Category: Rants

Purple Streetlights are Raising Awareness of an Important Issue

Whether you spotted one in your own neighborhood or saw one while driving into town, you’ve probably noticed the purple streetlights that are cropping up all over America. Street lights vary in color depending what kind of bulb is used. Most street lights are yellow, but long-lasting orange colored sodium lights are also popular. Whiter LED lights are now available, but why purple? It turns out the purple lights raise awareness of a very important issue.

You’ve probably read in the news how very wealthy individuals avoid paying income tax through questionable tax arrangements, offshore accounts or even outright fraud, but did you know that the rich manage to avoid property taxes too? A study of property taxes nationwide found that properties valued in the lowest 10% in a community are typically taxed at a rate 33% higher than properties valued in the top 10%. 

How is this possible? The answer is property tax appeals. Wealthy landowners can typically afford to hire law firms to challenge the valuation of their properties. The tax assessor then has a choice: they can put up a fight against a wealthy, well-connected campaign donor, or they can give up and get another campaign donation for their reelection. Even when the tax assessor isn’t elected, they report to someone who is. Unsurprisingly, the tax assessor usually gives the rich what they want. It’s not hard to make an appeals system that is hard for ordinary citizens to navigate but easy for a well-funded lawyer, so that’s usually how they do it. Poor landowners simply don’t have the time to challenge their assessments, so they pay too much while the rich pay too little.

What does this have to do with purple lights? Well, cities across America are under-funded due to the rich not paying their property taxes. Cities have pinched pennies everywhere they can, including by buying the cheapest streetlight bulbs available. Many of these bulbs are defective and turn purple after a few thousand hours of service. So the next time you see a purple streetlight, remember that rich people in your town don’t pay the taxes they’re assessed.

Lightning Fail

If you don’t hate Apple’s lightning connector yet, it’s almost sure that you will. Should you snap off the tip in your device you will find it impossible to remove. (Don’t take it to the apple store, they will just offer to sell you a new device.) The cables tend to break if kinked or pulled. Even if you’re consistently gentle, you could develop corroded contacts that prevent the device from charging.

Another failure I have encountered: pocket lint. It seems the female lightning connector on the bottom of the iPhone is just the perfect size for getting lint stuck in it. Because the opening is so thin, it takes a very small tool to get the lint out. In my case, a pair of static-safe tweezers I use for placing SMD components was small enough.

iPhone, Lint, and Tweezers
This was the first of three chunks removed.

I have never had this problem with any other connector. That includes USB mini, USB micro and Apple’s 30-pin connector, all of which have traveled in my pockets for years without incident. I haven’t had those others snap off in the device or become corroded, either, but both have happened to me with the lightning connector. Even the name is bad, since Apple also uses the thunderbolt interface, producing confusion. Sadly, I don’t think we can expect a change in connector for new iPhones. With Apple’s revenues missing expectations, they’ll need to sell lots of replacement cables and phones.

Someone Is Wrong on The Internet

I know, I know, there are plenty of people on the internet who are wrong about a good number of things, but good gravy this irks me. Check out what I found on a do-it-yourself reference site.
Did you catch it? Okay, maybe you didn’t, and that’s okay, but by the end of this post you might be as annoyed as I am because that is not a f#$%ing Phillips head driver. That is a Pozidriv driver. They’re different. Now I know that when it comes to putting art into an article, it’s often left to editors and not the writers. It’s not always the case that the editor has mastered the content that the writer has. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here, though. Check out the text.
There it is: the error extends to the text. The writer claims a Phillips head “does not taper.” The drive in the image doesn’t taper, but the drive in the image is not a Phillips. In fact it is the taper or lack thereof that differentiates the Phillips and Pozidriv. Here is a comparison of a Phillips next to a #2 Pozidriv, courtesy of my toolbox.
As you can see, the blades on the Phillips (top) are tapered, while the blades on the Pozidriv are not. Plus, there are those extra splines between the blades of the Pozidriv that are a dead giveaway that it’s different. If you’ve ever had to lean on a Phillips to get it to stop popping out of a tight screw, then you have experienced the difference. The Phillips drive is designed “cam out” of the recess when the screw is too tight. This is to avoid applying too much force to the screw and twisting the head off of it. Pozidriv screws are designed to withstand more torque, and so they have a driver capable of delivering more torque without popping out of the screw head.

So how did the author get it so wrong? Given that that the article reads like a freshman essay that’s been padded out for length, I’d say this article exists just to produce ad revenue. I imagine the work put into it was 99% search engine optimization and 1% content generation, with no time to check Wikipedia.