Category: Consuming

Status Update: Permits and Planning

Priority one on the Summit House is fixing the exterior before winter comes. After a few hassles and delays, we now have a permit and construction should begin any day now. We’re going with a light gray CertainTeed Carriage House shingle on the mansard roof, and white trim. We’ll worry about painting the exterior in the spring.

Meanwhile, the planning on the interior is moving along. We’re still flip-flopping on a few things but the designs are approaching completion and we have a list of Completed Decisions. One of those decisions was to use a 30″ range rather than a 36″ cooktop and wall ovens. Even as much as we love cooking, the giant cooktop isn’t that helpful. And if we find we’re short a burner once or twice a year we can always go for a portable one that plugs in.

Good News From the Energy Audit and Some Demolition

Today I took a half-day at work and met up with a guy from our utility to do an efficiency audit. He gave us some really good news: the house already got cellulose blown-in insulation on all exterior walls and in the attic, which means we don’t have to pay to have that done.

In other good news, the fridge is old enough that we’ll get a rebate for replacing it. And trust me, I have no intention of using that old fridge. Nick the Efficiency Guy opened it to check and I jumped back and said DON’T OPEN THAT. But it had been cleaned/emptied before being abandoned so he didn’t wind up unleashing fetid doom on the house.

Then I did a little demo.
Aaron-in-mask

This is about halfway through today’s smashing of the walls between the dining and living room. I got most of it out, although I left the studs and chimney stack in there. Clearly. I’m excited to smash stuff but anything that looks important I’m leaving to the experts:
Drywall-demo-2

I also knocked off some drywall around a chimney stack in the kitchen that we’re planning on removing. Behind the drywall we found some interesting 70s-ish wallpaper:
Kitchen-stack-demo-wallpaper

More relevant to the work that needs to be done most immediately, I tore off some ivy from the edge of the house, and then leaned on the exterior back stairs railing a little too hard…
Back-Stairs-Fail
Which means I guess we can add “replace exterior back stairs” to the to-do list.

But that’s OK. Our contractor (shout out to Lobsang at Tibet Construction, he’s a seriously good guy) is pulling permits today to replace the roof and repair the window sills and so forth. Looks like we’ll have the house weatherproofed before the really cold weather hits.

Dating The Building

Tomorrow I’m going to try to get over to the city archives but in the mean time I’ve found some interesting details. The house was described in the listing documents as built in 1900. But that’s a suspicious date – that’s what you put when it’s “at least 100 years old but we don’t know and can’t be bothered to get over to the archives to check.”

Also, my sister-in-law saw the place and she says it is absolutely built before 1900 just looking at it. And she’d know these sorts of things.

And sure enough, the building appears in roughly its present shape on this 1895 map, so we know it’s pre-1900 already. This is simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating things about knowing my sister-in-law: She’s so frequently right, and I want to be the one who’s right all the time.

This map from 1874 shows a building in the same location, although it looks like only half the duplex was built at that time. Also interesting to note that Summit Ave didn’t go all the way through from Walnut Ave to Vinal Ave.

Looking back a little further, in 1852, neither Vinal Ave nor Summit Ave existed at all.

So my guess for now is that the first half of the building was built in the 1860s or so, and that it was expanded into a duplex some time in the 1880s.

Design against humanity

From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.

During the Great Depression, park benches were designed so that you could sleep on them. Then they were manufactured and installed in parks as a job creation program….

Market positioning of macro vs. micro beer

My friends and I all cried watching the lost puppy ad for Budweiser, but the other Bud ad was probably more interesting from a market positioning standpoint, because Budweiser came out swinging against the craft beers that have undercut its dominance (still huge) of the American beer market.

The Beer Babe has a great take on how craft brewers are going to have to respond. Bud has always positioned itself as the beer of men having a good time, but here it explicitly marks itself as separate from unmanly beer geeks with twee mustaches and weird flavors: Bud is the beer of fun. Craft brews are the beer of pretentious neckbeards.

Beer Babe also points out that in this ad there are no women until one shows up bringing a tray of Bud to the party of bros. Yes, talking sexism with “The Beer Babe” may sound a little odd, but she has a great point: the Bud ad shows craft-beer-drinking as a sausagefest and Bud-drinking as a party with hot chicks.

The attack may be unfair and sexist, but it’s also got to hurt, because there’s an element of truth to the “twirly-mustache aroma-analyzing takes-it-too-seriously” caricature of the beer scene. It’s a weak point for people who make and like craft beer, and Bud will take advantage of it as much as it can.

The Beer Babe has the points for a really comprehensive response outlined in her post, and craft-brew manufacturers, distributors, and fans would do well to take note of them. This has the makings of a really interesting business case study in about a year or two.

If you want to feel particularly hopeless

This piece in the Atlantic is an indictment of higher ed in general as well as of for-profit law schools:

Across the ideological spectrum, it is almost universally assumed that more and better education will function as a panacea for un- and underemployment, slow economic growth, and increasingly radical wealth disparities. Hence the broad support among liberal, moderate, and conservative politicians alike for the goal of constantly increasing the percentage of the American population that goes to college. Behind that support seems to lurk an inchoate faith—one that is absurd when articulated clearly, which is why it almost never is—that higher education will eventually make everyone middle-class.

That faith helps explain many economic features of American higher education, such as the extraordinarily inefficient structure of federal loan programs, the non-dischargeable status of student debt, and the way in which rising college costs that have far outstripped inflation for decades are treated as a law of nature rather than a product of political choices.

And I don’t even know where to begin with this one:

At… Michigan State University (MSU), the on-campus food pantry reports that more than half of its clients are graduate students.

Channel Cannibalization

I get that channel strategy is difficult for businesses. If you sell only wholesale, like the ethical-and-stylish shoe company Novacas, you lose out on a direct relationship with your customers. Still, it’s a popular strategy especially for smaller companies that need the publicity and marketing stockists can do, and/or don’t have the size to run its own retail operation.

If you sell only direct, you’re doing all the work of both building your product, and also running the retail business. American Apparel, for example, used to sell only wholesale, but eventually opened its own retail line as well. But they now have to deal with running an entire retail operation, with all that real estate, all those leases, all that payroll, all the liability that comes with running a high-turnover, image-focused company.

And if you sell wholesale and direct to customers, you compete with your stockists. This was a major concern for Novell when I worked there: Many of their customers bought direct from Novell. Others bought from independent systems vendors or consulting companies. Novell was in the awkward position of trying to balance running a consulting team that sold its software to customers, a sales team that sold its software to customers, and then partnership teams that competed with those two teams to sell the consulting and software indirectly to similar customers. Lots of companies, especially big companies, wind up in that situation, for very good reasons. Most of your customers will fit clearly into one of the appropriate channels… but there are cases where the channels compete with each other instead of with your actual rival companies.

And then there’s Nike, which seems to have dozens of overlapping but incomplete channels for everything, so that no one place has access to their entire product line, not even their official direct stores. You can buy Nikes at any online or offline athletic goods store, or any shoe-selling website, or Nike.com or their official Niketown retail locations.

But you can’t get all the shoes at any of those places. Zappos sells more than 500 different Nike shoes, but that’s far fewer than the number of models Nike makes. If you want the unusual exclusive ones, you have to go to an unusual exclusive store, like BDGA in Boston. Not too surprising.

What’s somewhat more surprising is that even Nike.com carries a pretty limited selection of Nike shoes! Click “Sports” at the top of that page: There are 10 sports they offer gear for, including the very general “Training.” Everyone knows Nike makes shoes for more than 10 sports.

If you want, say, the Romaelos 2 weightlifting shoe, which is a pretty specialized shoe but not THAT weird, you’d have to go to their retail channels – the specialized powerlifting shops like Eastbay and Again Faster, or the more general shops like regular old FootLocker.

I assume there’s a very specific set of reasons that they use to determine which channels will get a given product. Obviously, the Kanye West collab will be limited release, because the whole point is that it’s hard to get. Obviously, a plain Nike Free running shoe will be wide release, because it’s for everyone who puts one foot in front of another. But what’s the justification for not selling all your specialized-sport shoes on your official website?

Disagreeing with Andrew Sullivan

I feel almost silly trying to argue with Andrew Sullivan, because his whole job is to create these arguments. But still, I think he and his commenters are missing a key point on the whole Bloomberg proposal to limit the maximum soda size in the city. I agree that it’s silly to have that regulation and also the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. But life is silly sometimes. And the Nathan’s contest comes but once a year, while sodas are every day.

The broader point Sully is making is that government regulation is generally a bad thing, and that people should be free to have as much bad-for-them soda as they want. But here’s the thing: Government is how people as a society make decisions.

Let’s use the (admittedly-flawed) household analogy. My wife likes a piece of chocolate now and then, but I really love chocolate. If there’s chocolate out on the counter, I’ll take a piece every time I walk past, and the next thing you know, I’ve eaten it all. So, we hide it.

I know exactly where the candy is – it’s in the top left drawer in the dining room cabinet, with the spare keys and the emergency flashlights and candles. But because it’s out of my immediate reach, I don’t eat it all. It’s not impossible for me to get it, but I make the decision in advance not to eat it, and then I don’t have to think about it again. I’m not forbidden from eating chocolate. It’s just ever so slightly more inconvenient.

Or consider Sullivan’s own medical care. Rather than make the decision every week about when to take an injected dosage of medication, he got a time-release implant. Making the decision in advance, once, in a more-permanent way, improved his health by taking a regular decision out of his hands.

If a large number of New Yorkers and advisers say “Mayor Bloomberg, we’re concerned about our health, please adjust regulations to make us healthier overall” then he’s got a very good reason to restrict extra-large sugared beverages.

This is, in fact, why Mitt Romney’s “corporations are people” statement is almost true. Corporations are made of people. They’re a way that people pool money and risk and decision-making.

And yes, I’m saying this as a liberal technocrat for Obama. People, whether they’re acting as decisionmakers for themselves or for their corporations, don’t always do the right thing. Getting those regulations right matters, whether they’re outright bans or little nudges.

Whether restricting maximum soda portion size makes a difference remains to be seen. But it’s not an unreasonable restriction on liberty, especially since, as everyone points out, it’s just a nudge and not an outright ban.