Author: Jeff Licquia

Our family is now in the market for a new vehicle, preferably a minivan or something like it. Our current van has been having problems (as regular readers know well), and when we decided against a family reunion on the basis of the van’s reliability, we knew it was time for a change.

The reviewers seem to think there are three choices out there for new minivans: the Honda Odyssey, the Toyota Sienna, and lots of wrong choices. (See, for example, this typical review.) So, these two models were among the four test drives we had time for on Saturday. There are a few other brands we want to look at, and the brands we did see (Kia and Nissan) weren’t bad, but there’s no question that the best models we saw were by Toyota and Honda.

At least, that was the impression I had until Saturday night, when I settled in for an evening of online research. While the Honda search was about what I expected, the Toyota search was a different story.

The first really interesting review of the Toyota Sienna came from Phil Greenspun, a respected techie and dot-com gazillionaire. The review itself is mostly nit-picky, with some nostalgia for a simpler past thrown in for good measure, but the comments, over and over, complained of a serious problem with Siennas and Toyota’s heavy-handed treatment of the problem.

The claim was that Toyota V6 engines had a habit of causing oil breakdown much sooner than usual, causing sludge to build up in the oil. Oil breakdown and sludge are signs that the owner has been neglecting regular maintenance; Toyota was treating these cases as such, and refused to cover the resulting engine damage under the drivetrain warranty.

In and of itself, this isn’t all that strange. The Internet tends to magnify the message of motivated speakers, and people with $6000 repair bills have plenty of motivation. As a result, there isn’t a popular product made that doesn’t have some number of loud complaints. So what was different here? Quite a few comments, made over several years, contained the same basic story: relatively new van, often immaculately kept, develops engine problems, with the dealer accusing the owner of causing the problem. By contrast, Honda complaints seem to be fairly diverse: a transmission here, brakes there, a broken door handle there. This is more in line with a generally good manufacturer that occasionally makes mistakes.

A quick Google search confirmed the oil sludge problem. There is an online petition, with nearly a thousand signatures, organized by “Toyota Owners Unite For Resolution”, which has more information and many more cases, including photos. News reports from USA Today, Consumer Affairs, and two from the Center for Auto Safety (one, two) support the anecdotes further. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports on a possible class action lawsuit.

While Toyota has given ground to the complaints and no longer refuse to fix these problems, they continue to insist that the problem is caused by owner neglect, and that their new policies regarding sludge issues comes solely from the goodness of their hearts. In other words, they continue to blame the owners, even the ones with documented records. One wonders what evidence could possibly convince them to take some of the responsibility.

And this is why Toyota has effectively lost the ability to sell to me. Everyone makes mistakes; it doesn’t freak me out that Toyota has made bad engines in the past. And it’s only natural to assume customer neglect initially, since it’s the proper explanation for most cases. But now, they have nothing to gain by continuing to blame customers, since they’ve already provided an unlimited warranty against this specific problem, and the evidence is much stronger than it appeared at first. Yet they continue to insist on their own innocence. If they refuse to budge even with so little at stake and so much evidence against them, what will they do when there is more at stake, or less evidence, that some other problem I might encounter is their responsibility? Rarely do we consumers get such clear evidence of a company’s customer service performance; it seems foolish to disregard it when we do.

I am considering giving Toyota a last chance to explain themselves at the dealer, since their van is otherwise so good, and on the basis of a recommendation from someone I trust. But it’s not likely that they will be able to convince me to buy, regardless of what they say. After all, their edge over the Honda van is very slim; why should I take an extra risk with Toyota when I can get nearly as good without this risk?

UPDATE (2005-07-01): The choice is made!

UPDATE (2005-08-25): Comments are now disabled. It’s one thing to have a different opinion and argue for it; it’s quite another to impersonate people and lie about their work.

It’s been a long month, with lots going on.

Further, I think I have too high a threshold for posting, for whatever reason. This makes it difficult to maintain a high level of posts; if every post has to be carefully crafted, then the number of posts goes down.

So, with that, I’ll just pass on a link to a post on the downside of growth in Hamilton County, Indiana (which is where I live).

The article does a good job of portraying the drawbacks of living in a fast-growing area, and brings up a practice I despise: the overuse of eminent domain and the practice of condemning perfectly good property as a legal tactic. On the other hand, the article clearly sees growth as a bad thing (what with snide jabs at “urban sprawl” that portray it and its “proponents” as monsters selling the environment for development money), and seems unwilling to consider that, even given the unsettling tactics used by the city of Noblesville, the road might still be a good idea. Little to no consideration is given to the side of the city, apart from selective quotes and “straw man” caricatures.

If you’re from the Indianapolis area, you’d have to be comatose to not know about the two major Indianapolis initiatives currently being floated: Indy Works, a plan to consolidate redundant city and county agencies, and the planned new convention center and football stadium for the Indianapolis Colts. Not surprisingly, the latter plan has an edge in local attention, especially given veiled threats that the Colts would move out of Indianapolis to get their new stadium. Property taxes and city services are one thing; the loss of a sports franchise in sports-crazed Indiana is quite another.

The theory is that the Colts provide both prestige to Indianapolis and a positive economic impact, and that an expanded convention center would pull in more conventions, generating even more economic benefits. Some studies seem to back up these claims, although others are skeptical. With the governor now behind the project, it looks like a done deal, so skeptics will have to content themselves with future vindication if the project doesn’t do well.

I was reminded of all this when surfing the site of the City Journal. Their current online articles include an article on development on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A rather dry and distant article became quite relevant when it turned to the disappointment of the Javitz Center:

Meanwhile, across America other cities were rushing to build or expand their convention centers, completing more than 200 projects in the 1980s and 1990s despite a growing glut of space. The result has been catastrophic. Since the late 1990s, the U.S. convention business has declined 40 percent. Cities that spent hundreds of millions on their convention centers are getting little or no payback. Boston’s new center will attract 50,000 visitors during its first year in operation, only one-sixth of original projections. Attendance at major events in Chicago is half of what it was in 1993, though the city spent nearly $1 billion to expand its center. “The overall convention marketplace is declining in a manner that suggests that a recovery or turnaround is unlikely to yield much increased business for any given community,” according to a Brookings Institution report by Professor Heywood Sanders.

Javitz appears to have had other problems, including a mob takeover of the project and its subsequent management; we would hope that Indianapolis could avoid those problems here. But a centerpiece of the plan New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is putting together involves Javitz as the center of New York’s Olympics bid for 2012, which prompted this bit of pessimism:

But convention centers, for all their hype and cost, aren’t the most unproductive publicly financed urban megaprojects, by any means. That honor goes to stadiums and arenas, with their big subsidies to rich team owners and rich players. Starting in the late 1960s, municipalities began churning out these facilities, thinking that they would generate additional tax dollars and prompt new economic activity, even in moribund neighborhoods. In the last three decades, cities and states have built 40 publicly subsidized stadiums and 52 arenas.

The one thing that is not controversial about these facilities is their low worth as economic engines. As Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist has written: “Few fields of empirical economic research offer virtual unanimity of findings. Yet independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facilities construction and economic development.” At least ten economists have reached the same conclusion, largely in peer-reviewed work, so that, as one reviewer of the literature recently noted: “It is virtually impossible to find an independent economist who views sports facility subsidies as good investments in local economic growth.”

So what do we find as the centerpiece of the Far West Side plan? A stadium/convention-center complex joining together what are universally recognized as two of the worst economic-development engines in urban planning. How we got to this point is a case study of the propensity of government leaders, prompted by their own grandiose ideas and urged on by self-interested executives, to pervert the best-intentioned plans.

Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in New York than in Indy. The land in question in New York is waterfront property that’s clearly underutilized; the land here is typical Midwest fare, and is neither clearly fallow nor as clearly lucrative as oceanfront property in America’s largest city. Indianapolis has no Olympic dreams, either, to both justify investment and complicate post-event use of the land. Still, if there is doubt New York can turn a convention-center-and-stadium plan into a winner with New York’s population and an Olympic bid, what does this say about our plan?

Of course, the one factor that can make this succeed: we have the Colts, and they have the Jets. Perhaps Peyton Manning can throw the plan into success. But if not, how much will an already straining Indiana suffer to afford all this?

This was the weekend for the family to visit good friends in the Detroit area. A good time was had by all, and their oldest son survived yet another year (three–he’s on a roll!)

Yesterday’s trip back, however, was less enjoyable.

Looking back, we really should have arranged to stay an extra day in Detroit once we heard the strange noise under the hood. But we looked, and the noise went away, and I just chalked it up as something to investigate once we get home. Fast forward two hours: as we pulled off the highway to get gas, we noticed the noise had returned, louder this time (though not so loud as to be audible over the normal driving noise). While filling up, I checked under the hood, and saw smoke rising from the part of the car where the noise had come from earlier.

This morning saw us emerge from our hotel room in Auburn, Indiana, and hazard the few blocks’ drive to Auburn Chrysler, the closest Dodge dealer. The part having trouble turned out to be the compressor for the air conditioning. You’d think you could do without AC in order to get home, but the compressor shares a belt with lots of more important stuff, and if the compressor had seized up completely, it would have likely caused the belt to snap.

I should point out that Auburn Chrysler is the first Five Star Dealer we’ve dealt with in over seven years that actually deserves the honor. They were short-staffed in the service department that day, but they still got to us quickly, squeezed us in for same-day service, and located a rebuilt compressor to save us the difference in cost from a new one. When that compressor turned out to be bad (according to them, it blew apart in the car while idling!), they located a second one twenty miles away and sent a courier to get it, all at no extra charge. Kudos are especially due Alvin, the man behind the counter, for superb task juggling.

Biometrics, the use of unique details about people’s bodies such as fingerprints or patterns on the retina, are hot in the security industry. Do they live up to the hype? Probably not:

Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the vehicle’s hi-tech security system.

Beating fingerprint systems doesn’t require violence; one researcher was able to do so by reproducing a latent fingerprint in gelatin. Still, this incident shows that security is a little more complex than fads allow.

English readers should not panic; the site has not been hijacked. I’ve just set the site up to better handle my Esperanto posts and readers, including integrating the bilingual plugin into the post page and translating the comment policy. Watch for the “other language summary” on the post page.

I’ve been evaluating themes for the look of the site as well. The WordPress 1.5 release and Alex King’s theme competition have spawned a multitude of themes; two good places for looking at them are the competition theme browser and Blogging Pro’s gallery.

If there’s one trend I don’t like, it’s the fixed-width fad. Most of these themes force the width of the content section to be so many pixels, which on a large monitor (like mine) means really wide margins with a tiny strip of content in the middle. Some of the themes combine this with fixed-size fonts, so the posts don’t end up one-word-per-line; again, on my monitor, these end up unreadable unless I increase the font size, which inevitably destroys the page’s layout. (Here’s a good example.)

Nevertheless, there are some very good themes in the list, one of which may replace Steam on this site. (Steam, by the way, is in the theme competition.) Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

UPDATE: Now the language summaries are on the main page as well.

Ĉi tiu komenta politiko anstataÅ­igas ĉiujn antaÅ­ajn komentajn politikojn, kaj efektiviĝas se pli nova politiko anstataÅ­igas ĝin. Por veni la nuna politiko, elektu la “Comment Policy” ligilo de la ĉefa paĝo.

Mi rajtas forigi aŭ redakti ion komenton ajn, kvankam mi informos vin pri redaktitaj komentoj Mi promesas ke mi redaktu aŭ forigu tiel malofte kiel mi povas. Oni farus komentoj pri malagrablaj temoj (kiel sekso aŭ perforto) respekteme kaj sen vulgaraĉe.

“Spamo,” malprecize, estas komentario en ĉi tiu sitejo kiu servas iun alian celon krom diskuti. Spamo, precize, estas iu ajn mi diras en tiu sitejo. Spamo blokiĝos kiam mi eblas trovi ĝin ĉe la fojo de poŝtado, kaj foriĝos en aliaj aferoj. Oftaj spamistoj eble perdiĝos ilian kapablon de komenti.

BedaÅ­rinde, spamistoj ofte rabokaptas aliajn komputilojn fari ilian malpuran laboron, kiu povas kaÅ­zi senkulpajn homojn perdi privilegiojn. Ĉar mi ne povas distingi viktimojn senkulpajn ekde konsentantaj partoprenatoj, mi ne eble promesas redoni ilin. Homoj kun tiu problemo instigiĝas malhelpi tiun, per uzi kontrolaĵo de “viruses” aÅ­ “spyware”, retlegi kun “Mozilla Firefox” anstataÅ­ “Internet Explorer”, komuti al Linux el Windows, aÅ­ aĉeti “Macintosh”.

En la celo de malhelpi spamo, mia sitejo eble prezentos al komentuloj literojn kaj numeralojn en stranga bildo kiu la komentulo devos tajpi kaj sendi antaŭ la komento akceptiĝas. La sitejo eble decidos ke iuj komentoj estas tia suspektinda, ke ili bezonos mian propran aprobo antaŭ ili aperos en la sitejo, do ili ne aperas tuj.

Mi esprimas badaŭron por la ĝeno, sed fidu al mi: verŝajne vi ne deziras vidi la rubaĉon kiu sendiĝas ĉi tie do homoj povas profiti.

Is it just me, or are newer video games making it more difficult to save when you need to?

We had a little problem with this over the weekend. When we tell the kids to get off the GameCube, we generally give them a few minutes to wrap up what they’re doing and save. This has worked well in the past, but it’s built up an expectation in the kids that they have the right to save, however long that takes. This resulted in a half-hour of extra playing time for Jon on Sunday, followed by some hurt feelings when he was forced to lose all that playing time.

Some older games (especially level-based ones) wouldn’t allow saves at any time, but they generally compensated by having short levels. The new games, by contrast, don’t have anything about them that would preclude saving at any time, yet they often have save artifacts you have to manipulate in the game in order to save. Which is fine, as long as you provide them at the right times, such as right after a difficult portion of the game.

I don’t want to be unfair, but I also don’t want to give game makers a veto over the rules I set over my children. If the game manufacturers feel a need to force their players to play for long stretches before giving them a place to stop, then we may not be buying very many more games.

Until recently, I subscribed to two feeds from major news media: the BBC and CNN. The BBC is generally a good-quality feed, although its bias is now world-famous and a lot of its news is a bit too British for me (such as, for example, the gushing soccer and cricket headlines). But CNN’s feed is downright annoying.

To illustrate, here are four headlines CNN gave me this morning:

• “Clinton to have surgery to remove scar tissue”
• “Clinton to have follow-up to heart surgery”
• “Clinton to have follow-up to heart surgery” (yes, twice)
• “Clinton faces new surgery”

When I look at my CNN feed and see in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 new posts, and half of them are repeats of the same story, I tend to just skip the feed entirely. The BBC does this too, but much less often.

Also, I see from the headlines that our government is calling for the dissolution of the IRA in Northern Ireland. But when I click on the headline, here’s the summary I get:

Read full story for latest details.

They do this for what seems like nearly half of their stories. Again, the BBC is much better about this; the summaries they provide are always informative.

What to do? Enter Fox News. I must have missed the announcement of their RSS feeds, but I check the big news outlets regularly for alternatives to CNN, and today’s check revealed a RSS link that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s early to say, but Fox looks promising: no zero-content summaries, and very few stories in the first pull. Plus, Fox content acts as a much better counterbalance to the BBC.

Despite the accusations of bias, Fox is now the number one news channel in the US. Part of that success comes from addressing a vacancy in the news market for conservative bias, but part of that also comes from execution: they’ve been able to do the news better than anyone else. We’ll see if that extends to their Internet presence.

If you haven’t seen the new comment policy, check it out. Mainly, the changes have to do with switching from the timed auto-moderate plugins I was using to Spam Karma.

Speaking of which, Spam Karma seems to be doing a good job. Occasionally, a spam slips through the cracks, but generally it’s done an excellent job. Even better, it requires a lot less attention to the moderation queue. So, it’s the answer for the foreseeable future.

I’ve also grabbed another plugin to help with my Esperanto blogging: Bunny’s Basic Bilingual Plugin. After I play with it a little more, people should be able to switch between English and Esperanto versions of posts via a small link. The idea is that most posts will be written in one language or the other; the plugin provides a way to mark the post’s primary language, plus provide an excerpt in the other language. Hopefully, I’ll be disciplined enough to do this with every post from now on, which should help my Esperanto fluency tremendously.

This comment policy supercedes all previous comment policies, and is in effect unless a newer comment policy supercedes it. To see the current comment policy, choose the “Comment Policy” link on the main page.

I reserve the right to delete or edit any comment, though I will alert people to edited comments. I do promise to keep editing or deleting to a minimum, though. Discussions about unpleasant subjects (like sexuality or violence) should be done respectfully and without vulgarity.

Spam, loosely defined, is commentary on this site that serves some other purpose besides discussion. Spam, specifically defined, is whatever I say it is on this site. Spam will be disallowed when it can be detected at posting time, and deleted in other cases. Frequent spammers may find their commenting privileges revoked.

Unfortunately, spammers often hijack other computers to do their dirty work, which may cause innocent third parties to lose privileges. Since I cannot tell innocent victims from willing participants, I cannot promise to always restore them. People with this problem are encouraged to take steps to prevent this, such as installing virus checkers and spyware checkers, browsing with Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, switching to Linux from Windows, or buying a Macintosh.

In the pursuit of preventing spam, my site may present commenters with a set of letters and numbers in a funny-looking image that the commenter must type in and submit before the comment is accepted. The site may also decide that some comments are suspicious enough that they require my personal approval before appearing on the site, and thus will not appear right away.

I apologize for all the hassle, but trust me: you probably would rather not see the vile trash that gets sent here just so people can make a buck.

UPDATE (2005-12-07): Someone is spamming this comment specifically in a way that defeats my spam traps, so I’ve disabled comments.

(It’s an old post, but I just noticed it, and I can’t let it pass.)

Could we have just bought and freed the slaves in 1860, and thus avoided war? Two very smart economists, Brad DeLong and Alex Tabarrok, think so, or are at least intrigued by the idea. But they shouldn’t be; while their theories may make great economics, they’re based on poor history, and at least some of it strikes me as just sloppy thinking.

First, the history. DeLong’s thesis is that the slaves would have cost $90 per capita to free, while just the direct costs of the war amounted to $140 per capita for Northerners and $340 per capita for Southerners. But would this have worked? Not in a society that frowns on free blacks. See, for example, this blurb for a book on manumission (freeing of slaves) in antebellum New Orleans:

Their success rate was so great that in 1857, facing pressure arising from the increase in the number of free people of color, the state legislature prohibited manumission.

Schafer also recounts numerous cases in which free people of color were forced to use the courts to prove their status, showing that remaining free was often as challenging as becoming free. She further documents seventeen free blacks who, when faced with deportation, amazingly sued to enslave themselves rather than leave family, friends, property, and home.

But couldn’t Northerners buy slaves, move them north, and free them there? In theory, yes; Frederick Douglass benefited from this procedure to legitimize his status as an escaped slave, for example. But Northern attitudes towards blacks were little improved over Southern attitudes. Consider that there was widespread opposition to the creation of black regiments even in places like Massachusetts and Ohio during the war itself. Even strong pressure from abolitionist groups could only push the Union to organize a few regiments as experiments; only the bravery of these first regiments caused public opposition to abate.

(For more examples of Northern attitudes towards blacks, look at the criticism President Lincoln received when he met with Douglass formally at the White House.)

DeLong uses the career of Stephen Douglas, the Senator from Illinois who debated Lincoln in the famous debates of 1858, as an example of unintended consequences, attributing to his “popular sovereignty” position the ills of “creat[ing] a low-leel [sic] guerilla war in Kansas, creat[ing] the Republican party, elect[ing] Lincoln president in 1860, and the South then secedes, and Lincoln says that he will fight.” Yet only the first of those ills can be credibly be laid at the feet of Douglas. The genesis of the Republican party was not, like the genesis of the Whig party that preceded it, the result of one personality, but of a confluence of events. Douglas played a part in some of those events, but others (such as the rise and fall of the Know-Nothings, the collapse of the Whig party between the 1852 and 1856 elections, and the Dred Scott decision) were far beyond Douglas’s power to control even had he supported them.

With the history out of the way, why do I suspect sloppy thinking? Simply because it seems dodgy to think that the government could have bought its way out of the slavery question. As noted before, it was not unheard of to re-enslave free blacks; providing a government bounty for each freed slave would certainly not have improved that condition. Further, certain parts of the Southern economy revolved around slaves, which implies that these parts would have to radically adjust to new conditions. What does the government say to the poor slave auctioneer, for example, whose job has just been legislated out of existence?

But for the most important refutation, we must turn back to history. Read, for example, John C. Calhoun’s speech on Clay’s Compromise of 1850, in which he ties slavery to the core of Southern character in his portrayal of Northern offenses.

Unless something decisive is done, I again ask, What is to stop this agitation before the great and final object at which it aims–the abolition of slavery in the States–is consummated? Is it, then, not certain that if something is not done to arrest it, the South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession? Indeed, as events are now moving, it will not require the South to secede in order to dissolve the Union. Agitation will of itself effect it, of which its past history furnishes abundant proof–as I shall next proceed to show.

Slavery was seen by Southerners like Calhoun to be a core part of Southern society, and almost definitive of it. Note how a single issue–slavery in the territories–is interpreted by Calhoun as an exclusion of the entire Southern way of life from those territories. With the battle lines thus drawn (and this was only the last of a very long line of speeches by Calhoun drawing the lines in this way), how can anyone think that the mere spending of money could alleviate all this hostility and defensiveness?

Well, the default WordPress spam system was working just peachy. Until yesterday, that is, when the nasty little spammers changed tactics.

The good news is that I’ve found a spam plugin that actually works with WordPress 1.5: Spam Karma. And what a plugin it is, too. It is amazingly cool-looking, especially from the admin point of view.

So, we’ll see if it lives up to its potential. Give us a few days, and if it works out, we’ll have a new comment policy.

How will this affect all three of my fans? Well, when you post a comment, you might be asked to read some funny-looking letters from a graphic into a box and submit it. The possibility exists that some people just might be denied access; if that happens, give me a buzz by E-mail. Here’s the address to use. (If you select the link, your computer should start an E-mail for you with the address filled in, so you don’t have to type it yourself or play with cut-n-paste.)

jeff+dated+1111380915.02a972@licquia.org

The stuff between the first plus sign and the at-sign means “Starting close to midnight on March 6, accept all mail from anyone for exactly two weeks.” That way, you guys can E-mail me, but by the time spam harvesters pick up the address, it will have expired. That also means that anyone else trying the address after about March 20 won’t get through, either; if we’re still having problems, check more recent blog posts for updated addresses to use.