And Three For Me...

Part of what makes me a run-of-the-mill blogger, I suspect, is that I'm not a particularly good researcher. And I'm bad at noting things of interest when I first encounter them. Oh, well.

I was making the point to an acquaintance that one aspect of American individualism that the United States should be happy to jettison is the a general lack of investment in each others' success. And this is where my poor research skills came into play. There was a study, in which people were asked which scenario would make them happier: If they made X dollars a year and their neighbor made Y dollars a year, where X was greater than Y, or of they made A dollars a years and their neighbor made B dollars a years, where A was greater than X, but B was greater than A. So we can imagine a scenario where the subject would make $80,000 a year while the hypothetical neighbor made $60,000 on one side, and the subject makes $100,000 a year while the neighbor makes $120,000 a year. According to the researchers (at least as I remember it), people tended to prefer the first scenario, where both parties are worse off, but the subject is comparatively wealthier than the neighbor.

Color me greedy, but I don't see the point in begrudging someone else making it big if I'm going to come along for at least part of the ride. (Actually, I don't see the point in begrudging someone else making it big at all, but that's beside the point here.) Preferring to be less well off just to hold someone else farther down seems spiteful to me. (Which it isn't really, and I know that.)

In a zero-sum game, it would make more sense to me. Come to mention it, I wonder if there is zero-sum thinking going on here, even though the scenario specifically disclaims that avenue. In any event, I think that the United States would do better for itself were its people (as a whole) more inclined to see benefits for themselves in other people succeeding. If for no other reason than people would be more cooperative.

But maybe that's the part that's too much to ask at this point. The United States has accomplished a number of truly remarkable things, all while being a highly individualistic society. And as much I think that a bit more social-mindedness would be a good thing, I don't want the current system to simply stop working, because I understand how disruptive that would be, and how many people would be injured by such a turn of events.

I suspect that this makes me part of the problem; that unwillingness to desire the pain of others, even if that pain would bring about something that I claim to want. Maybe it's simply that I'm okay with the way things are; it's more a matter of good-better than bad-good. I don't know. In any event, I'd like to track down that study again. Because I suspect that it's not as simple as my memory makes it out to be, and maybe that's why it persists.

CRTease

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to win a debate (and in some cases to even have one) if one starts by accepting a hostile framing offered by an interlocutor. So I was somewhat surprised when I came across this in the I Side With political quiz:

My first response to this was: Why on Earth would one teach a graduate-level legal theory in K-12? (For those of you outside the United States who may not be familiar with the term, "K-12" refers to Kindergarten through 12th grade; pretty much the sum total of one's pre-college/university education.)

• Yes, we cannot end racism until we acknowledge that our institutions, laws, and history are inherently racist
• No, kids should be raised to be racially color blind instead of being taught they are inherently racist or disadvantaged based on the color of their skin

These are not accurate descriptions of Critical Race Theory.

A big part of the problem, as I see it, is that the idea of "disparate impact," the concept that a policy or process that is neutral on its face can have differing impacts on different groups because it doesn't take past differences into account, has gone by the wayside. Term "racist" (or "sexist" or "homophobic" or what have you) has expanded into the space that disparate impact used to occupy.

Another large chunk of the problem is that "racism" and "racists" tend to conjure up images of Confederates and Nazis, and no matter how much someone might say that racism is no longer simply the province of racial animus or bad intent on the part of individuals, that old definition (which, I would point out, was the one that I grew up understanding) dies hard.

And so "Critical Race Theory" goes from:

an academic concept that [...] race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

to:

kids being taught they are inherently racist based on the color of their skin

And the I Side With quiz goes along with this, offering no answer that allows the reader to actively reject the skewed framing that Conservative activists have placed around the topic.

And as much as I find these sorts of political exercises interesting, I also find, more and more often, that what I'm mainly learning about are the biases of the people who write them, or the biases they expect the people who engage with them to have. Which is, in the end, understandable. After all, these are people who rely on eyeballs, and bland neutrality seldom brings in the views.

Flowering

I always wonder what small gestures like this do, in the grand scheme of things. Do people in Ukraine, when they hear about them, feel comforted and supported? Does it remind Americans of a war abroad where it's understood that people could use their assistance?

Of course, I understand the primary beneficiaries are the person who placed the flags, and perhaps the people who make and sell them. But it would be a shame if that were the limit of it.
 

Factor of 10

I was reading a story today on gun violence in the United States, or rather, a story about one of the many people killed by gun violence in the United States. It ends, like many such stories do, with the author wondering why people are still allowed to keep and bear firearms, especially the semi-automatic replicas of military weapons so favored by mass shooters. The story was reasonably well-written, although I found it maudlin in places, which is also typical of the genre.

Semi-automatic "assault weapons," to borrow the media misnomer for them, are common bogeymen because they represent random, portable violence. A sudden hail of gunfire in places where there shouldn't be any gunfire. Places where, in the vast majority of cases, there isn't any gunfire. And that may be why the stories about them fail to gain traction. Because while it might be easy to frighten a suburban parent who imagines some unhinged student coming into their child's school, or a an urban sophisticate who believes that their money should buy them safety from random violence, the mass shootings that take up so much airtime when they happen are not the primary drivers of firearms-related deaths in the United States. Suicide holds that spot.

But they aren't even the primary drivers of gun homicides.

Among African Americans, the rate was 26.6 deaths per 100,000, a 39.5% increase over 2019. For white Americans, the rate was 2.2 per 100,000.

By raw numbers, there were 19,350 gun homicides in 2020, with African Americans accounting for 62% of the total and white people 21%.
U.S. gun deaths surged 35% in 2020, higher for Black people - CDC

The shooting at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York was an outlier. Not only in the sense that mass shootings are still rare occurrences, but in the fact that it brought attention to Black people killed by guns in the United States. But even then, it was only because of the circumstances of the shooting. Most of the nearly 12,000 Black people in the United States killed by gun violence are much less photogenic, or respectable, to the affluent Americans who drive the gun control debate.

The ones and twos of domestic violence, gang conflicts and petty crimes don't commonly create targets who can be easily and unambiguously canonized by media outlets looking for clicks. For many, it seems, the problem isn't that large numbers of homicides are committed with firearms; it's that the wrong people are dying. And once the coverage runs out of the people who the public thinks should be above being slain by high-velocity bits of metal, it goes silent. It does not attempt to marshal public sympathy for those that are widely seen as expendable, if not outright undesirable. And so the problem seems smaller than it is.

But this is the way of things. The United States is both geographically large, and humanly diverse. The physical and social distance that this often leaves between people can be vast. And that distance, more than anything else, is the primary enemy of progress, for a remarkably large set of definitions of "progress." People are unwilling to give up something that's important to them to protect people they care nothing, and know less, about, whether they place importance on the value of physical assets, some piece of their identity or even simply how they feel about the world around them.

And without being able to bring the United States closer together, the collective action that's really needed to solve the problem will be absent. Forcing a solution, and holding it in place until everyone decides that they like it is harder than it's given credit for. And therefore, not a good starting plan.

Just a Bit More

There is a Zillow billboard that I see on my way home from work. It reads: "Sell for more than the house next door." I saw a post on Reddit from a person complaining that a recent raise wasn't large enough considering how much the company owner made. And people wonder why inflation rises.

Just as no single raindrop feels responsible for the flood, no single person looking to maximize their home's selling price, angling for a raise or otherwise attempting to line their pockets sees their actions as contributing to overall inflation. But it's just these sorts of individual decisions that play a part. Granted, they don't directly play into choices by the Federal Reserve to increase the overall supply of money in the economy, which is a much larger single factor in determining a current level of inflation, but the money people want for themselves has to come from somewhere. And as people seek to raise the prices they are paid for their own assets and labor, other people are doing the same.

The ability to move through the world on a day-to-day basis without needing to understand (sometimes at even a basic level) how it works is both a blessing and a curse. It allows people to concentrate on the things in front of them in the moment, and, in so doing, allows society overall to be more efficient. The time and energy needed to make everyone an economist is, in many circumstances a waste, and cutting it out is better for everyone. But it means that people often don't understand their own part in events that happen around them.

Hitching

The chalk reads: "Bro, can I get a hand on the bus... I'm waiting 4 my ride."

A small robot, waiting for a bus in Kirkland, Washington.

There was a version of me, once, that would have done things like this. I don't know what happened to my sense of play, only that at some point I mislaid it, and haven't seen it since.

It was likely a very long time ago. I seem to recall that serious Aaron was quite serious, even as a teenager. I think that this is why I so easily latch on the the whimsy that other people leave out in public; I've gone so long without my own.

Remembering when one is one's own most strident critic is more difficult than it seems. Even though I understand that the only think that gives the judgements of others power over me is my fear of such judgements, I can't easily let go of the sense that anything I do can, and will, be used against me. And so I spend more time than I should conforming to the dictates of my Inner Critic, on the chance that doing so will, this time, since the voices I have ascribed to it.
 

Strongarmed

A third of Americans prefer a strong, unelected leader to a weak, elected one

I admit that it makes for a quick, alarmist, headline, given that people are running around like headless chickens in fear of the immanent demise of Democracy. But it leaves me with a question: Who elects weak leaders?

Okay, Republicans feel that President Biden is weak, but that's the negative partisanship talking. And, of course, there were Democrats who felt that President Trump was weak. (They may have even had signs.) And I can grant that for some voters, their party's nominee may have been weak in their eyes; progressive Democrats who would rather have had a Sanders Administration may be an example. But, generally speaking, how would a "weak" candidate manage to win an election? This seems to presuppose that there is some set of policy and/or social positions that are more important to voters than "strong" leadership is. But what good would it be to vote for someone who one doesn't believe is capable of actually enacting any of those policies when there are any other choices?

Because of the primary system in the United States, it seems unlikely that the first choice of any significant section of the public would be a weak leader. Again, I can grant that a party might somehow manage to put forward an entire field of weak leaders in a primary election, and then the least wimpy of them advances to the general election where partisanship propels them into a safe seat for their party, but the Presidency is almost never a safe seat. It's possible that the George W. Bush Administration was such a disaster or that Hillary Clinton was such an unpopular candidate that Presidents Obama and Trump could have been literal ham sandwiches and still won the White House. But honestly, that strikes me as unlikely.

If the point is that a sitting officeholder were to become so feeble that they could no longer carry out the duties of their position, there tend to be procedures for that. And at such a point, it's no longer logical to argue that the impulse is any more "undemocratic" than any other restriction that the Constitution places on the will of the majority.

At the risk of repeating myself (as if that never happens), representative government with officeholders elected by popular vote is a means, not an end. Democracy is not, in and of itself, a guarantor of enlightenment among a populace. Okay, so people are becoming broadly unsatisfied with the outcomes that modern American democracy delivers. That's a sign that the implementation may need to change somewhat, not that people should simply accept some affirmative responsibility to support a system that doesn't serve them well.

Did You See What They Did?

I spent some time this evening wandering down a short rabbit hole of a few different news articles about how people in China see the United States. More specifically, how they understand violent crime, mainly mass shootings, in the United States. While there is a general accusation that Chinese state media, along with the government, sensationalizes the events in order to cast themselves as caring for their citizenry by comparison, I'm not sure that domestic media does a much better job of placing mass shootings into a useful context, either.

But what I found to be the most interesting thing about this is what one might understand as a point of agreement; in order to prevent citizens attacking and killing one another, what is needed is control. And some people welcome that level of control, while others recoil from it.

Faith in institutions to act on the best interests of people who are not themselves direct members of the institution is always a matter of individual outlook and worldview. The governments of both China and the United States each tend to cast the other as institutions that don't deserve the faith that people, whether their own citizens or others abroad, place in them. Each plays up what it understands to be the sins of the other while keeping quiet, via various measures, incidents that it understands might give others grounds to criticize. This is not to say that the two are equivalent, mainly because their methods are different. While supporters of China might claim that it's all a pack of malicious lies, my general understanding is that China's Communist government is somewhat more, shall we say, heavy-handed in its public-relations apparatus than the government of the United States could expect to get away with. The two-party system we have here may be a disaster for many reasons, but each party looking to call the other one out for any missteps made while in power does have some benefits.

The thing about the criticisms that the governments level at one another, however, is that they never really seem sincere. Sure, Chinese Media might proclaim that "Racism a poison running through [the] American body politic," after an event like the shooting at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, but as a Black person in the United States, I don't feel that the Chinese government cares any more about the situation of Black Americans than the Soviet government did. Likewise, who honestly thinks that the United States honestly gives the treatment of the Uyghurs in China a moment's thought outside of using it as a means to flog China for its human rights record? Each side stands up and calls the kettle black because its in their specific interests to do so.

Which is the way of the world. Transparent pretenses that ethics or principles are important are what is expected. It's the way the game is played, even when there's no apparent prize for winning. There isn't going to be some sort of worldwide referendum on which government people would rather have. And the number of people who base their purchasing decisions on such matters is vanishingly small. (As an aside, I'm always tickled when politicians talk about bringing jobs back to America from overseas. Because who would take those jobs at the rates of pay that offshore workers command? Or would by the products whose costs reflected what domestic workers would want?)

I admit to not understanding it. I think because I can't really convince myself that anyone in this entire business is being genuine; I couldn't make those sorts of arguments with a straight face if my life depended on it. Not that I think that people in China don't honestly think that their government is the best around, and the same for people in the United States. But there's that part of me that thinks that there's more looking the other way going on, than genuine blindness.

Eat Your Greens

 

Obliviousness

This was posted on Reddit. Given that, as near as I can tell, the average user of Reddit is a left-of-center Millennial or member of "Gen Z," it was unsurprising that people were lining up to dunk on "Pro Life Lad," make their own comments concurring with said dunking on, and voting up the dunking and supportive comments.

For my part, I'm a bit skeptical, if for no other reason that if "Pro Life Lad" were bright enough to both walk and chew bubble gum, they should have seen this coming from miles away. But bait or not, the post is indicative of the ways that many people experience the Culture War phenomenon here in the United States. While there are many dedicated culture warriors, for whom inflicting pain on the perceived enemy is part of the goal, many people are simply doing what they understand to be correct, and they don't understand why people are upset with them.

And I suspect that a lot of this comes form people simply not understanding that they aren't the only ones who see this as a high-stakes matter of right and wrong. "Pro Life Lad" was apparently engaged to be married to a woman who very much disagreed with the Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Et al. decision, yet he couldn't be bothered to understand that, or how important it was to her? (I'm not married myself, and have no intention to be, so maybe I'm speaking out of turn here, but I suspect that this blindsided him, he didn't know his fiancée well enough to have proposed to her, or accepted a proposal.) It never occurred to him that this was important enough to the people he worked with that maybe a public party wasn't the best idea? His dig on the women in the local area for not being pro-life would indicate that he lives in a fairly liberal place - what was he expecting would happen?

To hazard a guess, I would presume that "Pro Life Lad" simply assumed that he'd be able to bask in whatever minuscule part he may have played in "saving babies" and ride around on his high horse without ever needing up understand how the people on the other side actually felt about the issue.

Generally speaking, people do not act in ways that they believe will call unjustified harm, if any harm at all, to others. But they also fail to understand, or be curious about, the perception that others have that harm is being done. And thus "Pro Life Lad" can celebrate, with fireworks, an event that people around them consider an act of deliberate harm, and not realize that those same people consider that to be rubbing their noses in the impending injuries of themselves and those they care about. He tells his younger sister that she should be "grateful" that he's going to have a child who will be her niece or nephew, as if it's his role to tell her what is important to her.

This particular example landed in my lap, which is why it's ending up here, but it's not a one-sided phenomenon. Rather it's fairly routine in American politics. The only thing that's potentially unusual about it is the durability of "Pro Life Lad's" echo chamber and lack of empathy for the people around him, given how deep he portrays himself as being in their world.

In a lot of ways, this is the enduing problem of American politics; a lack of understanding, or perhaps even the desire to understand, driven by people's perceptions of themselves as on the obviously correct side of whatever issue is in question. And the belief that it's only a problem for others.

Untreated

The widespread mistreatment of people persists because the question of “How does our society end the mistreatment of people?” is kept out of the center of general attention by the question of “How does our society reserve mistreatment for those people who ‘deserve’ it?” The latter may be a workable position in a world in which concepts like fairness and justice can be objectively derived and known via the scientific method. But at present, those concepts are arbitrary and applying them leads just as (if not more) often to anger and resentment as to the resolution of injuries.

(I'm including the text of the image here, because here, it's actually searchable. Do enough work with online accessibility, and eventually, it starts to sink in.)

Mechanics

Alex Samuels: What things do you wish the Biden administration would tackle?

David Gonzalez (Hispanic, 43, Missouri): [...]I also wish the Biden administration would make real strides with climate change, LGBTQ+ rights and health care. These are things that probably have to pass along party lines and I don’t know if Biden could get Democrats in line to make those things happen or has the desire to make a number of executive orders.
Meet 6 Democrats Of Color Who Want To See Their Party Change

This is the problem with campaign promises, and other things that people want government to do, simply because they think it can. Given the presence of a filibuster where all it takes to prevent cloture is the opposition party deciding to not allow something to be voted on, and the fact that is not the job of the executive to simply will legislation into existence at the stroke of a pen, party line votes and executive orders aren’t going to do the trick.

But candidates don’t bother to make that point when they’re attempting to buy votes with campaign promises, and the people who believe in those promises are, more or less by definition, ignorant of how the process actually works, or they wouldn’t have believed the campaign promises that certain policies would be quick and easy to enact...

“Today’s Democratic leaders need to step down and create space for younger, more creative, thinkers who are better connected with their communities,” said 34-year-old Laura Taylor. “Older politicians past the retirement age shouldn’t put their power or reputation above progress for our people.”

In other words, “Since we don’t have the votes to elect the people we want into Congress, the people currently there should walk away from their offices.” Why would anyone do that?

But I remember when I was young enough that I thought that way. Granted, I’d become cynical enough to have left it behind by the time I was 34 and most certainly 43, but I remember when I thought that I understood what was best for everyone, and it was only also pretty good for me personally, because I was simply one of the everyone.

One of the casualties, and I use that word with due deliberation, of my maturation process was the understanding that I had anything approaching an objective view of the world, and thus, an understanding of good and bad policy that anyone other than myself should subscribe to. The realization that I hadn’t been distinguishing what I believed was good for me from what was good for the world around me eventually led me to want to understand what other people thought was good for them, and why.

People who, when given the chance, vote against politicians pushing for greater government funding of health care and/or against the local Millennial for Congress are doing so because those positions align with what they understand their interests to be at the time that they vote. And simply telling them that they’re ignorant or gullible isn’t going to cut it. Especially, if they, like myself, understand why they no longer think like a young person.

I am, for the most part, unsympathetic to the idea that governments should be run like businesses. Businesses are allowed a much greater level of choice over both their employees and their customer bases than governments can and still be workable. But there is some wisdom in the idea, however. Political incentives are not fixed. Some few are artifacts of the current state of Human Nature, but most of them are driven by the behavior of the general public; tens of millions of individual choices made because, in the moment, they make sense. Businesses understand this, and put a decent level of effort into aligning their offerings with the market that they’re going after. And while sure, there are businesses that seek to provide poor value for money or restrict choices in order to pad their bottom lines, most businesses are (whether they like it or not) reliant on their customers.

Young, progressive, voters are disappointed in the Democratic Party, because the party understands that there are multiple constituencies within the overall party, even if young progressives think that those constituencies are unimportant. Politics, however, is a balancing act on both sides, especially in a two-party system driven by negative partisanship. For the parties, they have to navigate between differing constituencies that are a) after different things and b) may even be acting at cross purposes. Just because someone supports and extensive welfare state doesn’t automagically mean that the steps needed to combat climate change are good, or even tolerable, to them. The things that excite one part of the base my inspire apathy in another, and arguments over who’s being the most irresponsible won’t fix that. Likewise, voters have to calibrate punishing the party by withholding a vote, with the risk that it will wind up blowing up in their faces. For all that many Democrats are up-in arms over the decision in Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Et al., there are very few voices pointing out that had more Democrats in key states come out to vote in 2016, they wouldn’t be in this position. (I’ve heard more criticism in political quarters of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the Supreme Court than I have of Democratic voters effectively failing to back her play.)

Representative politics is not a game of right and wrong. It’s about playing strategically to reach one’s goals. Which can be a tough lesson to learn. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

Of A Type

I'm one of those people for whom sex and gender may as well be one in the same. Be that as it may, I've understood that this isn't true for everyone. But with there being a growing sense that the two should be different, I'm starting to wonder if the stereotypes of masculine and feminine behavior aren't what's at issue here.

When Demi Lovato says that she's going back to using feminine pronouns because she's "been feeling more feminine" recently, I find myself being curious as to what that means. Come to think of it, I wonder what being "non-binary" is intended to mean. Masculine and Feminine, after all, are simply labels that have been attached to broad classes of behavior. But there's also Androgynous, which tends to be a catch-all for those people who don't fit into either category. While I understand that androgyny is typically ascribed to people on the basis of looks, rather than behavior, "non-binary" feels like a younger generation coining a new term for something that people were already familiar with, then claiming a discovery.

Although I suppose that non-binary is for those people who look very much male or female, yet don't see themselves as behaving in a particularly masculine or feminine manner. But this leads me back to the idea that it's really about the narrowing scope of gender-role stereotyping; placing oneself outside of the box, rather than making the boxes bigger.

When I was young, we had the concept of a tomboy; a girl who behaved in a more stereotypical masculine fashion than was expected of them. While there was a certain amount of social angst about this (which could manifest itself in remarkable destructive ways), it was a pretty straightforward idea. The flip side was the sissy, and that, like many roles that were conveyed as coming with a loss of status, it was seen as a problem to be solved, rather than just something to be. It was also the butt of jokes; I remember when the giant brawl at the end of Blazing Saddles spills onto a set where Dom DeLouise is directing a chorus of gay men singing "The French Mistake," and one of them shouts: "Get'em girls," just before the chorus piles into the fray. In a lot of ways "non-binary" is just a less judgmental term than the ones we used when I was young.

But still, the boundaries felt broader in those days. When I was in my twenties, I used to joke that I'd been forced to turn in my "Guy Card," for having no fear of asking directions, being reasonably empathetic and having a job where being nurturing was a requirement. I'm not sure, but I suspect that were I that twenty-something now, there would be more social pressure to declare myself non-binary on that basis. Whereas back then, it was simply a matter of needing to tap more into what people would have called my feminine side.

And I think that's the thing that I'm noticing; that both masculinity and femininity are becoming more "one sided," at least as I see it. Being "girly" or "macho" aren't specific ways of being feminine or masculine; they're becoming the sum total of those concepts. And this may be why it seems I'm more likely to encounter females who identify as non-binary, as opposed to males; men respond to the shrinking of the box by crowding more densely into the box. Personally, I think that making the boxes bigger will help a lot, but I'm not the one who makes the rules.

Roaming the Roads

It's said that online, if you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer. But it worth noting that there are times when even though you are paying for it, you still aren't the customer. And in e-commerce, one of those times is shipping.

Since shipping is a contract between the retailer and the shipping company, the purchaser isn't a party to the transaction, even though they are the one paying for it (if only through higher prices). And it leads to what strike me as consistently poor experiences that wouldn't happen as often if the shipper needed to convince the customer to use them next time.

I recently ordered from bookshelves from IKEA. The shipper's priorities were clearly to get the task done as quickly as possible, rather than following either the shipping instructions or their own updates to me. The boxes arrived several hours prior to when they were scheduled, forcing me to step away from a video call to take delivery, and the shipper intended to leave the boxes outside, when the instructions were that they were to be brought inside - something that I'd paid an extra cost for. And the shipper didn't wait around for the boxes to be counted or inspected, despite the fact that they were supposed to sign the shipping manifest attesting to the fact that everything had been delivered.

But, being paid by IKEA, they had no incentive to actually follow the directions. IKEA's feedback form discourages customers from leaving information that could be used to identify the customer or the order, and so prevents them from going back to the shipper and noting specific instances of poor performance or even following up with the customer.

I also recently ordered some books from Barnes and Noble. They haven't arrived yet. This despite the fact that on Monday, the package was supposedly in Fife, Washington, less than 40 miles from here.

As of this point, I have no idea where my books are, and neither does anyone else. The tracking site doesn't even give an estimated delivery date any longer. Not that it can be trusted - the package was magically somehow here in Kirkland three days before I placed the order, and is supposed to have gone from southern Oregon to Fife in less than 90-minutes, a feat that would be difficult to manage even by air. And once the tracking page is shown as untrustworthy, what's the point of it?

One of my co-workers pointed out that at this rate, I could have asked them to hold the package for me in Fife when it arrived on Monday, and I could have walked there, picked it up, and come back in less time than it's taking the combination of UPS and the United States Postal Service (which is normally the most reliable of the bunch, in my opinion) to coordinate moving a box less than an hour's drive.

But again, United Parcel Service isn't working for me, they're working for Barnes and Noble, who don't really care about how long it takes, so long as something arrives eventually.

And this isn't unusual. Items I order online routinely arrive late, and one never arrived at all. At the same time, I've received multiple mis-delivered packages, some that missed their intended target by miles. Strangely, shippers don't have a way for people to call them and say "you gave me someone else's package," or a plan for what to do when someone does.

Another thing that I've noticed with delivery, is that tracking sites will often claim that a package will be on-time until past the time that it was due to be delivered. That the Barnes and Noble site seemed to figure it out a couple of hours in advance of the deadline was actually somewhat of a surprise. Although it should have been fairly clear that if the Postal Service hadn't formally accepted the package by this morning, when it would have needed to be on a delivery truck, that something was amiss.

In any event, the problem is that it isn't a problem; not for the retailers anyway. They don't make any promises as to when items will arrive, regardless of the shipping option selected, and individual customers aren't usually worth enough for them to worry about that business going elsewhere.

Generally speaking, I find that retailers that offer multiple options for the shipper tend to have better experiences, since the customer selects the shipper. Whether shippers understand this to be the case I don't know, but it does seem to make a difference, so I suspect that there's something at work there. In any event, it's part of what prompts me to shop in-person rather than online. And maybe that's part of the goal.