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In Pennsylvania:

• you can’t buy wine or liquor in a beer store
• you can only buy wine and liquor in a state run monopoly shop
• there are beer stores (they call them distributor shops,) but you can’t buy less than a case (24) of beer in a beer store
• if you want a six pack, you can only get it “take out” in a bar, at a hefty margin

Before I start ranting about what an imposition on freedom this is, I’ll say this has some pretty interesting (but unintended) positive effects.  First, lots of people go to bars since it’s such a pain to get beer otherwise, and you might as well sit down and drink it instead of take the $1 discount you usually get for taking the beer home.  Second, there are these tiny little box bars in random places in quiet suburban neighborhoods that basically serve as beer corner stores.  These spots are a neat community development.  As often happens, good things come from bad things.  Great relationships, realizations, and renewed communities can rise out of natural disasters.  Of course, that doesn’t get me praying for typhoons.

Americans often like to connect economic freedom with political and personal freedom.  When Russia and China open their economies, they will ultimately be forced to open their political system - or so the theory went 20 years ago.  We know it’s not that simple now, but let’s take a look these Pennsylvania liquor laws for an interesting contrast.

You can buy beer, baijiu (Chinese rice vodka-ish drink,) and cigarettes (not to mention beetlenut and bootleg DVDs) on literally any corner in China.  You can open your beer in the store, walk down the street, wave to a policeman, and take the subway - all sipping your beverage.  Not that I’m a lush, but that sounds like freedom to me.  Economic freedom means anyone can sell me beer in any reasonable location.  Personal freedom means I can take that beer and drink it where I want to, as long as I don’t get wasted and start bothering people.  Political freedom means nobody wants to take that right away from me.  The first time you walk down a street with a beer in your hand on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you feel slightly awkward but oddly liberated by this simple pleasure.  By the time you get back to the “land of the free,” you start wondering where you feel more free - totalitarian China or the USA.

Why is the law in PA so insane?  I’m guessing it’s a decendent of the temperance movement.  Now, as with most laws, there is an entrenched economic interest rolling in dough that will fight tooth and nail to stop rational reforms.  According to my favorite source of mostly accurate data, Wikipedia, the state run liquor stores rake in $1.6 billion, while the state’s other hand happily collects an 18% liquor tax and 6% sales tax on top of that staggering number.   Of course the state liquor board is a monopoly, so it does not pass their volume discounts or efficiencies of scale to consumers.  In fact, stores in neighboring states that don’t get volume discounts sell to consumers for up to 40% cheaper, but it’s illegal to bring those to PA.

Well, it’s taxes so it goes to running state services, you say.  Sure, but you can be certain that so much money flowing through such a draconian institution does not go untapped by those in the know.

Other entrenched interests include the “beer distributors” which are those stores where you can only buy 24 packs.   They’ve got a nice monopoly on reasonably priced beer sales, and consumers are forced to buy from them in quantity.  Bars also make a nice business selling one-zies and siz-packs to those not looking to throw a superbowl party, but who want to sit down with a beer and watch the hockey game.

What’s worse, the county where Pittsburgh resides adds an additional 10% tax on liquor.  Boy do these taxes add up!   That money is supposed to fund the Port Authority which operates the public transportation system.  Let’s see what we are getting for that money on the bus system, which is all I’ve used at this point:

•  Zoned pricing
• $2.00 starting rate for a ride one way on one bus
• $2.50 for a ride with a one time use transfer - if you ride three buses, it’s $2.50 + $2.00

and compare that to San Francisco, the second most expensive housing market in the country (Pittsburgh is the fourth cheapest)

• $1.50 for unlimited bus rides for 1.5 hours

Conclusion?  There’s something very, very fishy going on in Pennsylvania liquor industry.  There is clearly a lot of money at stake, and nothing pisses me off more than mobsters raking in cash at the expense of my freedom.

I’ve found Plaxo to be a very cool tool. It keeps people’s contact info up to date and serves as a nice online repository and backup for my contact data. However keeping track of contact data is hard enough without having data loss.

Unfortunately, I have started to see random contacts and data fields disappearing when using Plaxo. This may or may not be related to using their new “de-duper,” which merges duplicate records. The de-duper seems to be generally careful about making mistakes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t. The lost data seems to be sparse and random - not enough that you notice right away, but eventually you just don’t find something you knew was there.

I’ve restored my Mac Address Book from a backup before de-duping and the records are there. The only software I can blame is Plaxo. I have seen a references (see comments) to similar problems.

Anyone with a similar experience?

I have been a member of e-rewards for a while now.  They e-mail me offers to make $5 to $15 in funny money in exchange for answering mind-numbing surveys.  The funny money compensation can be easily converted into gift certificates and loyalty program points.

Every once in a while I actually torture myself and answer one of their surveys.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it makes me feel important.  Maybe it makes me feel better about my own failures.

Anyway, they are truly horrendous.  I’ve got to wonder if the venture money pits that hire these guys even look at how the surveys are done.  They are a lesson in outsourcing - always check up on what you’re buying - you might end up with a company like e-rewards.  In fact, the business folks at e-rewards may well be brilliant, as they seem to have marquee customers and partners.  Unfortunately, business people seems to be all they have.

Here is a screenshot of the latest question I stumbled over.  Needless to say, I don’t use my brightest brain-hours for this waste of time, so I spent more time balancing my algebra than answering the question.  Would you do any better?  Are there developers really this inept that they can’t think of a better way to ask this question?  (Hint: Yes you need to calculate everything yourself - no clever javascript helpers allowed.)

This is just the beginning of how awful these surveys are.  The software asked me at least 10 times in a row about the range of revenue my company has.  (How many ways are there to say $0?)  Often it asks multiple checkbox questions like “which of these are brands do you know?”.  Then you get to answer the cartesian product of all the brands you checked with 20+ poorly worded questions - one per painfully slow un-Ajaxified screen load.  Often the questions require more thought about how to fill in the many small text fields than about how to answer.

Of course, if you’re in it for the funny money, you quickly learn to check only as few options as it will let you.  Check more and you’ll be there for hours.

I’ve said enough.  The screen shot speaks for itself.  I’ll even leave out the ironies of this sort of a customer research company having such a bad end user experience.

If anyone has the connections to make a better e-rewards happen, contact me.  We’ll be up and running in a few months.  Selling against e-rewards would just be too easy.