This rant pertains mostly to commerce at it is done in the U.S. Elsewhere, the relevance and reasoning may vary.
Reasons why I hate rebates:
1. You're never 100% sure that you'll actually get it. Between documents lost in the mail going to the processing center, checks lost or stolen in the mail coming back, processing errors, claims lost at the processing center, and checks misplaced or mistaken for junk mail (see item 6 below), the chances are good that a significant percentages of the rebates you request will never make it back into your pocket. No matter where the loss occurs, you usually can't get the rebate replaced; it's just gone for good. Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.
2. It requires extra time on the part of the buyer, and particularly if the purchase is made at a time of urgent need, there's a good chance that events (including merely being distracted at the wrong moment) will cause the window of opportunity to close, or something required for the rebate claim to be thrown away by mistake, before the rebate gets sent off. In many cases, even if you keep everything (receipt, proof of purchase, etc.), by the time you find the paperwork and realize what it is, the perhaps-as-short-as-5-day period to file for the rebate is over. (Yes, I have seen periods for filing which were that short, or shorter.) Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.
3. You have to pay sales tax on a larger amount than you would if they just discounted the item. If what you want has an $80 rebate, for instance, you're paying sales tax on the $80, and you won't get that back. If the price were simply discounted by that amount, you'd save the extra sales tax; where I live, on $80, that's another $6.60 out of my pocket. Businesses get to keep a trivial fraction of the sales tax they collect, usually a fraction of a percent, but it adds up, so once again, Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.
4. You're getting no interest on this loan...and that's effectively what it is. They're asking you to hand over the money now and maybe get it back later; essentially, to loan *someone* that money, interest-free, with significant risk and no guarantee, for as much as 180 days. (That's the longest delay I've seen; your mileage may vary, but 90 days is pretty typical.) Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.
5. If the rebate demands that you have to deface the packaging and/or send back the original sales receipt as part of the terms of the extortion, you may be surrendering your right to return the defaced item and/or to collect on the receipt-required warranty in the process. Although some states protect the consumer's rights to some extent in this area, not all do, and some manufacturers and businesses will try to avoid honoring warranties using any pretext at all, legal or not; wherever the rebate process creates such a problem, it's yet another instance in which Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, Even Though It's Bad For YOU.
6. When it arrives in the mail, the typical rebate check looks more like a scammish promotion come-on for a timeshare sales track than something with a valid depositable value. As a result, it's likely to get tossed in the trash unopened. While making it nondescript reduces the likelihood of its being stolen, making it look like unwanted junk mail takes extra effort, and the only reason I can see to do this is that they understand that it will increase the number of checks thrown away unopened in error. Once again, Businesses Benefit From This; It's Good For Profits, And IT DOESN'T MATTER TO THEM ONE BIT THAT IT'S BAD FOR YOU.
I really, really HATE rebates.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
What we can measure sometimes misleads us.
Over the course of the past century (plus a bit), a large number of tools have been added to the scientific box for measurement of things chemical and physical. In medicine, we have seen the capability for blood analysis go from merely testing for type compatibility to being able to precisely measure the levels of a number of hormones, antibodies, proteins, lipids, and other nominally-important substances. As each new measurement tool has been added, the importance of some branch of the medical art has risen with it, and new guidelines for treatment of various conditions (or their lack) have been proposed and adopted. One would assume that this is a good thing, but in retrospect, the evidence says that's not always the case.
The problem is that while we may know what we're measuring, we may not know what the importance of that measurement really is. The history of science is littered with the debris of discredited theories about how something worked, as based on the knowledge of the day, and that knowledge was usually based on the measurement techniques available at the time. If that history really teaches us anything in this regard, it's to be cautious about overgeneralizing the importance of what we can measure; it always need to be evaluated in the light of whether what we think we know matches up with what we can prove.
Take, for example, the levels of certain minerals in drinking water. Every passing decade has allowed us to add both to the number of substances we could identify in ever-smaller quantities, and to the precision with which we could measure them. The effects of high levels of these substances has often been well known, and as the capacity to detect them at low levels has improved, we've often seen alarms being raised about their presence in water around the world. In some instances, it has been possible to demonstrate that these minute levels are new developments traceable to contaminated water from mine tailings or other human activity...but all too often, it's been discovered that these low levels of supposedly-deadly elements have been present all along with no apparent ill effects. Our ability to finally measure the "contaminant" merely added to our knowledge of the natural world's composition; the misinterpretation of that measurement, however, has often led to panic.
As a second example, look at that much-heard word from the realm of nutrition, the "calorie." Measurement of the caloric content of foods is a tool that has been around for over a century, but the ability to make sense of what it was telling us has taken a lot longer to be developed...and still hasn't been fully recognized. As often happens, when the method of measurement of dietary calories was devised, the ability to perform the measurement itself caused the importance of the information to be overstated. The possession of a new tool tends to have this effect; that which can be measured is a source of certainty, therefore it must be important. Indeed, it even engendered a fundamental misconception, that "calories are calories" and that the body could not tell the difference between caloric input from any source. This misconception has hamstringed the efforts of those who are trying to reshape our nutritional guides to correctly reflect the actual state of our understanding of the subject, which is far more complex.
For a third example, consider serum cholesterol, once touted as the absolute predictor of heart health hazards. When the ability to measure it was developed, the medical community raced to embrace the test, and drug companies began looking for substances which would act to reduce the measurement to "safe" levels. A lot of money was spent developing cholesterol-lowering drugs before enough analysis of the measurements (and correlation of them to real-world results) revealed that cholesterol levels were not as important as first believed; instead, there were two other markers (of a related nature) which were shown to be more important, and the drug companies began chasing after ways to chemically alter those as well. Unfortunately, that, too, is proving to have been the wrong approach, as expanded understanding of the interlocking nature of the actions of several bodily systems has demonstrated that once again, the item being measured was only an indicator of a different problem, and trying to "fix" the "abnormality" with a drug merely masked the effect of a different, more fundamental problem.
In each case, the ability to measure something has caused a race to find ways to change the results, "treating" an "abnormality" which was thought to be the cause of a specific condition when in fact it was itself only a symptom. The same error has been made for a variety of other measurable chemical levels; we have drugs to lower and raise various levels of things that exist normally at varying concentrations in our tissues, but we often don't actually know why the levels are out of the "normal" range, nor do we necessarily always know what the actual causative underlying problem really is. Furthermore, sometimes we don't know precisely how a drug operates to achieve the changes in the measurable item's level; more than one pharmaceutical has been discovered to be doing more harm than good in attempting to treat various maladies.
Medicine is not the only field in which incomplete-toolkit-based misconceptions are seen, though it may well be the deadliest. The decades of the 1960s, 70s and 80s saw many engineering tasks moved from the practical and physical design methods of the 1950s and prior to the entirely math-based, computer-aided methods that dominate the field today. Computer simulations of stress on a structure were measurable more inexpensively and immediately than could be achieved with prototypes and physical gauges, so they were embraced wholeheartedly in the quest to get better products into production faster. Unfortunately, the shift began before our understanding of the nuances and complexities of system stresses had been adequately developed, and as a result, many computer-designed products of the 1970s were, to be blunt, completely rubbish.
New tools for measurement of the physical world come into being every day; we're a curious bunch, and we like to know what happens when we poke things with a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) sharp stick. The problem is that we don't always know whether the information we're collecting means what we think it does.
The problem is that while we may know what we're measuring, we may not know what the importance of that measurement really is. The history of science is littered with the debris of discredited theories about how something worked, as based on the knowledge of the day, and that knowledge was usually based on the measurement techniques available at the time. If that history really teaches us anything in this regard, it's to be cautious about overgeneralizing the importance of what we can measure; it always need to be evaluated in the light of whether what we think we know matches up with what we can prove.
Take, for example, the levels of certain minerals in drinking water. Every passing decade has allowed us to add both to the number of substances we could identify in ever-smaller quantities, and to the precision with which we could measure them. The effects of high levels of these substances has often been well known, and as the capacity to detect them at low levels has improved, we've often seen alarms being raised about their presence in water around the world. In some instances, it has been possible to demonstrate that these minute levels are new developments traceable to contaminated water from mine tailings or other human activity...but all too often, it's been discovered that these low levels of supposedly-deadly elements have been present all along with no apparent ill effects. Our ability to finally measure the "contaminant" merely added to our knowledge of the natural world's composition; the misinterpretation of that measurement, however, has often led to panic.
As a second example, look at that much-heard word from the realm of nutrition, the "calorie." Measurement of the caloric content of foods is a tool that has been around for over a century, but the ability to make sense of what it was telling us has taken a lot longer to be developed...and still hasn't been fully recognized. As often happens, when the method of measurement of dietary calories was devised, the ability to perform the measurement itself caused the importance of the information to be overstated. The possession of a new tool tends to have this effect; that which can be measured is a source of certainty, therefore it must be important. Indeed, it even engendered a fundamental misconception, that "calories are calories" and that the body could not tell the difference between caloric input from any source. This misconception has hamstringed the efforts of those who are trying to reshape our nutritional guides to correctly reflect the actual state of our understanding of the subject, which is far more complex.
For a third example, consider serum cholesterol, once touted as the absolute predictor of heart health hazards. When the ability to measure it was developed, the medical community raced to embrace the test, and drug companies began looking for substances which would act to reduce the measurement to "safe" levels. A lot of money was spent developing cholesterol-lowering drugs before enough analysis of the measurements (and correlation of them to real-world results) revealed that cholesterol levels were not as important as first believed; instead, there were two other markers (of a related nature) which were shown to be more important, and the drug companies began chasing after ways to chemically alter those as well. Unfortunately, that, too, is proving to have been the wrong approach, as expanded understanding of the interlocking nature of the actions of several bodily systems has demonstrated that once again, the item being measured was only an indicator of a different problem, and trying to "fix" the "abnormality" with a drug merely masked the effect of a different, more fundamental problem.
In each case, the ability to measure something has caused a race to find ways to change the results, "treating" an "abnormality" which was thought to be the cause of a specific condition when in fact it was itself only a symptom. The same error has been made for a variety of other measurable chemical levels; we have drugs to lower and raise various levels of things that exist normally at varying concentrations in our tissues, but we often don't actually know why the levels are out of the "normal" range, nor do we necessarily always know what the actual causative underlying problem really is. Furthermore, sometimes we don't know precisely how a drug operates to achieve the changes in the measurable item's level; more than one pharmaceutical has been discovered to be doing more harm than good in attempting to treat various maladies.
Medicine is not the only field in which incomplete-toolkit-based misconceptions are seen, though it may well be the deadliest. The decades of the 1960s, 70s and 80s saw many engineering tasks moved from the practical and physical design methods of the 1950s and prior to the entirely math-based, computer-aided methods that dominate the field today. Computer simulations of stress on a structure were measurable more inexpensively and immediately than could be achieved with prototypes and physical gauges, so they were embraced wholeheartedly in the quest to get better products into production faster. Unfortunately, the shift began before our understanding of the nuances and complexities of system stresses had been adequately developed, and as a result, many computer-designed products of the 1970s were, to be blunt, completely rubbish.
New tools for measurement of the physical world come into being every day; we're a curious bunch, and we like to know what happens when we poke things with a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) sharp stick. The problem is that we don't always know whether the information we're collecting means what we think it does.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Zion Canyon By Bike - Ohhhhh, yeah.
Zion National Park, in southwest Utah, is a real gem. Massive, sheer cliffs line both sides of the deep gorge, and unlike Grand, Bryce or Black Canyon, your visit to this one is primarily along the bottom, where the weather tends to be much nicer than out in the nearby desert. It's not terribly close to a major population center, but it gets a lot of visitors and is not far from an Interstate highway...which means that budget-rate accommodations can often be had in the nearby town of Hurricane, UT. Most of the accessible-by-road portion of the park is at a moderate altitude (4000 ft or below), and even the upper end of the tunnel road (whose tunnel is off-limits to cyclists, alas) is not up into the exhaustion-inducing thin air of Bryce Canyon or Cedar Breaks...and that means the potential for fun is definitely present.
Until its visitor population overran its parking capacity some years back, you used to be able to drive everywhere in Zion Canyon that was reachable by car. Now, except during November through March, the road that runs up the canyon past the main lodge is off limits to most private vehicles. Instead, you get around via free propane-powered shuttle buses...with bike racks. Each bus has a two-bike rack on the front. You can ride a bike both ways on the canyon road, but because that rack's presence means that you don't have to ride uphill if you don't want to, a bike is both fun and practical even for people who aren't particularly athletic - and better than the shuttles alone.
By using the shuttle, you can travel easily (if not always speedily) throughout the most popular part of the park and visit all of the principal interesting sights. Parking is free inside the park (though getting in requires a fee, of course), and the shuttles stop at every legal parking lot. Regardless of whether you bring a bike, you really don't need to drive any farther than the Visitor Center that's just inside the main gate at Springdale. If you do bring a bike, that's the logical place to leave your car. From there, it's an easy and pleasant (and scenic - did I mention scenic?) ride to the Canyon Junction shuttle stop, at which you can easily toss your bike aboard the rack on the front of the next bus, and loaf your way up (literally) to the Shinawava Temple stop at the upper end of the canyon. Once there, it's almost all downhill to get back to Canyon Junction. There's one short uphill stretch between Weeping Rock and The Grotto, but even that's not too bad; no worse than a freeway overpass. On the other hand, if you're riding a one-speed cruiser and don't feel like mashing the pedals that hard, or you're suffering from the cumulative effects of too many pizzas over the years, just stop at the Weeping Rock parking lot and grab the next shuttle to The Grotto to get past that climb.
For most of the downhill sections, it is easily possible for an experienced cyclist to outrun the shuttle buses, but they will occasionally catch up to you on the slower and straighter bits even if you aren't stopping to take pictures. The buses are not permitted to pass a rider in motion, so the cyclist needs to keep an eye (and ear) open for shuttles overtaking from behind, and should be prepared to pull over and stop to let them by. The shuttles are neither excessively noisy nor completely quiet, so if you hear one, it's probably close enough that you need to look for a flat shoulder quickly. Fortunately, that's usually not hard to find, and you can often dodge to the other side of the road to stop if your side's a bit precipitous at the point that the bus catches up to you since there's an amazing lack of traffic. For most of my first run down the canyon, I tried to make sure that I was well and truly between shuttles when I left a given stop, but that may not always be the best approach. Although the buses caught up to me handily on some segments, particularly when I stopped to look at things a lot, I was still easily able to outpace the shuttle bus between Court of the Patriarchs and Canyon Junction. You might not be as swift. On the other hand, you also might be a lot faster; don't worry, you can figure out your best approach to the "ahead or behind" issue in short order. The important thing to remember is that it's not a race; the point is being there and having fun while staying safe. And if you zoom down the canyon too fast, you may get stuck behind a bus anyway; the entire route is a "no passing" zone, so you can only go around them when they're stopped at the scenic points.
The easy downhill running is only the icing on the scenery cake, however. The real fun part (for me, at least) was being able to stop anywhere and everywhere I wanted to look at things and take photos. There are a number of scenic turnouts that the shuttles don't serve, and most people never get to stop at them as a result, but those are hardly the only places of interest. On a bike, the entire road is your turnout, and you can stop for photos wherever you please. Just don't park on the road surface itself!
Bike lockup racks are available at all shuttle stops and at every trail head I visited. The scenic road up through the canyon is open to bikes during the entire year, but the only off-road place they're allowed is the fully-paved Pa'Rus trail which crosses the Virgin River three times (and Pine Creek once) between the Visitor Center and Canyon Junction. Using the trail instead of the road for this section is recommended due to heavy traffic including some large trucks; Utah State Road 9 runs through the park over this route, and some of its traffic is commercial.
You'll almost certainly want to use some of the foot trails as well as riding; there's a lot more of the park than what can be seen from the road, though you'll probably want to spend most of your first day just enjoying the stuff you can do on wheels. The foot trails are mostly far too narrow to either ride or walk a bike along even if that was permitted...which it emphatically is not, so bring a lock; theft can be an issue wherever there are people, and Zion is very popular.
No one was using a bike helmet when I was there, probably due to the lack of threat from drivers on cell phones and otherwise-common hazards. Summer temperatures can be up into the 90s(F), but the humidity is low and there are shady, cool spots aplenty in which to shed the heat. Sunscreen is still a good idea, since skin damage is no joking matter. All of the major shuttle stops have fresh spring water available to refill your water bottle(s) or Camelback, and they actively encourage people NOT to use disposable bottled water in the park; they even sell their fountain drinks in compostable cups. Spring and Fall temps can get downright frosty; plan accordingly!
Until its visitor population overran its parking capacity some years back, you used to be able to drive everywhere in Zion Canyon that was reachable by car. Now, except during November through March, the road that runs up the canyon past the main lodge is off limits to most private vehicles. Instead, you get around via free propane-powered shuttle buses...with bike racks. Each bus has a two-bike rack on the front. You can ride a bike both ways on the canyon road, but because that rack's presence means that you don't have to ride uphill if you don't want to, a bike is both fun and practical even for people who aren't particularly athletic - and better than the shuttles alone.
By using the shuttle, you can travel easily (if not always speedily) throughout the most popular part of the park and visit all of the principal interesting sights. Parking is free inside the park (though getting in requires a fee, of course), and the shuttles stop at every legal parking lot. Regardless of whether you bring a bike, you really don't need to drive any farther than the Visitor Center that's just inside the main gate at Springdale. If you do bring a bike, that's the logical place to leave your car. From there, it's an easy and pleasant (and scenic - did I mention scenic?) ride to the Canyon Junction shuttle stop, at which you can easily toss your bike aboard the rack on the front of the next bus, and loaf your way up (literally) to the Shinawava Temple stop at the upper end of the canyon. Once there, it's almost all downhill to get back to Canyon Junction. There's one short uphill stretch between Weeping Rock and The Grotto, but even that's not too bad; no worse than a freeway overpass. On the other hand, if you're riding a one-speed cruiser and don't feel like mashing the pedals that hard, or you're suffering from the cumulative effects of too many pizzas over the years, just stop at the Weeping Rock parking lot and grab the next shuttle to The Grotto to get past that climb.
For most of the downhill sections, it is easily possible for an experienced cyclist to outrun the shuttle buses, but they will occasionally catch up to you on the slower and straighter bits even if you aren't stopping to take pictures. The buses are not permitted to pass a rider in motion, so the cyclist needs to keep an eye (and ear) open for shuttles overtaking from behind, and should be prepared to pull over and stop to let them by. The shuttles are neither excessively noisy nor completely quiet, so if you hear one, it's probably close enough that you need to look for a flat shoulder quickly. Fortunately, that's usually not hard to find, and you can often dodge to the other side of the road to stop if your side's a bit precipitous at the point that the bus catches up to you since there's an amazing lack of traffic. For most of my first run down the canyon, I tried to make sure that I was well and truly between shuttles when I left a given stop, but that may not always be the best approach. Although the buses caught up to me handily on some segments, particularly when I stopped to look at things a lot, I was still easily able to outpace the shuttle bus between Court of the Patriarchs and Canyon Junction. You might not be as swift. On the other hand, you also might be a lot faster; don't worry, you can figure out your best approach to the "ahead or behind" issue in short order. The important thing to remember is that it's not a race; the point is being there and having fun while staying safe. And if you zoom down the canyon too fast, you may get stuck behind a bus anyway; the entire route is a "no passing" zone, so you can only go around them when they're stopped at the scenic points.
The easy downhill running is only the icing on the scenery cake, however. The real fun part (for me, at least) was being able to stop anywhere and everywhere I wanted to look at things and take photos. There are a number of scenic turnouts that the shuttles don't serve, and most people never get to stop at them as a result, but those are hardly the only places of interest. On a bike, the entire road is your turnout, and you can stop for photos wherever you please. Just don't park on the road surface itself!
Bike lockup racks are available at all shuttle stops and at every trail head I visited. The scenic road up through the canyon is open to bikes during the entire year, but the only off-road place they're allowed is the fully-paved Pa'Rus trail which crosses the Virgin River three times (and Pine Creek once) between the Visitor Center and Canyon Junction. Using the trail instead of the road for this section is recommended due to heavy traffic including some large trucks; Utah State Road 9 runs through the park over this route, and some of its traffic is commercial.
You'll almost certainly want to use some of the foot trails as well as riding; there's a lot more of the park than what can be seen from the road, though you'll probably want to spend most of your first day just enjoying the stuff you can do on wheels. The foot trails are mostly far too narrow to either ride or walk a bike along even if that was permitted...which it emphatically is not, so bring a lock; theft can be an issue wherever there are people, and Zion is very popular.
No one was using a bike helmet when I was there, probably due to the lack of threat from drivers on cell phones and otherwise-common hazards. Summer temperatures can be up into the 90s(F), but the humidity is low and there are shady, cool spots aplenty in which to shed the heat. Sunscreen is still a good idea, since skin damage is no joking matter. All of the major shuttle stops have fresh spring water available to refill your water bottle(s) or Camelback, and they actively encourage people NOT to use disposable bottled water in the park; they even sell their fountain drinks in compostable cups. Spring and Fall temps can get downright frosty; plan accordingly!
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