. I think they are loath to describe the dire problem posed by bin Laden for a number of reasons. One of them is basically political correctness. It’s not career-enhancing to try to engage in a, in a debate about religion and the role it plays in international affairs. And so we, we, we address bin Laden from the perspective of law enforcement, picking them off one at a time, arresting them, killing them. And I think that’s a, the, the, the result of no one frankly discussing the size of the problem or the motivation behind the problem.”

[…]

“I’m certainly not an expert and neither am I a Muslim. I think the appeal that bin Laden has across the Muslim — I indeed think he’s probably the only heroic figure, the only leadership figure that exists in the Islamic world today, and he does so because he is defending Muslims, Islamic lands, Islamic resources. From his perspective it’s very much a war against someone who is oppressing or killing Muslims.

“And the genius that lies behind it, because he’s not a man who rants against our freedoms, our liberties, our voting, our — the fact that our women go to school. He’s not the Ayatollah Khomeini; he really doesn’t care about all those things. To think that he’s trying to rob us of our liberties and freedom is, I think, a gross mistake. What he has done, his genius, is identify particular American foreign policies that are offensive to Muslims whether they support these martial actions or not — our support for Israel, our presence on the Arabian Peninsula, our activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, our support for governments that Muslims believe oppress Muslims, be it India, China, Russia, Uzbekistan. Bin Laden has focused the Muslim world on specific, tangible, visual American policies.

There are many other interesting comments in this interview and I recommend that you read it in its entirety. It think its particularly telling that he’s written the book anonymously (becuase he fears for his job?), apparently with the approval of the CIA, and it suggesting that top government officals are afraid to openly discuss the role that religion plays in this war with George Bush. Why might that be?

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One of the things that always gets me about people who make laws for others is that they also think they’re above the law.

The memo, signed by former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, included long sections that appeared to defend the use of torture and contended that U.S. personnel could be immune from prosecution. The memo also argued that the president’s powers as commander in chief allowed him to override U.S. laws and international treaties banning torture.

It makes sense doesn’t it? If you created the law then you are the God of the law and so you can change it whenever you want. Right?

In natural law, there are the physical laws of the universe like gravity and inertia. The really cool thing about these laws is that no man made them up and everybody is bound by them. These laws unite all mankind. The physical laws that make up the universe unite all of existence, including men, into one state.

Then there are rights that stem from the nature of man and his capacity to comprehend his environment, to acquire knowledge and act on that knowledge. If man has a mind, then it is right that he use it. If he has a life then it is right that it belongs to him and nobody else, since he has his own mind and he was born without any chains on his body.

Every individual is born a free man until somebody takes it away from him.

This very unnatural process where some people make laws for the rest of us is completely made up. It is based on the plantation premise, the belief that one man has a “right” to control the life of another. There is no scientific evidence that such a thing exists, except as subjective creation of those who want to control the lives of others.

Belief in such an irrational premise can only lead to pain and suffering. It can only make it impossible to solve problems. Any “solutions” based on such irrational premises are doomed to create even more problems especially if they are “enforced” by law. An irrational premise coded into law and then backed up with guns forces people into a state of irrationality and insanity.

Even those who make up laws and sign treaties want to circumvent them. It’s painful. It’s torture. It slowly eats away at a human being’s sense of life and value. It divorces man from existence, and his natural state of being.

If George Bush, as an individual, wants to torture Iraqis he should go over there and do it himself and face the consequences. Under natural law he won’t get away with it very long. Under natural law it is implied that individuals defend themselves against torture and that is what somebody with self-respect will do.

Ayn Rand said that a leash is a rope with a noose at both ends.