General

No Place Like Home

I agree with Virginia. I’ve been living in south Florida for three years now (almost exactly–I came out here on Labor Day of 2004, just in time to board and shutter up the house for Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne (scroll to the bottom and work your way up, if you’re interested)), and it still doesn’t feel like home to me. And I don’t think it ever will, in the way that LA did, and still does, when I visit.

Business

Fraud

Here’s evidence that my skepticism about rebates is warranted:

I am staring at more than 1,300 rebate requests sent to Vastech on Bonaventura Drive in San Jose. The envelopes were tossed – unopened – into a garbage dumpster near Vastech. I have two boxes of envelopes that were thrown out without being processed. In all of my years of reporting, I have never encountered such outrageous behavior against consumers.

An employee of nearby Dominion Enterprises found the letters, along with hundreds of others addressed to Vastech, at his company’s dumpster. He turned them over to his boss, Joel Schwartz, who gave them to me. All of the letters were addressed to UR-04 Rebate or some variation of the product name at the Vastech address.

The problem is that it’s no skin off Fry’s or Best Buy’s nose if people don’t get their rebates. They just claim that it’s up to the manufacturer. So the fraud will continue. And I’ll continue to ignore the rebates.

Political Commentary

Runaround Hsu

Some thoughts from Eric Scheie:

I was immediately reminded of the unresolved Peter Paul case, but if we think back further, there’s Johnny Huang, Charlie Trie, Moktar Riaddy. The Craig scandal is pathetically simple, even sad by comparison, does not involve the presidential election, nor money corruption, and probably wouldn’t be much of a scandal if it involved the Democrats. That the public perception would be that “both parties have scandals” shows only how easily manipulated the public can be.

…I think the Hsu case is bigger than Vick and Craig combined. It has a creepy, tip-of-the-iceberg feel to it, and it’s a perfect reminder (as if anyone needed a reminder) of the deep, hard-core corruption which has long characterized Bill and Hillary Clinton. (I don’t believe they have changed at all.) What sickens me more than seeing this corruption resurface is to see so many naive people behaving as if they’re shocked and surprised. (And what will sicken me more than that, I’m sure, is the speed at which they’ll forget.)

Yes. That people still don’t understand the depth of corruption of the Clintons is a failure–no–a criminal unwillingness to inform the public, or even an ongoing effort to deliberately misinform them–by the press in the nineties. It was journalistic malpractice.

And it continues, as long as they remain Democrats, and Bill maintains his (always unnoticeable to me) charisma level. Who has been reporting on the upcoming Peter Paul trial? Very few.

And Eric implicitly offers a challenge to the poetically gifted among us–come up with new lyrics for “Runaround Sue.”

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!