08:38 – Barbara is taking the day off and driving up to Mt. Airy with a friend. They’re going to spend the day visiting antique stores and doing other girl stuff. They’ll have a nice day for it, with no chance of rain and a forecast high of 84F (29C). Yesterday’s official high was also 84, although it actually touched 90F (32C) here.
Yesterday I had to mail a replacement for a broken Petri dish. As usual, I sent that first-class mail rather than Priority Mail. Sending parcels by first-class mail is less expensive, although it’s limited to packages of no more than 13 ounces and doesn’t offer tracking. But the USPS Click-and-Ship website lets me generate postage labels only for Express Mail and Priority Mail, so for first-class parcels I use regular stamps. The postage for the package I sent yesterday was $2.41 (versus $5.15 for Priority Mail). Five first-class stamps are $2.30, so I had to add a sixth, for a total of $2.76.
I was already on the USPS website to find out how much postage was required, so I decided just to order a roll of lower-denomination stamps. They had rolls of a hundred $0.20 stamps for $20 plus $1.25 shipping, so I decided to order two rolls. I added them to my cart and tried to check out. Everything seemed to be going fine. I entered the CVN for the credit card number I have on file for them and clicked the Submit Order button. It came back to the previous page and displayed a message in red that said I hadn’t entered my telephone number, which was required. Nowhere on that page was a field for telephone number. Geez. I guess I’ll just pick up a roll of $0.20 stamps the next time I’m at the post office.
The taxes are finished, although I won’t mail them until the 15th. I plan to spend some time today cleaning up my lab and making up more solutions for kits.
12:09 – I see that a New York City councilwoman is pushing hard to get a law passed to make it illegal to buy “counterfeit” purses and watches. Not sell them, you understand. Buy them. And the law she proposes has teeth: up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail. Geez.
So-called “counterfeit” consumer products are not a societal problem. If someone wants to buy a “counterfeit” purse or watch, whose business should that be? Certainly not the government’s. In effect, we have the government police doing the companies’ jobs for them, at public expense. If Louis Vuitton or Coach or Rolex is concerned about people buying and selling “counterfeits” of their products, it should be up to them to do the policing. Let them sue the sellers.
This is a civil matter, not a criminal one, unless the sellers are falsely (and convincingly) claiming to be selling the real product. If a seller offers a fake Coach purse for $100, for example, it’s clear to any reasonable person that this could not possibly be the genuine $1,500 Coach purse. It’s either fake or stolen. On the other hand, if the seller attempts to sell a fake Coach purse for $1,200, a reasonable person might believe it to be genuine. That’s fraud. Let the police concentrate on real crimes like fraud, not pseudo-crimes like violating someone’s copyright. And, before anyone mentions it, I am aware that there are times when fake products can indeed be a societal problem. Criminals regularly sell fake products that do matter–things like pharmaceuticals and aircraft fasteners and automotive brake pads–where lives are actually at stake. But no purchasing manager is going to buy a fake $50 aircraft bolt if the price is suspiciously low. Buyers of this type of item are being defrauded, and the sellers should be prosecuted on that basis, not for copyright violations.