I’ve been fighting Carpal Tunnel for about two years now, and I still haven’t gotten over it. (That’s one reason I haven’t been blogging much.) Here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Carpal tunnel is a misnomer for what I (and many people) have. It describes a nerve being compressed in the wrist. The problem is, the symptoms are identical to the nerve being compressed anywhere between the brain and the hand.
• That being the case, surgery would do nothing for me. Anti-inflammatory medicine (such as aspirin) can help with the symptoms, and for some that’s good enough.
• You can have CT and also have lots of other problems simultaneously that have the same symptoms. In my case, I have real CT, but the main problems seem to be due to muscle tension compressing all three nerves (median, radial, and ulnar). And it’s tension near the elbows, arm pits, shoulders, and neck.

The symptoms I have aren’t bad, but they are persistent. I’m not worried about the numbness and tingling; I just want to be able to continue to use computers for the next 50 years without too much nerve damage. But for now I’ve given up laptops (or at least I’m trying to) and I’m trying all sorts of things. This week I’ve got one hour of physical therapy (which is really helpful, although I’ve been at it for six months), a massage (which is similar to PT, but less painful), and two visits to a Chiropractor. (Just had my first ever visit on Monday. It seemed to improve my posture, which is important since bad posture is one of my biggest problems.) I also spend a significant portion of the evenings trying to replicate what the PT does. (She gives me homework.)

It’s likely that this will be a persistent battle. Rather than going back to normal, I’ll be doing some amount of self-care for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, that will mainly involve a few simple exercises, a hot bath every once in a while, and the occasional massage. That wouldn’t be so bad.

Here is the Gettysburg address, illustrated using the first Google Image search result for each word. I considered doing it as a puzzle, but some of those images are pretty cryptic.

Last night I went to www.AnnualCreditReport.com, the site set up by the FTC for checking your credit report once a year for free. That site then sends you to the three credit rating companies, each of which buries links to credit report under a mound of offers for their credit monitoring services.

The worst of these agencies, from a security standpoint, is TransUnion. They require you to create a username and password, plus a password recovery question.

A password recovery question is essentially a secondary password that’s a whole lot easier to guess than the primary password. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account got hacked into by someone who could guess a few personal details that anyone in her home town would know.

Last year, TransUnion let me create my own password recovery question. This year, they’ve disabled that, so I had to choose from one of their questions. Every single question is something that a high school acquaintance might know about me and could be guessed from public records. Mother’s maiden name. Father’s middle name. High school mascot. The street I grew up on. If you’re from a small town, everyone in the town would know these things about you.

Now consider that you use your TransUnion password exactly once a year. If you don’t choose a good password, for example if you reuse the same password for every website you visit, it’s easy for someone to get a list of all your credit cards, bank accounts, loans, and mortgages. If you do choose a good password, you’re almost certain to not remember it. So the password recovery question is your password. (What’s the right thing to do? Choose a really cryptic password like A2LCA6BVW3 and keep it in your wallet. And don’t mix up your O’s and zeroes or ones and ells!)

So what should Sarah Palin and all the other small-town folks in America do? Go to AnnualCreditReport.com and use the mail-in form.

Sylvia got class photos at school a while ago. The photo company, rather than asking up front which pictures people wanted, printed a kitchen sink portfolio and sent it home with the kids. The parents were instructed to return any unwanted photos along with payment for the rest.

Jordan dutifully took a few photos out and returned the rest with her credit card information. In theory, that should have been the end of it. (Her credit card was just fine.)

The other night, a debt collector called. They claimed to own the debt. They didn’t know much about it, not even Jordan’s address. So they said they could not send her a bill.

And they wanted her to pay not only the amount owed (which seemed excessive) plus an $8 handling fee for paying over the phone. Jordan asked for an address. The caller provided one with an incomplete zip code, then hunted around for a different address.

Neither Jordan nor I knew how to handle a call from a debt collector. For the record, the law you need to know about is the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. In short, if you get a call from someone claiming to be a debt collector, you should:

1. Not reveal too much information about yourself or any potential debt. In particular, don’t say anything that would confirm or deny any debts. Keep in mind, the caller could be anyone. Plus, they will use any information against you. If it’s a scammer or identity thief, any random information makes it easier to impersonate you.
2. Request that all communications be in writing. Don’t tell them your address (see above). If you really owe them money, they should have or be willing to find your address.
3. Tell them to send you a description of the debt in writing.
4. If they balk, you may politely remind them that failure to comply results in a $1000 fine.
5. And, of course, do not accept any “convenience charge.”
6. When you get the statement, which they are required to send within five days no matter what, it shoud say that you have 30 days to pay or contest it. If you don’t respond in time, that is not evidence of debt, but it will complicate matters if you really do owe them.

The relevant section here is on page 5 of the FDCPA.

Sometimes I use Google to see if other people have the same voices in their heads that I do.

It turns out that nobody else has a little voice that sings along with Elton John saying Plaid thongs say so much.

On the other hand, someone else did think of Yahweh or the Highway.

I don’t know if this is a great idea or a terrible idea, so I’ll just throw it out.

One of the problems with proprosed carbon cap-and-trade systems is the uncertainty of the real value of carbon credits. A carbon credit is where you buy, for example, solar panels for a factory in Bangalore to offset the carbon dioxide from your coal-fired power plant in Belgum. The overall goal is to reduce the greenhouse gasses entering the atmosphere, and it doesn’t matter where the reduction actually occurs.

There are a lot of moving parts to a carbon credit market, but the primary issue is this: we’re pulling ancient carbon out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels, then burning them to produce carbon dioxide. In a geological instant, we’re burning the remains which have collected over billions of years. We need to either stop burning ancient stuff, or start burying as much as we burn.

Unfortunately, we don’t have accounting rules that work in geological time. What a carbon market really needs to do is to guarantee that either a particular chunk of carbon is going to stay out of the atmosphere permanently. Or at least for the next fifty years.

What we have instead is a variety of dubious claims and half-claims based on expected results of the things that can be accounted for. So, for example, you can get carbon credits for planting trees, but there is no disencentive for burning existing old-growth rainforests. Thus you can get paid to burn down one forest and replace it with another. The system is full of these sorts of paradoxes.

There is one industry which is used to working on long time scales to manage risks and protect valuable resources. The insurance industry. So perhaps when a power company buys a carbon credit, it should also buy carbon insurance for that credit. If the credit turns out to be of questionable merit, or unforseen circumstances ruin its value (e.g. a forest fire), the insurance company buys another credit to replace the old one.

All of which brings up the question: what is renewable energy worth? If you replace a coal-fired power plant with solar or wind energy, there’s no guarantee that the coal won’t just get sold to someone else. In fact, supply-and-demand dictates that coal will just get cheaper until it’s no longer profitable to pull it out of the ground– with little or no impact on the actual amount of coal usage. (I have no idea whether that represents the actual dynamics of the coal industry, which is probably dominated by long-term contracts and razor-thin margins.)

I suspect that renewable energy is not as valuable as demand for renewable energy. If there’s money to be made, research and development gets done until you get to the point where renewables really are cheaper than fossil fuels. Which, if it works, makes them far more valuable than a carbon market.

I’ve implemented a new system for avoiding comment spam. When you submit a comment, you must answer a simple question that anyone who speaks English fluently will be able to answer, and anyone who isn’t fluent should be able to google. The question never changes.

I’m relying on security through obscurity, that is, I’m assuming that no spammer will try to outwit it. Security by obscurity is usually derided by security professionals since it’s useless against a dedicated attacker. If I were Google or FaceBook, this would be an issue. But as long as there are thousands of less secure blogs, it’s not worth a spammer’s time to spend a minute or two to add a custom rule for my site.

For now, comments still need to be approved before they show up. If I don’t get any new comment spam in a while, I’ll change that rule.

In case you’re wondering, it took me about an hour to write the WordPress plug-in. That included reading the documentation, then looking at a few published plug-ins (one of which probably doesn’t really work) because the documentation is incomplete or misleading. I was inspired by this blog post. (The author uses a fixed image for his CAPTCHA. Based on his experience, I figured I could make one that’s accesible to the blind.)

There was a time when companies were owned by people, and they existed not just to make money but to represent the values of their owners. Today, companies are still owned by people, but with so much indirection that they end up being faceless profit-making machines.

Most corporations are owned largely by mutual funds, which in turn are owned by most Americans as part of their retirement funds. Although these individuals have strong opinions about corporate America, this indirection causes these opinions to be summarized as “make as much money as possible.” Especially with index funds, which are managed essentially by an algorithm, there is no mechanism to get the real opinions of the shareholders to the corporations.

If you own stocks individually, on the other hand, you can get the attention of corporate management through shareholder proposals which are voted on at the company’s annual meeting. (By and large, they are non-binding. But electing a board of directors is binding, so the Board ignores these proposals at their peril.)

If you can’t attend the annual meeting in person, you send in a proxy vote. That is, an absentee ballot. It is called a proxy vote, because the ballot is given to a person, a proxy for you, who is instructed to vote with your shares according to your preferences. (I’m not sure that it actually works this way in this age of computer tallies, but that’s the theory.)

Here’s my idea: everyone who buys a mutual fund should be allowed to designate a proxy. Since the fund may include hundreds or thousands of companies, it would be unwieldy to actually fill out all those ballots for your proxy (much less read about what you’re voting for and try to understand all the issues.) However, if you tend to agree with Warren Buffett, or your union, or GreenPeace, or Bill O’Reilly, and if they agreed to vote your shares for lots of companies, it would be better that they get the vote than the mutual fund manager.

More specifically, people or organizations could register as designated proxy voters and list the companies they plan to vote for. You could then supply your mutual fund with the list of designated proxy voters. This is the sort of thing which was unweildy before computers, but should be easy these days.

The reason the proxy voters should be registered is both to make it easy for computers to track which votes go where, and so that the regulators and companies would know in advance if, for example, the ACLU has enough votes to stage a coup.

On Sunday after church, Sylvia didn’t want to go inside. She lay down on the driveway and refused to get up. So Jordan picked her up by the arm. Then she really started to cry. This isn’t unusual, so it took a while for us to realize that her crying was now from pain rather than defiance. We didn’t see any bruises or anything obvious, so we gave her some pain killer and hoped she’d get over it.

Several hours later it hadn’t diminished, so we called our doctor, who told us to go to the emergency room. She suspected it was nursemaid’s elbow, which is easy to fix, but is best taken care of quickly.

The triage nurse at the emergency room had the same opinion, as did the doctor when we eventually saw him. Popping the bone back into place didn’t take long, but it didn’t take on the first try, and after the second try it took a while for the pain to go away. In between, Sylvia got X-rays and Jordan got dinner. The worst of it was having to wait for so long. We left for the emergency room around 5:30 or 6:00, and Sylvia and I didn’t have dinner until 10:00.

If we have a few more trips to the emergency room, Sylvia will start to recognize how unusual Ian’s experience was.

On Saturday I took a nap. It didn’t feel restful, and I remember at least once gasping for air. For at least an hour afterward, I felt the need to take deep breaths. On Sunday I had the same experience, only I was alert enough at the end to notice that my chin was resting on my neck. (I don’t have a double-chin.) When I nap, I’ve been using Jordan’s new “memory foam” pillow. It is convex in the middle, so it mainly supports the neck, with only a little padding for the head. The “memory” part is that it shrinks with heat, leaving an impression wherever you touch it.

The problem is that after sleeping for a while, the “memory” means that the neck no longer has any support. The pillow seems to work fine for Jordan, but I’m not going to be borrowing it any more.