I can has yummy tea!

I got myself a nice toy which was delivered a few days ago: an electric kettle. My stovetop kettle takes half an hour to boil water, and doesn't whistle reliably. That makes it a bit of an ordeal to make tea or hot cocoa. The new electric is awesome. Flip down the little switch, and in five minutes I've got water at a rolling boil. Or I can turn it down if I'm making green or white tea. I can actually have tea in the morning before work now. It's a happy thing.

It also let me test a theory that certain people are stupid assholes. Y'all know the McDonald's Coffee case. As a quick reminder of my opinion on it, 3rd degree burns, skin grafts, debibement, an 8-day hospital stay, 700 previous injuries and a refusal to fix the problem due to corporate insistence that the coffee is used in a way that their own market research showed it was not: I do not call this a frivilous lawsuit. Now, the issue here is that homemade coffee is served at 140F (60C), restaurant coffee is often 150-ish F (a little over 66C), and McD's was 190F (88C).

Well, I have seen certain people insist that 140F number is BS and a normal person would consider that cold coffee, that 190F is a perfectly reasonable temperature, and tea is about that temperature when it's served because it's made with boiling water.

Now, I don't know about you, but I let my teabag sit in the water for a few minutes. You know, kind of steep? And while my cup is sitting there steeping, it does this little thing called 'cooling'. So, I decided to make an experiment. I made echinacea tea this morning, which has a 6-minute steep time. The water I poured in the cup was at a rolling boil, which means that it was 212F (100C). Now, when I took the tea bag out, it was hotter than I care to drink it, but I measured it right then, before I even put in my honey.
154.4F (68C)

I didn't measure it when it got to drinking temperature, but it was undoubtably somewhere in the 140s. So nyah. :P

In which Kati waffles about the car industry bailout failure.

OK, I'll admit up front that I don't know much about the proposed American auto industry bailout. I'm discussing from a very theoretical standpoint, and as such I don't mind if someone wants to give me some more information or gently correct errors.

Now, just from an academic standpoint, I was torn about the idea of a bailout. On one hand, this industry falling right now would be positively detrimental, but on the other, the American auto industry has been doing poorly for twenty or thirty years. The Big Three have been run on an insanely short-sighted "business strategy" when this result was quite predictable to anyone willing to take a long-term view, and our government has done them no favors by coddling them during that time. For example, the American government's refusal to set any reasonable gas mileage standards (and overturning states who did so) and the corporations' neglect of developing higher mileage cars on their own insured that the American car makers' market is limited exclusively to the United States. Any analyst could tell you that's a horrible state for a multi-billion dollar corporation to be in, but investing in a wider (and thus more stable) market long-term would have amounted to higher expenses short term.

Next, with the bailout work that just fell through, I think the UAW should have been included at least as much as the high company executives were -- especially as cutting UAW wages became the primary mechanism to reestablish profitability. I think it is also essential that CEO wage limits be a part of any type of bailout. It's not just a matter of the money -- although at the money CEOs get, that is significant. It's a matter of proving good faith. A limit on a CEO's wages is the same as the earnest money you pay when negotiating to buy a house. The limit is to prove that "yes, we really are in this much trouble and yes, we really are serious about fixing the problems."
Furthermore, if we're going to expect the ground-pounding workers to be paid as much as their counterparts working for Japanese companies, isn't it only fair that we expect the American company CEOs to be paid as much as their Japanese company equivalents?

Also with that, although I could be wrong and I don't have any statistics to back this up, I strongly suspect that the Japanese-owned plants are safer than the American-owned ones. I base this on a comparison of how Japanese corporations usually operate and how they balance long-term versus short-term costs, compared to American corporations. The higher wages and benefits negotiated for workers in American plants are not just smoke and mirrors. They have been at least partially negotiated to compensate for higher risks.


Finally, I find this unthinking economic recovery strategy of corporate welfare, coupled with the abhorrence of citizen-level socialism, to be pretty scary. For example, with the auto industry bailout, instead of giving $34 billion in handouts to the companies, couldn't we instead give $34 billion of rebates to households that buy a brand new, American made automobile? We pump the money directly into the economy, it ultimately gets more money to the auto industry because the households that participate will be adding in some of their own, it increases the market for the companies' products and probably trickles down to other industries. I can't say that it's the best option, since on the flip side there's also the risk of crashing the used car market as it's flooded with trade-ins (although on the third side, that also reduces the price of them, encouraging those who couldn't afford a brand new car even with rebate to buy a used car) and who knows what other effects. But my point is that it was never even on the table.

You can see this also in the 700 billion bailout. $700 billion would stop a LOT of home foreclosures, which is what caused the problem. But it was never considered to give this money to citizens, to directly benefit the American people. The only lever our politicians consider pulling is dumping money on companies that have proven their irresponsibility and hoping that it trickles down.

That's absurd.

Open Letter to Clothing Manufacturers

OK, you clothing-making assholes,

1) Give me ALL the shirt buttons. I will decide how much of my blouse I want to leave unbuttoned.
2) You know what's tossed on my bed right now? Brand new men's pants. And you know what I'm going to do with them? I'm gonna WEAR them. I have absolutely had it with poor quality, thin fabric, and stupidly small pockets. After traipsing all over that damn mall trying to find something vaguely acceptable, I took my child-bearing hips and all the junk in my trunk over to the men's section, and you know what I found. Stuff that fits. Screw you, women's clothing makers!

I wish I'd tried the men's section years ago. I honestly didn't think it would work with my body shape. I've got a 34 inch waist, 43 inch hips, and 27 inch inseam. 36X29 or 38X29 pleated fronts, baby. Taken in a vacuum, I'll admit they don't have the nicest line possible. I'm using pleats designed to hang straight in order to get room for my hips, so there's a bit of flair. But you compare to the women's equivalent, and you know what? Most women's pants do that to me, too, except now I won't have my wallet and my keys protruding from my hips like a pair of saddlebags. Men's pockets just keep going and going! I stick my hand in one and keep going to mid-forearm. It's wonderful.

They really don't look any different on me than most of the women's pants I've bought. I don't think anyone will be able to tell they're men's.
Honestly, right now I'm thinking all that "women's bodies are so different that they need specially made pants" stuff is a bunch of advertising hooey. It would certainly be true if clothing was well shaped and tailored, but it's not in this mass-produced world. I think women's and men's pants patterns are a LOT more similar then the companies want us to believe.

So, ladies, if you haven't tried to see if men's pants would fit you, take some time and see, even if you're curvy. If you don't find anything you like, you're not out much, and if you do, you'll be very happy. Even if you don't think it'll work, give it a try. 9-inch waist-hip difference here, worked just fine.

I was so intoxicated by the functional pockets thing that I bought myself a nice comfy pair of cargo pants. :) I swear I could throw a knitting project into one of those pockets, ball of yarn and all. (Single sock knitting would fit just fine, I have no doubt at all. Ooh, that'd be deliciously geeky.)

A few weeks ago, someone who works for a clothing manufacturer wrote into a thread on Ravelry (I think) explaining what she goes through, and suddenly all the problems with women's clothing make sense. It all comes down to money, both at the design company and then again at the manufacturing plant. Every quarter inch of fabric they save, every curve they reduce to straight lines, every button and buttonhole they don't put on, every extra patternset they can cut out at once (even though it negatively affects the fit of the bottommost pieces), basically every single cent they can squeeze out of a single item is worth it at their volumes, regardless of what it does to fit or quality. Screw the customer. And they can get away with this in women's clothing because historically, every clothing producer has done this and there's no competition. We're used to have no pockets, to having to try on every individual item because even the same items differ between units, and having our clothes wear out in three months, and there's little to nothing on the market for us that doesn't have these problems.

Men's clothing, on the other hand, has historically been long-wearing, fit to size, and had deep pockets. A 34-waist, 32-inseam guy buys his 34 X 32 pants without trying them on, gets them home, and finds they don't fit, he takes them back and he doesn't buy that brand anymore, because he knows when he grabs the competitions off the rack, they will fit. He sticks his hand into a pocket and about breaks his fingers before his wrist is into it, he's going to raise hell and buy the competition. His clothing wears out after 12 washes, he's taking it back, complaining, and buying the competition.

In men's clothes, those are defects. In women's clothes, they're industry standard. In case I'm not clear, let me stress that these problems are not the faults of end consumers, they're the fault of the manufacturers. We female consumers don't have alternatives. Show me a women's clothing manufacturer that, for decent prices, makes clothing that's robust, always fits like the tag says, and has deep pockets. (PLEASE. I'm desperate to buy from the company.)

Until then, guess I'm buying men's pants. :)

See, this is why I hate Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is convenient to the bus line, so every once in a while the grocery shopping gets done there. Now, I usually have a little container of yogurt as a mid-morning snack at work. Usually I get the grocery store brand, which isn't fabulous yogurt but is pretty good. So we picked up the Wal-Mart equivalent.

Ugh! Ack! Melodramatic gagging sounds! That is absolutely the most disgusting thing I can remember having eaten. The stuff tasted like flavored corn starch. And since those were two of the top three ingredients, I suppose that's not surprising. I know a lot of commercial yogurts have corn starch in them, but most of them don't taste like it. This was not yogurt. I'm sure it met some legal definition of yogurt, but it's not yogurt.

OK, so I got some lousy yogurt. But this just reinforces my biggest gripe about Wal-Mart: its exploitation of the poor. There's this strong (and I would say cultivated) air about Wal-Mart of "you have to shop here because you can't afford anywhere else." And indeed, I know many people who shop at Wal-Mart because they don't think they can afford anywhere else. But the thing is, and the thing my family members can't seem to catch on to, is that Wal-Mart has a very bad value-to-cost ratio. The stuff they sell isn't just cheap, it's crappy beyond what it's price suggests. Take the yogurt again. The grocery store brand is actually cheaper, tastes much better, and I think has better nutritional capabilities. In my experience, just about everything Wal-Mart sells can be had elsewhere at similar prices and better quality. But they've cultivated this image of "we're the cheapest", and a further insinuation of "you can't afford any better" to those most struggling to keep it together financially.

No more Wal-Mart shopping, I don't care how convenient it is.