Blog: February 2005

It's silly that people have to actually expend energy to lobby against stupid bills. But in many state legislatures (and often in Congress too), passage is the default once someone introduces a bill, unless an industry, consumer group, or other organized lobbying force mounts a campaign against the bill. The problem is that the legislators are being paid to pass laws, and so they feel like they have to pass some. And if some legislator introduces a law, then his or her colleagues will be making their friend happy (and potentially generating goodwill for the future) by voting for it; unless someone with some clout is standing up in opposition, there's no downside.

But any law has some downside in forcing some people to spend time and/or money to comply. The cost is often worthwhile, but it needs to be considered. Whereas in the legislature, there's no such cost to passing a law. As a result, industry groups have to constantly shoot down stupid bills, and sometimes, bad bills that hurt the public but don't harm companies enough to generate organized opposition often float through.

I don't have any solution - I'm not sure the Texas scheme solves the problem. Give legislators a bonus based on how few laws they pass? Impose more procedural roadblocks or even direct costs for passing each law? Actually, the Michigan situation suggests one brilliant method of slowing down bad legislation which the Founding Fathers already thought of - the bicameral legislature. For a stupid bill to be passed twice by different groups, it needs to clear a formidable speed bump.

1. The first page just says DETECTING FLASH PLAYER... making me wait at least ten seconds.

2. Then we get the "Detecting Your Version Flash Player" page, which also takes seconds - until I give up and click on the itty bitty link. I can't help but notice the lengthy list of requirements for my machine, including the amount of RAM! I'm looking for a non-Flash version here, but alas none is evident.

3. Finally admitting I have Flash, I now get a splash page I have to click through, with a hard-to-read "ENTER" button next to a very easy-to-read-but-not-what-I-want "CLICK HERE TO MAKE YOUR RESERVATION NOW!".

4. Now I see "This website contains sound, please adjust your speakers" - ah, another page telling me what my machine needs to "enjoy" their site, also being yet another feature of a site I really would rather not have at all. I click Skip Intro, and...

5. Finally, the main page, with - yup, light red text on a dark red background. Since my mouse cursor was already in the middle of the page, one of the four menu choices "helpfully" zoomed over to my mouse, making it hard to read (the cursor is partially obscuring it) and also hard to scan all the choices since one is out of line.

6. I try to get directions, and have to endure yet another animation before it will give them to me. And the map has tiny hard to read street names, but very easy to see cars zooming up and down the avenues. I'm so glad it reminded me that there's traffic! Now if only I could read the tiny street numbers. I also love how the map has buttons to move it, but when it scrolls, there's no more map to see.

Everyone thinking about designing a site should read The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 and the associated blog, The Daily Sucker.

P.S. I've added a few new themes, like this and this, plus these strange signs as a tribute to Mike's Satan's Laundromat.

Thanks to Arielle Krebs for the great pictures of the UnAugural Ball, which I sadly wasn't able to attend - since at the same time, high in the Sierra Nevada, Google had rented out every hotel room in Squaw Valley for its annual ski trip. This year the company had grown so big we had to hold the party out in the parking lot, under five tents erected just for the occasion. Each tent had a different kind of music, with the main tent featuring 80s cover band and Tellme favorite Tainted Love, returning for the second year in a row. I joined a game of Mafia and successfully fooled the others as a Mafia member in my first game. The trip was definitely fun, though it's too bad we couldn't fit all the activities - dancing, talking, board games, poker, guitar playing and singing, and more - inside a single building, as we could last year. Next year, who knows?