Matt Schonert's Blog

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Thoughts for the back-to-school season:

The real intellectual life of a body of undergraduates, if there be any, manifests itself, not in the classroom, but in what they do and talk of and set before themselves as their favorite objects between classes and lectures. You will see the true life of a college…where youths get together and let themselves go upon their favorite themes–in the effect their studies have upon them when no compulsion of any kind is on them, and they are not thinking to be called to a reckoning of what they know.

— Woodrow Wilson

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My band, Ten and Six, released our debut music video today:

Our new album is also out today. You can download it free, or buy a CD for $4.95.

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1929-2009

Born, lived, and died in Middle Branch Township, Osceola County, Michigan

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State Senator Mike Switalski (D-Roseville) of Michigan has reintroduced legislation which would expand the state’s bottle deposit system to include non-carbonated beverage containers.

Having worked in grocery stores for six years during high school and college, I witnessed some of the effects of Michigan’s bottle return laws first hand. In such a system, the state directly burdens retailers, who must bear the labor costs of sorting and storing the materials, the purchase and maintenance costs of reverse vending equipment, and the responsibility for disposing of non-returnable matter that customers bring into the store.

In the summer months, many out-of-state visitors would attempt to return all of their empty plastic containers, whether the bottle was refundable or not. A surprising number of Michiganders did the same, probably because they were simply too lazy to sort their own waste and were happy to let a minimum-wage-earning 16-year-old do it for free.

None of the stores I worked for had reverse vending machines, so our employees had to sort items by according to brand and material, all by hand. The workers responsible for handling a customer’s sticky half-full Gatorade bottles with cigarette butts floating inside are often the same ones stocking shelves, bagging groceries, or ringing up items at the register.

These laws are especially harmful to struggling businesses and individuals. Mom-and-pop stores rarely have the floor space or cash flow to accommodate the required equipment. Also, because the cost of maintaining this equipment drives up operating expenses, this in turn raises the final price of groceries, which hurts Michigan’s struggling families most.

If a bottle return law is truly for the common good of Michigan, the state should be prepared to fund and operate its own bottle return centers instead of mandating that retailers provide free recycling equipment and labor for the public’s use.

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Among other splendid gifts, I received a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas. In accordance with my personal household inventorying policies, I immediately filled out Hoover’s mail-in warranty registration card. In addition to wanting to know my age range, income level, and how obsessive I am about cleaning house, they also wanted to know if I own, or plan to purchase within the next six months:

• a CD-ROM drive?
• a compact disc player?
• a subscription to an online service (AOL, CompuServe)?

Cute, but a bit behind the times.

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As a Michigander who grew up three hours from Metro Detroit, I’m always amused by sentences like this (emphasis mine):

In southwestern Michigan, about 30 vehicles were involved in a deadly series of pileups on a six-mile stretch of Interstate 94 north of Stevensville, about 175 miles west of Detroit.

Stevensville is a village just off the Lake Michigan shoreline, about 70 miles east of Chicago.

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AFP reports:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to give “a major address” in an Islamic capital soon after taking office as he seeks to mend America’s image in the Muslim world, a Chicago Tribune interview said.

“I think we’ve got a unique opportunity to reboot America’s image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular,” Obama said in the interview published late Tuesday on the Tribune’s website.

As an information technology guy, I appreciate this advent of computing metaphors in mainstream political speech. I hope his speechwriters make a habit of this. Here’s something to get the ball rolling:

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It seems every other day I see another news story about surveillance in the United Kingdom.

Continuing the trend is Form 696, which the London Metropolitan Police are requiring managers of musicians to provide in advance of live shows. It was introduced in response to violent incidents at some larger performances, but the information it collects hardly seems relevant:

The form demands that licensees give police a mass of detail, including the names, aliases, private addresses and phone numbers of all musicians and other performers appearing at their venue, and the ethnic background of the likely audience. Failure to comply could mean the loss of a licence or even a fine and imprisonment.

Clearly, the police are using collective ethnic profiling to forecast expectations of violence at live shows. Because such forms of statistical discrimination are so politically offensive, I suspect this is why the police collect so much seemingly irrelevant data (residential addresses and personal phone numbers of the musicians), perhaps in an attempt to make it less obvious. The original form is not available for critique, having been pulled from the Met’s website following the Independent’s November 21 story.

Another side effect is the disproportionate effect this bureaucratic obstacle poses to independent musicians, much like a similar (but more restrictive) measure proposed in Chicago this year — the Promoters’ Ordinance. The costs of complying with the regulation impose a greater cost on independent musicians and promoters than they do on professional firms.

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