Notes from Maine - 2024/09/08

What a beautiful morning we’re having here. When I went outside this morning the sky was blue from horizon to horizon. We’ve had very little rain the past couple of weeks (new roof = no rain), so the foliage is a little washed out. That makes the sun look extra bright, like it’s burning away some of the color out of the world with its power. This late in the season, bugs are few and far between, which means that as soon as I glanced in the direction of the barn the horses were absolute dying to go inside. Whinnying, high stepping, and tossing their heads—they did everything they could to let me know how miserable it was to be outside.

That was a mild inconvenience for me, and it’s all because of how I grew up.

I remember back in the 1970s when things changed. Working as a lawyer for industry lobbyists, my father fought back against regulations in the paint industry. This is when Ralph Nader (the “nation’s nag”) was the “driving force behind the passage of more than two dozen landmark consumer protection laws.” From seatbelts to OSHA, things were changing. As a little kid, the world became more predictable and a lot less magical.

I was the kid who was duped by those ads in the back of comic books. I bought the six foot “Frankenstein” [sic] with glowing eyes. It turned out to be a plastic poster with little glow-in-the-dark stick on labels for the pupils. Someone gave me X-ray specs, which purported to give the user the power of X-ray vision, but really just turned the world dim, red, and unseeable. Then, as laws tightened, I noticed all the little asterisks that began appearing on advertisements and commercials. Suddenly, I was informed that the cookies pictured were “NOT ACTUAL SIZE” and that the action figure “DOESN’T MOVE ON ITS OWN.” We almost never got any of those products anyway. We were a powdered milk and homemade bread household. The manager of our grocery store knew Mom’s budget. He would set aside damaged and marked-down goods for us. We weren’t poor, but we certainly didn’t spend money on things you might see in a commercial. 

So that’s what I mean when I say that the world became a lot less magical. Before all the asterisks appeared, I was free to imagine that the action figure might come to life and play with the kids like it did in the commercial. I was a kid who was very much into electronics, so I noticed something else. Suddenly, UL Certification was on every plug of every toy. In the basement, I might see an old circular saw with a cloth cable and a sketchy two-prong plug, but the new belt sander had a fancy plastic three-prong plug and it was UL Certified. 

So advertising got strict and electric appliances became certified. That was the world I saw around me, and the world stayed that way until this century. I don’t remember precisely when it happened, but everything began to shift back maybe about fifteen or twenty years ago.

Some of my favorite examples fall into the category of inflatable water slides. The picture on the box shows one child climbing the back of a waterslide like they’re scaling Everest, while two kids plummet down the face into a giant pool. In real life, those children loom over the slide, looking down on it while they debate who will get to put their foot in the water next. In real life, the whole contraption is so small that a single child could accidentally crush it underfoot.

Electronically, it’s not difficult to purchase a device that might or might not catch on fire as soon as it’s plugged in or charged up. Hoverboards have burned down houses on Christmas Day. Vape pens and Samsung phones have burst into flames inside a person’s pocket. 

And now we’re finally back to the beginning, where the horses wanted to go in the barn and that was a mild inconvenience for me. I was huddled around my phone (like a Cub Scout at a campfire) talking to my sister while my phone charged. Although it was on its charging pad all night, it was still in the red. On the screen, the graph showed me that the phone thought it was charging consistently since midnight.

“Maybe it’s the cable,” my sister said.

“Nah,” I replied. It was looking at the graph. The phone thought it was charging for at least seven hours. If the cable was bad, it wouldn’t say it was charging, right? 

“You said there are different types of cables,” she said.

That’s true. I say that a lot. In one of my side hobbies, I program these little devices called Arduinos. People online follow my instructions to reproduce my projects and I get emails all the time with them saying, “I followed all the instructions but it says it can’t connect to the Arduino.” Well, clearly they didn’t follow STEP 1 that closely. Step 1 is and always will be, “Get a data cable. If you have a micro USB cable and you don’t know whether or not it’s a DATA cable, rest assured, it’s NOT a DATA cable.” If you want a micro USB data cable, you have to go out and specifically buy a data cable. It’s easy to spot the difference between a charging cable and data cable because… Oh, that’s right, it’s impossible to spot the difference. They look precisely the same. 

There ought to be some kind of regulations on these cables. What is Ralph Nader up to? But only a complete jerk would want the nanny state to regulate cables, right? I remember when iPods and iPhones switched from the weird 30-pin cable to the Lightning. The new cables were better in every way—smaller and you didn’t have to worry about what was upside down or right-side up. Everyone complained and complained. The biggest complaint was that the cables were proprietary. 

More recently, the EU forced Apple to switch to USB-C. Everyone complained and complained. The biggest complaint was that people had to buy new chargers. They didn’t, really. You just needed a new cable, but I get it. Change is hard. 

I was pleased. I don’t have to keep two types of charging cable in my car anymore. Whenever someone rides with me, they always need to charge their phone and I used to have one for Android folks and one for Apple folks. Now they’re all the same. I mean, they’re not. Of course there are still Apple Lightning people as well as Android micro USB people, and that creepy-looking USB 3.1 Gen 2 Fast Charging Cable, that’s supposed to be compatible with micro (I think?) but never is.

You might ask, “Who wants government regulations to control what type of charging cable people use?”

Me. The answer is me. Eventually capitalism will drive all the cables towards the “best” one (cheapest to manufacture, I’m sure), but we’ll have ten more types of cables by then. And none of them will tell me if my phone is really charging or if it’s just claiming to be charging while it does nothing at all. So when I went outside to do barn chores and get the horses inside (as they demanded), I wasn’t able to listen to my podcasts on my ear buds.

Try telling that to a kid back in the 1970s.

“Hey, kid, you know all the regulations that took the magic out of advertising? Well, because they were relaxed, my phone went dead and now I can’t listen to my podcast on my earbuds.”

At least it’s a beautiful day.