Jason’s Random Thoughts

Following the lead of countries like Australia, Canada may consider ditching our lowest denomination coin; the penny.

MP Pat Martin is drafting a private member’s bill to kill this seemingly useless coin, and it seems to have a large number of people talking.  What I find interesting in the conversations at the neighbourhood coffee house, though, is that there is no clear direction as to whether people think this will be a good thing or not.

To get around the problem of what to do when your coffee comes out to $1.77, Martin proposes a rounding system akin to the method found in Australia.  Everything would be rounded up or down to the nearest nickle (5 cents) when paying with cash.  Debit and credit purchases would continue to work with full cents, and gas companies would continue to charge in tenths of cents.

This reminds me of the tactic that my family used when playing Monopoly.  The $1 was useless when you landed on property, so everything was rounded up to the nearest 5, and the $1 was dubbed the $1,000 bill.  It was a great system … since I was more often than not the one with the Monopoly at the end of the game.

But some people think this is some sort of twisted socialist plot.  One person at the coffee shop today seemed to think that gasoline companies would actually change their pricing to work in 5 cent increments (which would likely cause Canadians to take up arms at home for the first time since the Battle of Stoney Creek).  Others believe that by scrapping this coing and saving the $30million annual production costs, we could put that money towards some worthy causes such as education or health care.

I believe the greatest benefit of this draft bill is not what the bill proposes to do, but instead the discussions that are ensuing because of it.  There are some pretty surley people that sit at some of my favourite coffee shops and they have very unique perspectives on the situation.  My favourite, of course, being the suggestion that rather than ditch the penny, we should introduce a new one that is worth 1/10th of a cent.  This way when we go to buy gas, we’re not losing out to the rounding that happens at the pump.

I highly doubt this bill will pass even first reading at the Parliament, but the discussions should be lively.  I believe that if the penny is truly going to be eliminated from the market, then the market needs to first kill it silently themselves.  Many places offer club cards that offer instant discounts on products.  If the cash machines were configured to ensure the final sale was a nice round figure that eliminated the need for pennies, then they wouldn’t need so many.  Banks wouldn’t have to order the same quantity, as stores would undoubtedly rarely require more than a few rolls a week.  And consumers would have fewer pennies to squirrel away in buckets or jars in the house.

What’s your take on the situation?  Would the elimination of the penny benefit Canadians?  If nothing else, it would speed up the supermarket lines as people no longer fish out eight pennies from their pockets.

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How often has this happened to us?  After landing at an airport, we make our way to the carousel to wait for our luggage, only to find that after an hour’s wait, we’re the last ones at the claim and there are no bags left on the track.

While it’s never happened to me (yet), it does happen to thousands of us every month.  Often times the airports are pretty good about getting our bags to us afterwards, but what if we’re on a trip that will take us to several locations over the course of a week?

Kelly Cho tells us about a service offered by GlobalBagTag.com, and it’s definately worth taking a look at if you plan to fly anytime soon.

Most of us tend to buy tags for our luggage to help us identify them as they make the way around the carousel.  I had done this for my trips to Japan as well as Ontario and, aside from the time I thought someone else had picked up my bag, they have served well enough.  GlobalBagTag also offers tags, but these are small stainless steel pieces that come with a high-security fastening.  According to their website we don’t need to write our personal information down on the tag (which is great for anyone concerned about privacy) because each tag has a serial number stamped right into the metal.

In order to use the service, we need to register on their site and then enter all the pertinent contact info we might have.  One absolutely wonderful feature is the ability to enter our intinerary for a trip right on the site.  Should our bags get lost, they can be sent to the hotel we’ll be at rather than the one we just left.  Security also seems pretty tight with this company as the only people with access to your contact information or intinerary are the airlines, handling agents and lost property agencies.  Heck, I can see people getting these for their everyday suitcases or notebook bags.  If you were to forget your bag on the train, a good samaritan would (hopefully) turn it in to the transit agency’s lost and found, who would then have GlobalBagTag get in touch with you.  Your personal information is never given away.

When GlobalBagTag has found your item, they will let you know through email, SMS, phone or fax.  Very nice.

The company is based out of the UK, but their services are offered worldwide.  A set of tags sell for $18.95 USD with first class shipping to North America for $4.50 USD.  There is an annual subscription fee, but it’s a mere $4.80 USD, regardless of how many tags you might own.  If you happen to have friends who travel quite often , these can be given away as a gift, or even sold in quantity discounts as part of a corporate package.

Kelly Cho is holding a contest to give away a set of these tags, and this is my entry.  However, after reading about GlobalBagTag’s services on their site, I think I’ll be buying some tags even if I don’t win.

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Is it just me, or is sun-block cream really big business?  Until five years ago, SPF 15 was recommended if a person was going to spend more than half an hour in direct sunlight.  For a while it was 30 … now we’re being told that SPF 45 lotion should be the minimum we use for protection from our sun’s UV rays.

The differences in the Sun Protection Factors are often misunderstood.  SPF 15 will filter out just a bit more than 93% of all UVB sunlight, whereas an SPF 30 will filter out 97%.  So SPF 30 is not “twice as strong” as SPF 15, rather, it will only allow half as much UVB penetration.

Though despite all the warnings we’ve heard, many of us go without adequate coats of the slippery goop.  I’ve avoided the stuff pretty well over the last decade, only occasionally being forced to apply mixtures of titanium-dioxide and zinc oxide to my skin.  But after hearing the recommendation for SPF 45 products for this summer, I started asking myself “has the ozone depleted further?”  Oddly enough, no.  In fact, the ozone layer has been on the mend for quite some time, albeit slowly.  Many sources believe it will be several decades yet before we’re naturally protected with pre-1970 levels.  Antarctica is the last continent on earth without protection from the sun.

Thinking that the amount of pollution we eject into the atmosphere might offer some protection, I investigated the matter but found no real data to say our greenhouse effect was doing us a favor by obstructing some of these potentially dangerous rays.  Perhaps Dr. Roger Angel’s proposed sunshade could act as an artificial buffer ….

2007 is a low point in the Sun’s Solar Cycle so the planet will have less chance of being hit by coronal mass ejections, and though the Earth’s magnetic field is gearing down to switch polarity for the first time in 780,000 years, it plays little role in UVB protection (but a much bigger role on protecting us from everything else the sun belts out).

So why the SPF 45 minimum?

I’ve searched through some of the sunscreen manufacturer sites as well as some dermatologist pages, but can’t find anything aside from doom and gloom stories about the potential damage to DNA with prolonged exposure to short-wave UVB radiation.  While the concerns for genetic damages leading to various forms of cancer is certainly an issue, could this be just another ploy to scare us into buying the (moderately) more expensive product?

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How long would you be willing to wait for a plot of ocean-front property near Hawaii if you could buy the land starting at $40 US?  Ten years?  Twenty?  Ten Thousand?

Lo’ihi Development Co. will soon start offering oceanview lots that may not be realistically viable for above-surface residential complexes for a few millenia.  This is because the land that’s being sold is currently a kilometer (about 3,000 feet) below the surface of the ocean.

Ya know … I wish I would think of things this crazy once in a while.  Norm Nichols, co-developer of the online venture, assures people this isn’t a scam saying “If you really think there’s something here that you can’t live with, nobody’s forcing you to buy it.  It’s meant to be fun.”  This reminds me of a few other sites where we are enticed to buy entire star systems, or plots of land on various celestial bodies for relatively small amounts of cash.

What I find positively amazing is that some people actually make enough with these ventures that they only need to work part-time, if at all.  Though unlike some of the other sites, Lo’ihi Development lets you know that this is a parody up-front.

Scientists don’t know how long it will be until Lo’ihi will break the surface of the Pacific Ocean.  Some say ten thousand years, while others say never.  So if you’ve ever wanted to leave something worth absolutely nil to family after your passing, perhaps a few acres of land on this submerged volcano would be a nice parting gift.

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In a move that’s viewed as a major departure from their direct sales strategy, Dell will start selling their Dimension-line desktops at Walmart stores in June as part of a “global retail strategy to provide customers with more options.”  Keeping with these options, Dell is also giving American buyers the option to have the Linux variant Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed on some of their systems.

I guess Michael Dell wasn’t too happy when he returned to the company earlier this year after a seemingly abysmal fourth-quarter profit.

What I find interesting is this Ubuntu offer.  By having a system configured with this OS, a customer could easily shave a hundred or two off the cost of their PC.  Of course, that said, the OS will only be offered on three Dell products, and only in the US for the time being.  But this could be a pretty big boost for the incredibly user-friendly Linux variant.

I’ve tried a few Ubuntu flavours over the years.  Not for a primary computer, but mainly as a “where are they now?” kind of test.  Aside from understandably limited hardware support, this is an operating system that I would feel comfortable giving my parents.  But this does make me wonder if Dell is going to make a real effort at the retail market again.

Last year, the company had opened two retail stores in New York as a test to see whether they could compete against other mixed-market (direct and retail) providers such as Hewlett-Packard and Acer.  There was even a time when Dell PCs were sold at Best Buy, Costco and Sam’s Club … though that ended in 1994 with Dell citing low profit margins on the business.  So I wonder how different things will be at Walmart, where commercials show that happy face happily knocking a few bucks off the price of products ….

The only positive factor that I can see with this move is that now potential customers can try before they buy.  One of the biggest issues I’ve had with Dell products (aside from their shoddy construction and horrible habit of self-destructing 14 days out of warranty) is that we can’t really see what we’re buying until we get it.  We can’t see if the notebook will fit our hands properly.  We can’t see just how big and obtrusive that XPS case is.  We can’t see that their definition of “Wide Screen XGA” is actually just Wide XGA (give me numbers on your site, Dell.  Your descriptions suck.).

Well … now we can.

June 10th is the day Walmart officially starts selling these things there.  I wonder if any of the M-series notebooks will be available or on display.  I’ve always wondered what the M1210 actually looked like.

Not that I’ll ever own another Dell.

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