Double glazing and the "sounds of silence"

It may seem somewhat perverse to complain about birds chirping outside my window, but when the window is closed and double glazed, then it was certainly a surprise – an expensive surprise as I had just had spent over $11,000 on five windows to keep out train noise.  Needless to say, if I can hear the birds in the tree just outside my bedroom window, the Ecostar double glazed windows have done little to abate noise from trains.

Ecostar provides a convincing demonstration of the effectiveness of its double glazing. 

It sets up a speaker playing loud music in a sound-proof box, with double glazed glass on a hinged door.  With the door open, one hears how noisy the music is.  With it closed – the sounds of silence.  I was impressed. 

Perhaps even more impressive was the salesman who visited my house to inspect the bedrooms where the double glazed windows were to be installed and provide a quote.  He assured me that other people who lived along railway lines had installed Ecostar windows and were happy with their performance.  To back up his point, the salesman showed me a graph that claimed that the windows can cut noise “by up to 80%.”  The words “up to”, of course, is Ecostar’s escape clause.

After the windows were installed, I gave them the gentlest of tests — would they cut out the chit-chat between the sparrows perched on the tree just outside my window?  They didn’t.  And, as far as cutting out train noise, the windows were a dud.

Is this just a case of “buyer-beware”?  Well, no.  When I phoned Ecostar afterwards, they explained that the windows were not particularly effective in brick veneer houses or ones with a metal roof, not facts that I knew or could reasonably have known.  The company, however, did know this, and as the salesman had inspected my house, he was in a position to advise me that I could not expect significant noise abatement for my house.  He didn’t.

To be fair, the company promptly sent someone out to inspect the windows after I complained, and there were a number of emails and phone calls that followed.  But the message coming out of Ecostar, loud and clear, was that the failure of the windows to perform was the fault of the construction of my house, not its windows. 

Finally, rather than treating my calls as a complaint that needed resolution, the company treated them as “feedback.”  It was only after I told Ecostar that it wasn’t providing them with “feedback” but that I wanted Ecostar to accept responsibility for not warning me about the limitations of their windows that I finally experienced the sounds of silence.  I haven’t heard from Ecostar since.

Election Frace at the World Bank

Elections, in the heyday of the Soviet Union, were often announced before voting concluded.  It was all a done deal.  The Soviet Union may be dead, but its ideas on how to conduct democratic elections are still alive and kicking.

On April 16, 2012, the new head of the World Bank was announced. To no one’s surprise, Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American. His victory was assured since the major powers—Europe, US, Japan and Canada—voted as a bloc, by prior agreement.  By convention, this coalition endorses whomever Washington nominates, and so it has been from the first meeting of the World Bank in 1946.  The only break with tradition is that the winner was not a white, male politician, bureaucrat, or banker.

The Golem President

In Jewish folklore, a golem is a monster made of mud.  In the US, if President Barak Obama wins, he will be the first Golem president of the USA.

Much of the mud will be supplied by Republican strategist Karl Rove, who is expected to use an estimated $300 million that he has stashed away in American Crossroads, a Super PAC, to attack Obama in an advertising blitzkrieg the likes of which the US has never seen before. 

The Treason of Benjamin Franklin

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A public figure receives a cache of leaked government documents whose contents is so explosive that it will embarrass the government, incite insurgents and encourage them to attack government officials. It could even bring on a war. The person leaking these documents is quickly identified and dealt with by authorities, but more of this later.

Let’s have a free market in IP

Both Samsung and Apple entered into a legal battle over patent infringement back in April 2011 on three different continents.  With such a short shelf life, if one or other company can get an injunction, it wins by just stopping its competitor getting its product to the market.

Climate Change Skeptics v Science Wonks

Nothing is more certain about who will win a war than if only one side turns up, armed to the teeth, while the other sits at home, enjoying a cup of tea and chatting among themselves of how much more superior they are to their opponents. Welcome to the climate wars.

Resource Supertaxes - Miners Fear Race to the Top

One of the unfortunate hallmarks of globalization is that governments must compete fiercely with one another to attract business to their shores. 

Playing governments like a Stradivarius, transnational mining companies have forced them to weaken environmental and other regulations, as well as reduce tax rates and even tax holidays.  The result is the greatest transfer of wealth in history from taxpayers who own the minerals to companies exploiting the resources who have been enjoying super profits for decades. For example, in the last ten years global miners have increased profits tenfold, which was hardly slowed by the global financial crisis.  But could this trend be reversed, as governments realize that they own the mineral resources and not the mining companies, and therefore hold the upper hand?