Is it ESP, or what?

No sooner do I sound off about mandatory, random drug testing for nicotine in schools than the Fox News web site delivers an expanded story on the issue (the link for which I neglected to grab, but it was a story posted today under the "National" topic).

To briefly summarize, the Hoover, Alabama school district is testing kids for - among other things - nicotine, with the ostensible goal of protecting student health and keeping kids from even trying cigarettes. A first offense nets a call to one's parents. A second offense gets one a mandatory tobacco education class. A third offense gets one suspended from 25% of group games or activities.

"It became evident that our community wanted us to include tobacco in the testing," said a school official, explaining that many parents and school administrators felt nicotine use paved the way to the use of other drugs.

Wow. This tells me two things. First, the parents of students in Hoover, Alabama seem to want to divest themselves of parental responsibility, in the classical sense of watching out for one's own kids. Second, adult specimens of homo sapiens in Hoover have no problem making serious decisions on the basis of spurious "feelings," likely have no use for scientific evidence and probably wouldn't know a fact if one walked up to them on Main Street and smacked them in the kisser. Cigarettes lead to drug use? Putting aside the convenient recent redefinition of nicotine as a drug - proudly standing shoulder-to-shoulder together with cocaine and heroin - I have to ask: "Say what?"

The article did provide some interesting quotes.

David Borden, executive director of the Drug Reform Coordination Network, is quoted as asking, "To what lengths do we go to (monitor) our young people and force them to conform to our ideals?" The sky is the limit, if we go by the actions of the town fathers and mothers of Hoover.

Yet Hoover is not alone in its quest to quell the Devil Weed Tobacco, whatever the cost and the Fourth Amendment notwithstanding. "It's unfortunate that society has gone in a way that makes organizations feel that they have to do this," said Terry Nance, athletic director at the London City Schools in Ohio, another district that tests for smokers. "Most of the comments we've had have been very supportive."

Wow, yet again. In an era where you can hardly get four people in a room to agree just exactly where society is going, Director Nance feels that the issue is clear enough for organizations - actually the small elite of such organizations - to see their way to a solution. One problem is that testing for "classic" drugs hasn't established too good a record, either from the detection standpoint (can you say "false positive"?) or from the standpoint of effective deterrence.

More important, the real problem is that the "organizations" doing the "feeling" in these cases are not voluntary organizations, in the conventional sense of the word. If this were a case of some private school, say, requiring urine tests, then parents would be free to opt in or out of the program by enrolling or not enrolling their children. However, most parents have no choice but to send their kids to public schools, where kids are solwly and surely becoming a commodity, to be handled in whatever way the Wise Graybeards of the Totem rule.

In their "debate" last night, neither candidate said anything too shocking about education. (If they said anything significant about drugs, I missed it.) Predictably, both candidates want to expand the role of the federal government. The difference lies in the details.

Gore wants the government to recruit 100,000 new teachers (I guess the same way his predecessor went off to recruit a similar number of cops), fund universal preschool, and mandate tests for teachers. Dubya wants the government to mandate tests for students, consolidate federal education programs, and fund a limited voucher program.

Neither bigshot wants to reduce the role of the federal government in education, or allow parents to keep what is, after all, their own money so they can afford to send their children to a school of their choice. (The fact that the NEA opposes this idea with a passion is reason enough to embrace it, with a passion.)

Through this all, I am reminded of a comment heard from a recent immigrant, whose 14-year-old daughter nearly collapsed with laughter upon entering school locally. It turns out that the material being taught to her 14-year-old American peers had been taught to her in her home country several years ago.

And this is a problem that nobody in public life really wants to address. It's apparently way more important to make grand gestures and hunt down nicotine fiends.

Cheers...

E-Stamp redux

There are days when I begin to feel that my apparent primary mission in life is to walk around with my wallet open wide to the world, casting greenbacks to the wind with little other purpose than to enrich perfect strangers and to steer myself to the poorhouse.

I just got off the phone a little while ago with E-Stamp customer support. The company sells a gizmo and software that lets you literally print valid U.S. postage on your printer (you've probably seen their banner ads all over the place). I allowed myself to invest about $50 for the hardware and software, because I thought it would be useful for my wife's real estate mailings and my occasional eBay packages, and it looked cheaper than investing in a traditional postage meter. Looking to get the best deal on their "convenience fee" (the amount you pay over the postage you buy), we opted to buy the maximum amount of postage, $500, which incurred a convenience fee of about $25, or about 5% overall.

The concept of printing your own postage is pretty slick, actually. If you're looking for a gimmick that screams "I am technologically up-to-date," this is it. The stamps come out looking like a "hash" that is laser-readable and apparently contains the date the mail was sent, confirms the value of the postage that was printed, and probably contains information related to the sender and/or recipient (I would imagine Zip code info, at least). For sure, I can say that every "stamp" requires a valid address, and addresses are validated using a CD-ROM database that's updated every six months. Periodically, the E-Stamp software uploads a report to the home office that shows how much postage has been used, and possibly uploads information about recipients as well. There is certainly opportunity to do so. In any event, this was a privacy risk I was willing to take.

Using the system was not always easy. Early on, some attempts to print postage gave me a nicely printed address, but no stamp, which basically meant the value of the postage was completely lost. A few other early tries misprinted, and I'm confident that the promised refund will be made once I make proper application. Other difficulties included a pain-in-the-neck interface with the Outlook address book and apparently limited types of postage that could be printed (Priority Mail, si; book rate, no). To be frank, I wasn't too fazed about the Outlook interface since I won't run Outlook except when forced to, but this meant having to enter each address by hand, which is in itself no big deal, except it makes the whole deal utterly unsuitable for large mailings. To be fair, E-Stamp never claimed it was suitable for large mailings.

The point of this post, though, is not to complain about what amount to Early Adopter issues. I have a relatively high tolerance for software "funnies" and design compromises. Heck, I've written software in my day. What utterly bugs me is the following:

A few months ago, we moved from one Zip code to a neighboring one. According to the terms of the USPS license, which we had to get to be able to use the E-Stamp hardware "vault," we had to get a new "vault" and return the old one we'd been using and get a refund of the postage stored "inside." We went along with the program, having printed out about $80 of postage by the time we sent the unit back for replacement.

We got the refund check today, and the refund apparently covers only the unused postage. The E-Stamp folks did not pro-rate the "convenience fee" at all. A call to customer service confirmed this. "The convenience fee is not refundable," said the service representative, a point echoed by his supervisor, who tried to convince me that this was fair. My position is that it would have been fair to charge me a convenience fee as if I'd bought only the $80 of postage I'd printed (the percentage would have been higher; something like 10%), and refund the rest. As far as I'm concerned, though, right now I feel as if I've been charged $25 for the privilege of printing $80 of postage (a "convenience fee" of about 30%).

Given that I am feeling a bit taken-advantage-of, I'm going to have to think really hard about whether I'm going to drop any more money in these folks' pockets. My advice to anyone contemplating getting into "printing their own postage" is caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Then again maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion.

Cheers...

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The Art of Debate...

...was certainly not on the agenda at last night's Boston fracas between George "Tweedledum" Bush, who likes big government and wants to make it bigger, and Al "Tweedledee" Gore, who likes big government, too, but wants to make it much, much bigger.

You'll pardon my cynical tone, but I suspect that one of the primary factors behind the prosperity that's running around these days - besides the "peace dividend" that accrued to Mr. Clinton as a result of the fall of the Evil Empire before his time - is the fact that (a) His Billness has been too busy chasing skirts around the Oval Office and (b) Congress was too busy trying to nail him for it, for either the Executive or the Legislative branch to engage in the kind of "leadership" that causes more problems than it solves.

The reactions to the debate have been interesting. One moving mouth on TV wondered how come a poll taken among regular people differed so strikingly from the opinions held by "professional observers." Excuse me? Professional observers? Is there such a job, or do you mean your buddies in the media? (Clearly, it's the latter, and wouldn't you know it, the angst appears to be based on said difference being in the "wrong" direction, i.e., in Dubya's favor.)

Our local PBS channel featured a piece I followed only partially as I cooked dinner this evening. What struck me, as I was chopping onion, was a statement made by one young woman - well groomed and well spoken, but oh, so ill-educated - to the effect that one or the other (or both) candidates weren't able to adequately explain their positions on health care for the elderly and on foreign policy. Lacking sufficient detail, she concluded that she was thus left in the dark on these issues and was "forced" to turn elsewhere to find additional information.

As a citizen who shudders whenever he hears ABC proudly proclaim, "More people get their news from ABC News than from any other source," this woman's reasoning (or rather, lack thereof) really sends chills down my spine. She probably believed Gore when he claimed to have traveled to a Texas disaster area with Federal Emergency Management Agency head James Lee Witt. Yet according to the Media Research Center, Gore was fibbing, and futhermore, his telling of various tall tales has accelerated of late.

A press release from the Libertarian Party notes that neither candidate once used the word "freedom" or "liberty" in the course of the debate. It also notes, among other items, that the difference between Tweedledum's tax cut and Tweedledee's tax cut is a paltry 3%; the former believes the gummint oughta keep 95% of what it collects; the latter thinks it ought to keep 98%. This illustrates an obvious rift in thinking between the parties, dontcha think?

Vote Libertarian.

Cheers...