Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

A monthly combo pass (subway, bus, and a couple other media) from the MBTA costs $57. Buying a weekly combo pass costs $12.50. At an average of 4 and 1/3 weeks per month, a month’s worth of weekly passes would cost $54.16 — less than the single monthly combo pass. Why is the monthly pass more expensive? Presumably because it’s more convenient: you have to show the weekly passes to an MBTA employee who waves you through, whereas you can swipe the monthly passes through most any turnstile. But the thing is, the monthly passes are more convenient for the MBTA too: their employees don’t need to wave people through and don’t need to spend time selling four times the number of weekly passes. The MBTA should be encouraging sales of monthly passes.

It’s also frustrating to me that you can’t subscribe to get monthly passes. Every month, the pass would arrive in the mail on exactly the same day, and would be charged to your credit card like clockwork. But the MBTA doesn’t do that. Also, for some reason, you can only buy passes for the next month as late as the 22nd of this month.

All hail illogical transit systems. (Note: for all that I bitch about things on this website, I’m really quite happy with life.)

Dan Savage is a fantastic sex-advice columnist. He’s on vacation this week, but he’s responding to all the people who’ve asked him questions that merit the easy answer of “DTMFA”; this weblog is a family publication, so I won’t expand the abbreviation here. However, I will point out one of the letters, which is alarmingly close to my own history (and that of many other people, I’m sure):

I went snooping in my long-term girlfriend’s inbox and found that she is a member of an Internet matchmaking service. Her profile was searching for men within 25 miles of her city. I currently live 600 miles from her city. While I am out of sight, is she looking? We’ve been together for 18 months, and this profile was set up 139 days ago. Do I have a right to bring it up since I was snooping? She did give me the password to her inbox, practically daring me to go there. The larger issue here is that she has told me that she cheated on every one of her serious boyfriends. According to her, I am “different,” so she wouldn’t dream of cheating on me, but can I believe that shit?

I almost wonder whether the letter-writer is describing my ex-girlfriend.

I heard from a few people on my trip around Europe that very few Americans own passports; the statistics ranged from 15% to 30%. A quick google for ‘passport statistics’ brings up a handy State Department web page with the number of passports issued since 1974.

Now, those statistics don’t give us everything we want, because many of the people to whom passports have been issued have surely died, and a good many other people have probably lost their passports. I’m sure there are other reasons why the count is inaccurate. However, that page could give us a good estimate. Given that passports expire in 10 years, all the numbers on that page before 1992 are actually irrelevant to us. If you add up the number of passports issued between 1992 and 2002 — that is, all of those that might still be valid — you get 64,167,272. According to the Census Bureau, there are 291,582,615 Americans alive today. Hence a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that 22% of Americans own passports, minus the number of passports that have been invalidated for some reason (e.g., the owner died or had his passport revoked).

Now I’m curious: how does that compare with other nations? I’ll take some of the blame away from the U.S., given that going to other countries is a lot harder for Americans than for people in, say, Europe: going to France from the U.K. is a €20 or €40 plane ticket; going from the U.S. to France is at least €400. However, Australians have to travel farther than Americans to go anywhere, and still 3.8 million Australians traveled overseas in 2000-01, out of a population of 19.5 million. That’s 19.4% of their population abroad in one year. Almost all of the Americans who have valid passports from the last 10 years would have to travel abroad this year to make that true here.

I’d like to see this country encourage foreign travel. It’s valuable at a personal level, but I think it would also help prevent a lot of the disastrous foreign policies this country has had over the last 40 or 50 years if we actually knew where the little countries we’re blowing up are located.

One more thing before I go to bed: stories wherein a technology company grudgingly allows another tech company to share its software or hardware make me mad. The continuing lack of interoperability amongst all the major IM providers was the big one that bothered me until now. This time it’s Sprint and AT&T, in talks to share their wireless access points. Ridiculous. All the wireless companies should be sharing all their networks with all the other wireless companies, and just charging the other companies for the use of their networks. That’s how the Net works: your ISP is probably using a larger upstream network, of which there are several. Those several networks connect at Network Access Points (NAPs), which are just big routers. Depending on the number of bytes going from one network to another, one company will charge another company a variable amount of money. Duh. That’s the way it should work. Imagine if the Net worked like the cell-phone network: I’d go to Vermont and find that I couldn’t use my “Sprint Internet connection,” but could “roam” to the Verizon Internet connection. It’s ridiculous.

My travels in Europe also convinced me that the lack of interoperability between American cell phones and the rest of the world’s cell phones is stupid. I should be able to carry my cell to Europe and have anyone call me. Maybe the price would be high if someone calls me from the U.S., but that’s a separate issue. And still I notice that the network-dependence problems in the U.S. exist in Europe: people using cell phones in Ireland couldn’t use those phones on the Continent, except in the unlikely case that they’re using a Continental provider in Ireland. Again: set up a bunch of peering agreements and be done with it. What’s the delay? And why haven’t governments pushed through some interoperability requirements? Isn’t that what governments are for? Aren’t they supposed to require standards when the market is slow to enact them and when the standards would help everyone?

All right, I swear I’m going to bed now.