I'm almost 70 and never post here. Two-or-three years ago I knew a very warm-hearted young woman going through a very hard time in her life. She discovered Farmville and I started getting the Zynga message stream... a picture of a sad little animal and a message saying "An abandoned little baby llama has just been found and it needs to be adopted... so lost and lonely". I knew the incredible effort my friend put into fostering real animals, the insane hardships she had seen and how little money she had. And now some of that miniscule amount of money was going to Farmville. She was living in her car here in Austin scraping by with her two pet dogs and a coutimundi she was fostering (I kid you not). One afternoon we took one dog and the coutimundi out for a walk on leashes near the U. of Texas, where I live, and ever since I've been elevated by the frat boys to "The Coutimundi Dude"- a serious promotion. I didn't really know what Farmville was costing her, so after the"baby llama" emails I looked at Zynga and how it worked. What they were doing- carefully and systematically preying on the kind and the needy like some sort of hyper-evolved emotional shark while the tech press politely applauded- made me madder than anything I'd seen on the internet in years. Today I emailed the following to my now much happier and more settled young friend: "I saw thew following story and remembered the time in your life when Farmville was so important to you. I never said anything at the time, because I know how much you loved animals, even virtual ones, but I did look at the company that made Farmville, Zynga, and got incredibly upset at the tactics they were using to make money. The idea of charging for add-ons didn’t bother me at all, but the way they systematically targeting the needs of people who were both kind-hearted and vulnerable because of the way they loved without reservation and yet felt so alone really pissed me off. I’m so glad that today you are in a much better place. I just feel sorry for those who created and so generously loved those disappearing virtual pets." I'll make no comment on Zynga and its well-deserved fate. But the rest of us (including me) should remember with love and respect the sheer neediness of some of those we make for and sell to... or just meet on the street,and try to do a little better by them in 2013. Happy New Year.

Modern cars are much more crashworthy and safer than old cars. But this video is a bit of an intentional misrepresentation of reality. Starting with the 1959 models, GM went to a modified unit body construction, eliminating the two, heavy, car-length frame rails that ran the length of the car, and instead mounting a small front frame to attach the engine and transmission to a newly designed unit-body passenger compartment. The aim was to lower the car's profile and to improve head-on collision crash survivability. In the new design the front end was designed as a crush zone- no more instant stop for the passengers when two rigid-frame cars collided head on. Also the engine would no longer end up in the passenger compartment when it broke loose from the frame in a bad accident; instead the engine would absorb much of the front end impact and then slid slide harmlessly underneath the passenger compartment when the subframe collapsed (that was what the wide "hump" in the middle of the floor of the 1959 car was all about). One result of this new design was to make the 1959 cars more dangerous in one type of accident, a "corner to corner" collision, one where the impact was head on but the two cars overlapped a bit but not enough so that the engines absorbed the impact- it was a design tradeoff. The Insurance Institute, which is, after all, a self-congratulatory lobbying group, reproduced that one type of accident here on purpose to showcase the results it wanted you to see. The Institute moved the impact point so that only 40-45% of the cars would overlap (see the overhead view at 1:16-18 in the shockwave flash cited- http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs-reveals-before-and-after-of-malibu-bel-air-cr/ ). This is enough overlap to make full use of the new car's unit front end, roll cage and air bags (note even the windshield stays in and absorbs energy), but the overlap is small enough that the old car's engine and transmission, designed to absorb energy in a head on collision, were just outside the accident zone and did not absorb any of the impact energy. If the institute had shown a real head on collision the results would have been very, very different, with the damage much more equal. And a 1958 Chevy in a corner-to-corner would have performed much better. New cars are nifty, but this is a piece of propaganda designed to "educate the masses".

Some comments and two ideas on these calls. First, I get these calls all the time in Austin, TX. But I just spent a week in the Washington, DC area, where NONE of my friends get these calls. So it seems as if the callers follow the old Mafia rule- operate everywhere but in DC, because that might lead to a reaction by the only people who count- legislators, thier staff members and thier neighbors. Don't mess with the big boys. Second, more people have voted for the Do Not Call list with thier fingertips than have ever voted for a Presidential candidate, so the public is on our side. But the law is weak, has no enforcement mechanism to speak of, and was intended that way- the bill's opponents were the "non-profits" (and now everyone is a non-profit), the financial institutions (the previous-business-relationship exception), and all the usual suspects, who hire a company in India, have them do the automated calling, then switch the call back to the U.S. when you "press 1"- and of course the U.S. company hangs up when you ask "who are you?". So this is the usual "We really are doing something" legislation aimed at shutting up the one-hundred million folks who want to be left alone at dinner time, so that Congress and the contributors can make a buck- and, of course, be left alone at dinner in the DC area. In Europe, where they have real privacy laws, people get arrested for this stuff. Not here. So what is to be done? First, lobby your legislature, but don't hold your breath. Money talks. Second, spread the pain to DC. Anyone who comes up with an easy way to redirect these calls to the White House and Congressional switchboards will hear squeals of pain immediately. Then there is the question of what happens when someone with a knowledge of Skype et. al. comes up with a "Washington Area Autodialer For the Rest of Us". If it is legal to do this stuff for money it is legal to do it for political purposes. For example an automated message to phones in those Congressman-laden prefixes in McLean, VA saying "Send money to our new PAC aimed at getting Congress to pass a bill giving us REAL opt-out phone privacy and a private right of action against ANY U.S. company using using these subcontract cut-outs" will get the right people up from dinner. If you make our leaders get up from thier own dinner table often enough they will listen. Make DC share our pain; lab rats can learn and so do legislators. Deeply annoyed Dave