Aug 26

Invention needed: Cell-scanner gadget

P1070046 (Small)For my efforts at jury service — the defense lawyer in a criminal case bounced me on a peremptory challenge — I received a check in the amount of $17.04 from the court.  That seemed not worth the trip to the bank to deposit it.  Fortunately my credit union now allows me to deposit checks via cell phone.  The app takes a photo of the front and back of the check, you enter the amount, and it’s done.  You hold on to the paper check for a few days to make sure it’s cleared, and when it does, you can rip it up.

Seems easy enough, but the devil is in the details.  Holding the phone just right, and getting enough light on the check without the shadow of the phone (the flash isn’t very effective up close) turns out to be a PITA.  Having just finished some carpentry projects I happened to have scraps of wood laying around and a table saw plugged in, so I kludged together a cell scanner (pictured).  The phone lies flat on the upper platform.  Underneath, an LED light source from IKEA (“OMLOPP” is the brand name) throws photons down on the paper.  The upper structure floats on a pillar scavenged from a toilet tank repair kit (“Hunter” brand) that I happened to have lying around.  This tube lets the platform be raised from about 6 inches, for a check, to about a foot, which works for a full 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. P1070047 (Small)

This contraption works.  Not brilliantly, but good enough.  However, every detail of it screams “kludge”!  Someone with more brains, tools, and materials should be able to make one that’s much lighter, smaller, and brighter.  How about it, you clever inventors and entrepreneurs out there?

Aug 13

Rentals More Expensive Than Ever

From Bloomberg Aug. 13 2015.

imagesAmericans living in rentals spent almost a third of their incomes on housing in the second quarter, the highest share in recent history.

Rental affordability has steadily worsened, according to a new report from Zillow, which tracked data going back to 1979. A renter making the median income in the U.S. spent 30.2 percent of her income on a median-priced apartment in the second quarter, compared with 29.5 percent a year earlier. The long-term average, from 1985 to 1999, was 24.4 percent.

While mortgages remain relatively affordable, landlords have been able to increase rents because demand for apartments remains strong. The U.S. homeownership rate fell to the lowest level in almost five decades in the second quarter, as strict lending standards and tight inventories keep many families in the rental market.

Rental affordability worsened from a year earlier in 28 of the 35 largest metropolitan areas covered by Zillow. Rents were least affordable in Los Angeles, where residents devoted 49 percent of monthly income to rent. The share in San Francisco was 47 percent, 45 percent in Miami, and 41 percent in the New York metro area.

Meanwhile, historically cheap mortgage rates are keeping the cost of homeownership low. Buyers in the U.S. devoted 15 percent of their income to mortgage payments, which is less than the historical average of 21 percent. Exceptions include the Silicon Valleyarea in California, where homeowners and renters each devote 42 percent of income to housing costs.

Aug 12

What economic recovery?

 The National Bureau of Eunemptconomic Research (NBER) recently published this study showing that for the majority of workers laid off in the recession of 2007-2009, a recovery of full time work has not happened.
Great Recession Job Losses Severe, Enduring

Of those who lost full-time jobs between 2007 and 2009, only about 50 percent were employed in January 2010 and only about 75 percent of those were re-employed in full-time jobs.

The economic downturn that began in December 2007 was associated with a rapid rise in unemployment and with an especially pronounced increase in the number of long-term unemployed. In Job Loss in the Great Recession and its Aftermath: U.S. Evidence from the Displaced Workers Survey (NBER Working Paper No. 21216), Henry S. Farber uses data from the Displaced Workers Survey (DWS) from 1984–2014 to study labor market dynamics. From these data he calculates both the short-term and medium-term effects of the Great Recession’s sharply elevated rate of job losses. He concludes that these effects have been particularly severe.

Of the workers who lost full-time jobs between 2007 and 2009, Farber reports, only about 50 percent were employed in January 2010 and only about 75 percent of those were re-employed in full-time jobs. This means only about 35 to 40 percent of those in the DWS who reported losing a job in 2007–09 were employed full-time in January 2010. This was by far the worst post-displacement employment experience of the 1981–2014 period.

The adverse employment experience of job losers has also been persistent. While both overall employment rates and full-time employment rates began to improve in 2009, even those who lost jobs between 2011 and 2013 had very low re-employment rates and, by historical standards, very low full-time employment rates.

In addition, the data show substantial weekly earnings declines even for those who did find work, although these earnings losses were not especially large by historical standards. Farber suggests that the earnings decline measure from the DWS is appropriate for understanding how job loss affects the earnings that a full-time-employed former job-loser is able to command.

The author notes that the measures on which he focuses may understate the true economic cost of job loss, since they do not consider the value of time spent unemployed or the value of lost health insurance and pension benefits.

Farber concludes that the costs of job losses in the Great Recession were unusually severe and remain substantial years later. Most importantly, workers laid off in the Great Recession and its aftermath have been much less successful at finding new jobs, particularly full-time jobs, than those laid off in earlier periods. The findings suggest that job loss since the Great Recession has had severe adverse consequences for employment and earnings.

—Matt Nesvisky

Jul 26

New Edition, New Publishing

HWYW2015-Front-Cover Option B (Small)One of the rewards of my retirement is the time to get to long-postponed projects.  Other than dropping 30 lbs and getting ripped abs, the longest-postponed project in my life has been updating How Was Your Week, the LifeRing convenor handbook.

How Was Your Week came out originally in 2003, at a time when LifeRing was a toddler in diapers.  We produced 25 copies at a time at a local copy shop, bound with a plastic comb like a college reader.  It was very expensive to produce it that way and LifeRing Press made no money on it.  The print was tiny (10-pt Times New Roman) and under heavy use it soon fell apart.  By now, many of the references in the text were obsolete, and we had tons more experience not reflected in the book. Still, it served its purpose, and it might still be on sale today if it weren’t for the Swedes.

A Swedish recovery group sympathetic to LifeRing got a grant to translate the three main LifeRing books into Swedish.  I had no problem giving them the green light to translate the Recovery by Choice workbook (updated in 2011) and Empowering Your Sober Self (updated in 2014), but I almost gagged when I thought of the Swedes having to translate this dated, ragged convenor handbook.  It’s in a way the most important of the three books, because it is a resource for forming the core of the LifeRing network: the convenors.

It took several months of intense focus to update How Was Your Week.  There was the mechanical stuff, such as transferring the text from OpenOffice to Adobe InDesign and completely reformatting everything in a larger page size, bigger font (13 pt  Garamond Pro) and more white space.  Then there was the easy editorial stuff, such as updating references from the old unhooked.com website to lifering.org, and deleting references to out of print titles (like Keepers).  Then came the heavier stuff, namely deleting the autobiographical passages, including my personal riff on spirituality, which really doesn’t have a place in an organizational handbook.  (I’ll republish this stuff later in a more personal volume.)  And then came the add-ons — new experience gathered in the intervening dozen years, which led to the addition of two new chapters and the expansion of several others.  A number of current LifeRing convenors pitched in here with their experiences, and flagged mistakes.  The most fun part of the update project was going through the past 7,500 posts on the LifeRing convenor email list and picking out the gems that struck my eye, and adding those as sidebars to the book’s body text.  Those add-ons really help liven up the book with more voices.  The least fun part was doing the index — Adobe InDesign’s indexer is really medieval, but eventually it got done.  There it is, with a full-color cover, all of 368 pages, printed and bound like a real book.

With this book, we not only update the text and cover, we move into the brave new world of On Demand Publishing (ODP).  My previous LifeRing Press books were done the conventional way:  I sent a PDF file to a printer, the printer sent the LifeRing Office half a truckload of books, the office stores the books and office volunteers fulfill orders for the books as the orders come in.  I did that myself for most of fourteen years; since my retirement Craig W. has been doing most of it.  No more, at least for this title.  Now this is the drill:  I sent a PDF file to CreateSpace, an affiliate of amazon.com, and CreateSpace takes the orders online, prints exactly as many copies as are ordered each day, and sends them directly to the customer.  No boxes of books piled in the LifeRing office.  No volunteers needed to process the orders, pack the books, and cart them to the Post Office.  It’s all outsourced to CreateSpace, which prints in South Carolina.

At an exhibition a few years ago I saw an early model of the commercial POD technology.  This was a machine maybe 45 feet long, with a computer at one end and a bin at the other.  For demo purposes, you entered your name and a few other names into the computer.  Half an hour later, a bound novel with your name as author and the other names you entered as the main characters in the novel dropped out the other end into the bin.  I haven’t seen the current versions, but I’m fairly confident that they have production time down to a few minutes.  The cost per book is the same whether you order one copy or a thousand.  Most important, that cost is in the same ballpark as a conventional printer quotes on the same book in quantities of a thousand.

It’s also useful that for books ordered by customers in Europe, the work is printed on a POD machine inside Europe.  No more exorbitant international shipping charges.

The quality on these POD titles is excellent.  I published my book of Cesar Chavez Park photos this way, and have no complaints.  The proof of the new edition of How Was Your Week is flawless.  These books are indistinguishable to the naked eye from offset press products printed and bound the conventional way.

There are downsides to this arrangement.  LifeRing Press no longer has a record of who ordered books, useful for mailing announcements of other titles or events.  LifeRing Press can’t include brochures or little handwritten notes of encouragement with the book shipments, something that Craig likes to do, and is probably deeply appreciated by the customers.  We’ll go with this system for a few months or a year and see how it fits.  If it’s a headache, we can always go back to the old way.

Oh, yes.  You can order a copy of How Was Your Week, new edition, here.  And of course there is a Kindle edition also, here.

odp press

A small ODP machine, capable of printing books on demand in a retail book shop. Commercial presses such as used by CreateSpace are hugely bigger and faster.

 

Apr 16

Berkeley Post Office Saved

By David Welsh (sub@sonic.net) via email:

Victory for Berkeley

Court deals another setback to USPS scheme to sell off Berkeley’s Post Office

Here is a summary of the effect of the April 15th court decision, by the City of Berkeley’s attorney Antonio Rossmann:

1. “In a nutshell, Judge Alsup has effectively granted the City and National Trust [for Historic Preservation] the relief we requestedby requiring USPS to make a binding commitment that its decisions to relocate and sell the (Berkeley) post office have been rescinded.”

2. “…the litigation has accomplished its primary goal of keeping the Post Office at 2000 Allston Way.”

Court dismisses lawsuit over Berkeley post office after USPS rescinds decision to sell the historic building

April 15, 2015    www.savethepostoffice.com

The Postal Service has rescinded its decision to relocate and sell the historic post office on Allston Way in Berkeley, California.  As a result, the legal casechallenging the sale has been declared moot by the court.

The lawsuit was filed by the City of Berkeley and the National Trust for Historic Preservation late last fall.  The complaints argued that the Postal Service had failed to comply with federal historic preservation and environmental protection laws (NHPA and NEPA) prior to entering into a contract for sale of the building.

Yesterday, U.S. District Court judge William Alsup dismissed the lawsuits on the ground that they were moot after the Postal Service agreed to his requirement that it make a binding commitment to rescind its decision to relocate retail services and sell the historic building. 

Should the Postal Service change its mind at some point in the future, the court’s ruling says, “The [USPS] must provide plaintiffs with written notice at least 42 calendar days in advance of the closing of any future sale of the Berkeley Main Post Office or any final determination to relocate retail post office services.”

That would give the City and the Trust an opportunity to renew the court case and reassert their arguments that the Postal Service had failed to comply with NEPA and NHPA.

There’s more about the recent developments leading up to yesterday’s ruling by the court on Occupy Oakland, here.

The City of Berkeley was represented by Antonio Rossmann (pro bono), and the National Trust was represented by Brian Turner.  Their work has really paid off.  In December, the prospective buyer of the post office canceled the sale, perhaps because of the lawsuit, and now plans to sell the building have been completely dropped.

Based on the court’s ruling yesterday, if the Postal Service were to renew its plan to sell the building, it would need to start at the beginning of the relocation process.  That doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon, so yesterday’s decision by the court is definitely a victory for the citizens of Berkeley, who have been fighting the sale since 2012. 

The only downside of Judge Alsup’s decision to dismiss the case is that the court never ruled on the merits of the NHPA and NEPA issues themselves.  Thus, the complaints about how the Postal Service goes about selling historic post offices were not litigated, and no precedents were established that might affect the sale of other historic post offices.  And that may be precisely why the Postal Service decided to cancel its plans to sell the Berkeley post office.

Mar 20

The Water-Wise Home

waterwisehomeThe Water-Wise Home:  How to Conserve, Capture, and Reuse Water in Your Home and Landscape, by Laura Allen, ISBN 9781612121697

Laura Allen was one of three women who founded the Greywater Guerrillas more than ten years ago, long before the current drought.  They went to plumbing classes, devoured everything written on the subject, boned up on codes and regulations, and acquired a thorough hands-on knowledge of how we use and misuse the elixir of life: water.

Soon they were leading weekend workshops in people’s gardens.  That’s how we came to host about a dozen participants on our patio in September 2008 for an hour of educational talks by Allen and her partners Christina Bertea and Andrea Lara, followed by six hours of cutting and crawling and trenching and gluing and sweating.  At the end of the day we were tired and dirty, but one of our showers and our washing machine fed irrigation to the garden.  Not long after, the trio helped me set up a pair of 500-gallon water tanks and the associated ducting to collect rainwater from the roof.  Both of those systems are still working and both tanks are full from the storm we had in early February.

The group has gone on from there to give many dozens of hands-on greywater workshops up and down the state.  It has buffed its name to Greywater Action, and has successfully lobbied water authorities like EBMUD, local governments, and even Sacramento to update the plumbing codes to remove antiquated obstacles to home water conservation measures. Their workshops are always full, with waiting lists.  Now Allen has put these years of experience into a 250-page volume, The Water-Wise Home.  It’s about the same size as the Western Garden books, and destined to become just as treasured and indispensable.

The first part of the book sets the stage for the how-to projects in the remainder.  Allen explains where our water comes from, where it goes, and what it impacts along the way.  She outlines the challenges and problems of municipal water systems, and the interplay between water use and energy use. One chapter presents a range of simple practical options for saving water at home – fixing leaks, choosing efficient fixtures, and designing water-efficient landscapes.

Laura Allen (left) and Andrea Lara at a greywater workshop in our backyard, September 2008.

In part two, Allen focuses on systemic solutions. There are two chapters on greywater, two chapters on rainwater, and a chapter on waterless and composting toilets. The presentations here are an admirable mix of general principles with nitty-gritty details accessible to any halfway handy person.

It’s a pleasure to read Allen’s writing. She handles complex ideas without sounding the least bit academic.  She excels at explaining technical issues in layperson’s language.  And the illustrations!  She’s enlisted truly talented graphic artists who enrich the pages with line drawings that range from simple pipe schematics to gorgeous full-detail pictures of homes and gardens.

This is a timely book, if ever there was one.  California’s drought is one of the most daunting issues in our lifetimes, and Allen’s book is up to the challenge. Just as three women led by Sylvia McLaughlin in the 1960s launched a movement to Save the Bay, the founders of Greywater Action are spearheading a movement to Save Our Water.  Some aspects of water management – levees, tunnels, canals, San Joaquin Valley groundwater — are not directly in our hands.  But there are things we can do, here and now, and Allen’s book shows us how.

Jan 29

Retiring from Law Practice

new tiresAfter 28 years, I am retiring from the practice of law and closing my law office effective February 2, 2015.  It’s been a great learning experience, and it’s been a privilege to make the acquaintance of so many excellent clients as well as adverse parties and attorneys.

This is not necessarily a final decision. If some compelling matter spurs me to get back in the ring, I can do that simply by paying the annual State Bar dues.  But I’m 73 years old and, as the saying goes, you have to know when to hold them and you have to know when to fold them.

There is no shortage of lawyers in California, and the Bay Area in particular is home to many of the best and the brightest.  The Alameda County Bar Association lawyer referral panel is available online here or by telephone at 510-302-2222, extension 4.

I’m not going away.  I’ve got a stack of writing projects on my desk and I’m busy with various issues and causes.  For example,  I’ve just started Duplex Press to try to pull some of my writings together under one roof, and I’ve caught a passion for a local park, among other commitments.  In fact I seem to be busier than ever. If you’ll pardon the pun, my re-tirement means I’m putting on new tires.

You can still contact me via this website.  I can’t be your lawyer, but I could be your friend.