Renewing a US Passport: 2011 edition

With 3 adopted kids including two born overseas and different parental last names [1], we suffer when it's time to renew our passports. For reference, here's the procedure we follow as of Nov 2011. Average adults might try renewal by mail, but I don't trust that process.

Note government web sites are usually outsourced to contractors. Every time a contract changes all the links break. You'll usually need to search on key words to find current links.

References

• Travel.state.gov passport site
• Check Application Status online
• Minors Under Age 16
• Passport Fees

Recommendations and notes

• Use a regional passport center or other dedicated Passport service. Don't use anywhere else for photographs, don't use the Post Office to renew unless you have to. This is not well documented. If you go to the State Department site you'll find a short list of regional centers. However, we use a local Passport Center that's not on the list: Roseville, MN - Passport Services. We know of that center because I saw it when renewing a driver's license. It is walk in only, there doesn't seem to be a way to reserve an appointment. We know they do photos because we saw them do it. Yes, this is crazy.
• Always pay the expedited service fee, you need it to use the regional passport center anyway. Yes, it's expensive.
• When you have  current passport you can use it as proof of citizenship and identity. So never let your passport lapse.
• If renewing a child and parent's passport, do them both in person at the same time and place or else you'll run into catch 22 problems.
• When you go to renew bring checkbook, VISA and Cash. You never know what you'll need.
• Print out the renewal forms and complete them beforehand. If you read the inept State department web site carefully you'll realize that it's not clear if you need DS-11 or DS-82 for an adult renewal. Print them out and complete both in black ink. Minors need DS-11.
• When renewing an adopted minor's passport bring everything you can think of, not limited to:
  • Proof of citizenship: Mercifully, an undamaged US passport will qualify, probably even a not-current passport.
  • Driver's licenses: Just in case
  • Proof of marriage :(esp. if Parents last names differ [1])
  • Adoption documents (evidence of relationship)
  • Birth certificates (evidence of relationship)
  • Adoption related citizenship documents (in theory only need for initial passport)
  • Bring originals and bring photocopies of everything following the strict photocopy rules
• When applying in person you must be patient, reasonably but not excessively friendly, and compliant.
• Bring books for the kids to read, you can't use electronic devices at passport sites.
• Show up at an off-time of day, but not a time when everyone is on break.
• Kids will usually have to miss school to get a passport renewed.
• Even with expedited service, assume a two month turnaround. During that time you won't have a passport.

[1] America really, really, really wants women to adopt the last name of their husband. This is not changing.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Don't take passport forms to Post Office (3/2009)
• Gordon's Notes: Deinventing government: renewing a US child's passport (2/2007)

Does anyone seriously test Apple's iWork products?

I've been using Apple's Pages and Keynote for a few modest projects.

They're functional span is very good and the price is excellent.

Quality though, that's a problem. Once you move outside of the basic functionality there are big unfixed bugs and half built solutions.

I'm somewhat used to this from Apple. Their software quality is only as good as it has to be -- and their customers are notoriously compliant. (Though years of poor quality Aperture releases probably cost Apple the professional photography market.)

I'm used to Apple's poor quality software, but I don't like it.

We're into the Apple 4.0 era now. There are reasons to expect Apple's elegance and share price to decline. i'm good with that. I'd trade 20% of Apple's elegance for better quality products.

Straight and Crooked Thinking - Wikipedia's remarkable catalog of rhetorical devices and cognitive errors

I reader recently asked me to resolve a bad link in a post I wrote 7 years ago about the book "Straight and Crooked Thinking'.. I had no memory of the original, but my personal Google Custom Search found it in seconds.

I found the original article in what I suspect is a modern splog. I didn't want to give that any link love, but I will grant that the splog is the only remnant of the original work.

Instead I found a terrific synopsis of rhetorical devices in a Wikipedia reference: Straight and Crooked Thinking. From that article there are links to memory and cognitive biases. It's altogether a true Wikipedia tour de force.

Beyond that, the 1953 edition of the book is available as a well done PDF. I've added it to iBook for later reading.

I love the web.

An American toaster

Five years ago, when China's manufacturing quality was at its worst, I used the crummy toaster crisis as a missing-middle example. It was easy then to find cheap goods that were crummy, and with difficulty one might find luxury or industrial goods that might be reliable, but the market for quality goods at a reasonable price had evaporated.

A cheap toaster might cost $25, but a $75 toaster wasn't any better.

Since then, a few things have changed. With the Lesser depression Americans started to pay attention to how long things lasted. China's own internal markets have, I suspect, become more demanding. I think the quality of manufactured goods is better than it used to be.

About two years ago a small repair business started selling a Wide-Slot Automatic Pop up Toaster Made in the U.S.A. for about $350. Now it's down to $265 for an "introductory price". Clearly, this is a luxury good purchase.

Still, the price is coming down. Perhaps a large scale manufacturer will pick it up, particularly as China's currency (mercifully) appreciates against the US dollar. Perhaps one day a $150 US made toaster will sell as a luxury good in China, and a quality good in the US.

In fifty years, what will our sins be?

In my early years white male heterosexual superiority was pretty much hardwired into my culture. I grew up in Quebec, so in my earliest pre-engagement years add the local theocracy of the Catholic church.

Mental illness, including schizophrenia, was a shameful sin. Hitting children was normal and even encouraged. There were few laws protecting domestic animals. There were almost no environmental protections. Children and adults with cognitive disorders were scorned and neglected. Physical disabilities were shameful; there were few accommodations for disability.

Our life then had a lot in common with China today.

Not all of these cultural attitudes are fully condemned, but that time is coming.

So what are the candidates for condemnation in 50 years? Gus Mueller, commenting on a WaPo article, suggests massive meat consumption and cannabis prohibition.

I am sure Gus is wrong about cannabis prohibition. Even now we don't condemn the ideal of alcohol prohibition; many aboriginal communities around the world still enforce alcohol restrictions and we don't condemn them. We consider American Prohibition quixotic, but not evil.

My list is not far from the WaPo article. Here's my set:

• Our definition and punishment of crime, particularly in the context of diminished capacity.
• Our tolerance of poverty, both local and global.
• Our wastefulness.
• Our tolerance of political corruption.
• Our failure to create a carbon tax.
• The use of semi-sentient animals as meat. (WaPo just mentions industrial food production. I think the condemnation will be deeper.)
• Our failure to confront the responsibilities and risks associated with the creation of artificial sentience. (Depending on how things turn out, this might be celebrated by our heirs.)

The WaPo article mentions our isolation of the elderly. I don't think so; I think that will be seen more as a tragedy than a sin. This is really about the modern mismatch between physical and cognitive lifespan.

The article is accompanied by a poll with this ranking as of 5800 votes:

• Environment
• Food production
• Prison system
• Isolation of the elderly.

Google Reader: This is going to hurt

Let's get the good news out of the way.

Google has stepped back from their Buzz/G+ nymwar policy. Google will support pseudonyms. So they listened after all.

More good news. As promised, Google Reader lives.

That's enough of the good news. Don't want to overdose.

The bad news is that Google will be ripping out a lot of GR in favor of G+, even though G+ lacks a mechanism for subscribing to aspects of a person's stream. Much of the functionality I love, such as the feed for GR shares, the web page created from GR shares and notes, the ability to follow my trusted curators shares -- it's all at risk. In my case, tens of thousands of annotations, a vast amount of Cloud data, is at risk. Reeder.app, by far my most heavily used iPhone app, is at risk.

The worst news is that Google is giving us 1 week's warning. It's almost as though they want to get this over with before they get a nymwar level of feedback.

Happily, we bereaved GR users are not alone. There are 357 comments on Alan Green's G+ announcement, and the last few hundred are a tad ... unhappy. Please feel free to add your comments one way or another.

My primary comment is that Google needs to stop and think - carefully. Sure, there aren't many GR power users. What we lack in numbers, however, we more than make up in geekery. We are uber-geeks and/or journalists, and we have a long memory. Apple can blow away data, but we don't mind. We never trusted them with our data. Google though, Google's not Apple. We expect different failures from Google.

There's a tsunami of hurt building in the obscure little GR community. We may be small Google, but we're rabid little buggers. E.D. Kain, Sarah Perez, Skeptic Geek, Jesse Stay, Incidental Economist, Martin Steiger, Brett Keller, me... We're coming out of the woodwork.

There is a right way to fix GR. That would be to clean up and fill out the current feature set, and replace Reader's dead Buzz functionality with similar G+ functionality. Offer us the option to share via G+ in addition to GR -- assuming G+ gets its interest streams working.

Google's making the same kind of mistake they made with the nymwars. That one they're fixing. Maybe they'll fix this one too.

So we're gonna yell. One week isn't much, but it may be enough time to get Alan Steel and his colleagues to put the brakes on. Stop, then think.

Update: My companion G+ stream post (restricted).

Update 10/21/11: There's a petition expressing user concerns about Google's plan.

Choices

The Atlantic has a sure fire winner online. Kate Bolick's All the Single Ladies follows the formula - single woman in New York, romantic life, no true love, aging now, allegedly happy single. Every magazine can do it once a year, usually in the fall.

I skimmed this one. Can't help it, I get the paper rag though it often annoys. It's my way of saying thank you to Fallows and TNC.

These articles feel sad to me; the authors protest too much. I hope it's just part of the formula, the adult equivalent of the dead mothers of Disney orphans. Something to pluck the strings and get the hits. We all need to work.

There's a deeper theme to play with though, one Bolick wisely avoids. The vast majority of humans, from nameless peasant to feudal king, have had short lives of abundant suffering and few choices. Bolick has, by their standards, vast wealth, luxury and choice. Me too and probably you, we're the lucky ones.

It's relative though, our active lives aren't much longer than the life of a Roman citizen. We have many more choices, but roughly the same number of prime years to spend them. We have to leave a lot of roads untraveled.

If our lifespan were matched to our choices, we'd be 35 for a hundred years. It still wouldn't be enough of course.

Me, I say there's a truck waiting on every one of those roads. Step off the curb one day, and meet the truck. So this road really is the best of all ...

The iPhone - Android cost difference is getting large

A colleague of mine bought a $200 unlocked Android phone made by Acer. He's pairing it with an AT&T paygo plan using an automated purchase option that effectively costs him about $200-300 a year total for some voice and a modest amount of 3G data. Of course in many locations he's using WiFi.

So his total two year smartphone cost is on the order of $700.

A minimal iPhone plan, assuming purchase of the 4G without jailbreaking, would be perhaps $1,800 with all the fees and taxes of non-paygo plans.

That's an $1,100 gap.

The iPhone 4 (much less the 4S) is much better than his Acer phone - and iOS is mostly better than Android [1]. I'll count that as a $300 offset against that $1,100 gap.

That leaves an $800 value gap and an $1,100 gross gap. This is not sustainable. Apple's brand isn't worth a value gap that large.

I'm awfully glad Android is out there. As Android captures more of the geek market, and as the cost of Android data falls, there will be enormous pressure on the cost of iPhone plans.

[1] However Calendar/Contact/document functionality with iOS 5/iCloud is much worse than Android/Google Apps.

Update: Lots of great comments on this post. I hope I get to do a f/u post, but in the meantime ...

• Apple missed analyst expectations today... "Net income in the fiscal fourth quarter was $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per share ... Analysts ... were expecting $7.28 per share... iPhone sales were up 21 percent from last year at 17.1 million ... Analysts, however, were hoping for 20 million". There are lots of good reasons for this expectations gap, but it is consistent with price pressure.
• I'm only writing about the US. The US Apple Store doesn't yet sell an unlocked iPhone 4S, but it sells an unlocked iPhone 4 for $650. Unfortunately, it's not clear that US users can use it with a PayGo data plan, or even that AT&T officially allows it to be used as a voice-only phone. So using an unlocked iPhone might increase the price gap (unless you can live with T-mobile's limited service area.)
• It's easy to forget that in the US the purchase price of a phone is a fraction of the cost. The real basis is the costs of ownership over two years. That's why I don't compare unlocked phone purchase costs but compare phone and service. There are a lot of odd and disturbing rules about how and where iPhones can be used.
• I think the Acer phone is probably more like an bizarro 3GS than a 4, so I'm overstating the value gap by comparing it to a 4.

Apple can obviously close the price gap significantly, but that will impact their margins and, eventually, their share price. The good news for families like mine (five iPhone devices) is that our costs are likely to fall. (It's good for us if Apple's stock price falls!)

Limbaugh defends Satan's army

If Satan had an army, it would be the Lord's Resistance Army.

Rush Limbaugh knows that Obama doesn't like the LRA.

So Limbaugh likes the Lord's Resistance Army. They are, after all, called the LORD's resistance army.

Limbaugh has not merely jumped the shark and nuked the fridge. We need a new name for the domains he's visiting now. Snorted the shark?

What if we are measuring economic output incorrectly?

Imagine that your compass was 20 degrees out of alignment.

Imagine you didn't know that.

Good luck finding the North pole.

Now imagine life if our economic compass were 20 degrees off.

That's what Ezra Klein and Uwe Reinhardt are suggesting in two coincidentally synchronous articles ...

Ezra is responding to a NEJM report on the economic impact of RomneyCare (Massachusetts' health care reform, the template for ObamaCare):

Health care and jobs: Mixed news from Massachusetts - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

... On the surface, the NEJM study looks to be great news for Massachusetts: health care jobs in the state have grown much faster than in the rest of the country since its reform law passed...

... But the study actually isn’t good news when you look into what type of health jobs propelled this strong growth. Most of it, the study authors conclude, came from an increase in administrative positions, jobs like billing specialists and office support staff. It’s quite likely that more people with health insurance mean more resources necessary to bill insurance companies and administer the business of health care.

An increase in those kind of jobs is great for employment. But it’s not so great for health care costs. It’s part of the reason that American doctors have administrative costs four times higher than their Canadian counterparts. It likely contributes to growing health care costs that have eaten up nearly a decade worth of increased earnings....

Ezra doesn't make the connection directly, but in the traditional model of measuring GDP this increase in administrative activity is economic growth.

Let that sink in a bit.

Now read Reinhardt (emphases mine)...

Uwe E. Reinhardt: Make-Work and the G.D.P. - NYTimes.com

... Suppose some evening a group of bored and mischievous teenagers slash tires on a number of cars in the parking lot of a shopping center. Distraught car owners call sundry nearby garages to send someone to fix the damage on the spot or tow the cars in for repairs. That work is speedily done, and the cars are ready for use again. The car owners pay the garage owners sizable repair bills.

This fictitious event leads to a number of questions:

1. Did the garages deliver value to the car owners?
2. Was gross domestic product increased or decreased?
3. Were the car owners better off, after paying the repair bill?

My answer to the first question is yes and to the second yes, as well, unless the garages had to give up other jobs with revenue equal to or greater than what they earn coming to the car owners’ rescue. To the third question, my answer is, it depends....

... In many instances, Person (or Enterprise) A delivers great value to Person (or Enterprise) B to extract the latter from a situation into which B should not have been put in the first place. We count in G.D.P. the value added by the extrication but do not detract the value destroyed by being driven into a precarious situation.

... Now think about the almost incomprehensible tax code that Congress has imposed. Think of it as a disaster of human making. To cope with it, individuals and businesses hire legions of lawyers and accountants who have deployed their human capital to understanding this bewildering code. These tax experts work hard and often brilliantly to shield their clients from taxes, usually achieving tax savings that are multiples of what they charge for their services...

... In many ways, our health care system mirrors our tax code — especially in its financing and health insurance facets. These can be made so complex and have been made so complex in the health care system in the United States that many decision makers in health care — patients, physicians, hospitals, employers and so on — need in-house or external consultants to find their way through the maze.

.. An academic health center may have a dozen or two dozen employees devoted to compliance. Such a center may employ several hundred billing clerks to cope with the myriad of private health insurance plans and policies, each with its own coverage, nomenclature and payment rules and requirements for prior authorizations...

... At Yale University I had the privilege of sitting in the classroom of the lateJames Tobin, an early Nobel laureate in economics and one of our profession’s greats. He distinguished between “enjoyable” and “nonenjoyable” G.D.P., with the latter including military spending or other “value added” from coping with either externally inflicted or self-inflicted damage done to our society. I often think of our revered professor when I contemplate the composition of this country’s G.D.P.

More than twenty years ago it occurred to me that different economic activities had different secondary multipliers. My focus was on the multiplier effect of military vs non-military activity. I was so impressed by my cleverness I wrote a letter on it to, I think, Time magazine. Of course it vanished, and subsequently I thought my "insight" was trivially obvious.

Maybe I shouldn't have given up so easily.

What Reindhardt describes is an aspect of the increasingly AI mediated "complexity wars". This is vast economic activity that is both destructive and creative.

We build castles and we tear them down.

We count this as economic activity.

What would our GDP per person growth look like over the past thirty years of innovation stagnation if we stripped out this "nonenjoyable" GDP activity?

Might explain a few things.

This is important.

Counterfeit Apple goods on Amazon - an interesting lack of enforcement

Amazon is selling a 45watt MacBook Air power supply for $20 less than Apple. The title is interesting: Amazon.com: Genuine Apple 45W MagSafe Power Adapter for MacBook Air A1244.

Why is the title interesting? Because of the word "genuine". Remember the old wisdom - "people's republics" are always tyrannies. Products that claim to be "genuine" often are not.

This particular product could be genuine. Not so the "apple" cables sold on Amazon for $2 instead of $20.

There's a lot of counterfeit Apple gear for sale on Amazon.

Amazon is increasingly a competitor with Apple.

I'm sure those two facts are not related.

Democracy in crisis: Not all votes are equal

This surprised me:

Notes on income inequality - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

... Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University, has been collecting the results of nearly 2,000 survey questions reaching back to the 1980s, looking for evidence that when opinions change, so too does policy. And he found it—but only for the rich. Policy changes with majority support didn’t become law except when that majority support included voters at the top of the income distribution. When the opinions of the poor diverged from the opinions of the rich, the opinions of the poor did not appear to matter. If 90 percent of the poor supported a policy change, its chances of passage were no better than if 10 percent of the poor supported it...

American democracy is in poor health.

Apple 4.0 - take 2

I received some good comments on yesterday's Apple 4.0 post. They were interesting enough I'll address them in a f/u post.

Andrew M took exception to my claim that Apple's historically lackluster quality was improving. I admit, it's a mixed bag.

On the one hand, the build quality on my MacBook Air is excellent. Unlike my iBook and MacBook I don't expect the hinges to fail, and unlike my MacBook I don't expect the enclosure to begin disintegrating. On the other hand several of our iPhones have had flaky home buttons, and Apple's 2nd generation iPhone sync cables are crummy. I gave Lion 1.0 (10.7.0) credit for being better than I'd expected, but I expected a disaster. Many feel Lion is a disaster, with a poorly designed save/save as implementation, problematic app restart behaviors, and a nearly crippled Safari. MobileMe sync has been mangling my contacts, and today Apple server failures have been bricking iPhones.

I concede the point. Apple has shown quality improvements in some areas, and regressed in others. Quality is still below what we deserve. I am still hopeful Cook and Apple 4.0 will put more weight on quality than Apple 3.0 did.

Jeffrey Dutky said I didn't give Apple enough credit for moving to industry standard interfaces like Thunderbolt. At first thought I agreed with him, but then I realized physical connectors like the iPod cable are going away. Only power connectors are definitively physical, and only Apple sells them for Apple laptops.

Apple's device connectors now are wireless protocols supporting things like AirPlay and AirDrop. I believe both are proprietary. I hope Apple 4.0 will be open these types of connections, and enhance data freedom for all Apple applications.

Apple 4.0

Steve M was* a master Healer and Teacher at the Upper Peninsula Health Education Corporation (UPHEC), but his true love was HyperCard. He should have been a programmer.

One of Steve's jobs was to civilize an obnoxious (think Jobs sans glamour, sans genius) young physician. The other was to convert me to the way of the Mac.

That was 1989, in the days of Apple 2.0. Steve Jobs had been gone for four years.

It wasn't hard to convert me. In those days Microsoft was taking over the world, but their Intel products pretty much sucked. Their Mac products, Word and Excel in particular, were far better than their Windows equivalents.

The Mac had a rich range of software, like More 3.0. The Mac cost about 20-30% more than roughly similar PC hardware, but Mac hardware and software quality was excellent (no viruses then, so security was not an issue). Apple networking was a joy to configure, though the cracks were starting to show. Apple networks didn't seem to scale well.

I stayed with Macs during my Informatics fellowship - until 1997. By then, twelve years after Jobs had left Apple, they weren't obviously better than the Wintel alternatives. Apple's OS 7 had terrible trouble with TCP/IP; it was even worse on the web than Windows 95. Windows 2000** was better than MacOS classic and Dell hardware was robust.

It took twelve years for post-Jobs Apple to become as weak as the competition. We were a Windows household from about 1997 to @2003, when I bought a G3 iBook. By then Apple was back. The Apple 3 recovery took about 5 years.

Now we're in the Apple 4.0 era. I suspect it began about 2010.

Apple 4.0 will behave like a publicly traded corporation (PTC), instead of the freakish anomaly it has been. It can't be Apple 3.0. On the other hand, I'm hopeful that Jobs last invention will turn out to be a new way to run a corporation; a reinvention of Sloan's GM design. It's clear that this is what he's been aiming at over the past few years. I stopped underestimating Jobs years ago. If anyone can fix the dysfunctional PTC, it would be Jobs.

Apple 4.0 won't have the glamour of 3.0. It may, however, do some things better. I believe Apple's product quality has been improving over the past two years. They're beginning to approach the quality of early Apple 2.0. Apple 4 may start to play better with others, even begin to support standards for information sharing instead of Jobs preference for data lock and proprietary connectors.

Apple 4.0 will have less art, less elegance, less glamour -- but it might have more engineering. Less exciting, but better for me.

I'm optimistic.

--

* Still a great Healer, but our UPHEC passed on. Steve isn't teaching these days.
** Windows 2000 was better than XP and Vista and Windows 7, but that's another story. Microsoft's post 2000 fall was much more dramatic than the slow decay of Apple 2.0.

Update 10/12/11: I respond to comments on quality and connectors in a f/u post.

Netflix train wreck

Emphases mine:

Netflix Abandons Plan to Rent DVDs on Qwikster - NYTimes.com

...We underestimated the appeal of the single web site and a single service,” Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in a telephone interview. He quickly added: “We greatly underestimated it."...

So we weren't the only family to dump streaming in favor of DVD, while looking for any alternative to the Netflix we'd come to despise.

What an astounding debacle. It's time for Hastings to go.

Good news for the USPS.