If you're *not* on the list (which for reasons that will go unexplored at this juncture I'm not), you'll find that there are *lots* of other telemarketers. Most of the ones that call me want to sell mortgages or credit cards or other kinds of loans, or the occasional real estate agent, plus a few have vacation scams of various sorts.
One catch is that the laws are US laws, so they don't really apply to telemarketers in India, unless they're sufficiently connected to their real customers in the US.
My mom has limited vision. She needs a phone that's easy to read and doesn't waste her time with zillions of deep menus that she can't really see and doesn't care about - she wants to make phone calls, and maybe have a phone number list and maybe some voice prompting and a speakerphone. When my mother-in-law was alive, she needed a phone that was not only visually simple, but was bigger with big widely-spaced buttons that she could hit easily, because her finger dexterity was also pretty limited.
There's a big emerging market for phones for older people. The US baby boomer generation are mostly in our 50s and comfortable with technology, but most of our parents never really got into cellphones, and they're hitting physical limitations that make most of that unnecessary. We got my mother-in-law a phone that had basically two big buttons ("call the operator" and "hang up") and an overpriced per-minute rate for operator-assisted calls, and she could about handle that, but there are a lot more people who can use a bit more phone than that.
Some technical advantages of big simple phones are that they can be cheaper, because they're not trying to fit as much capability into a small space, and they can have much longer battery life because they've got the space to fit a bigger battery. They probably still need polyphonic ring-tones, not because their customers really care, but because the carriers want to sell ring tones, and you can always custom record something like "[ring-ring] MOM! PICK UP YOUR CELL PHONE! [ring-ring]".
This phone sounds like it has a great display, though some people may have better luck seeing brightly backlit displays. Having icons to tell you what you're doing sometimes works, if you've got a limited number of icons - but if you've got too many, you're basically reinventing Chinese ideograms. [cue the standard slashdot "Old People in Korea" meme.] (Actually, my mother used to read Korean and Chinese, but that was a long time ago - at this point she'd rather have big numbers and occasional phrases like "REDIAL")
GSM encourages world-wide compatibility (ahem) by having multiple frequency bands that aren't all supported everywhere. North America and most of Latin America use 1900 MHz and/or 850 MHz. Europe, Asia, and Australia mostly use 900 and 1800. Quad-band phones use all four, and US and EU/Asia have different tri-band combinatations that give you some coverage in most of the world.
The article describes the cost of producing this technology of panels as a lot less than conventional panels. So it's probably good, but as you say it would be really nice to know.
On the other hand, if you're trying to decide about investing in the factory, a big issue is the granularity of the cost of producing factories (including the initial R&D). $25M is an amazingly low number - lots of investors could fund that, and assuming that the marginal costs are cheap enough to get customers, the technology should bootstrap nicely - more easily than with $100M startup costs. (I assume that some of the R&D gets paid off by licensing it to other investors.)
Getting to high volumes would crank up the demand for indium, so the marginal price of materials would probably go up after a while, but the costs of the manufacturing technology would go down with increasing volume.
This technology supposedly produces panels at much lower cost than competing silicon processes. Therefore, at least financially you'll have paid off the purchase debt much faster than the 5 years you're talking about. How much of that manufacturing cost translates to energy debt as opposed to toxic-waste debt or other kinds of ecological problems is TBD, but it's likely to be a much better deal. And once you're producing power from the panels, you're not only paying off the energy debt of the coal/oil/etc. that you're displacing, you're also reducing the other environmental damage from their production as well.
Sure, they talk a bit about using Fusion for power generation and all that other Atoms For Peace hype, and there are a couple of astrophysicists who want to model the insides of stars, but almost all of the fusion research out there is really driven by the military. It's about learning how to build bombs differently or more efficiently or more tunably, and learning things to simulate in their supercomputers that can be used for better modelling of bomb behaviour.
It would be nice if we could use fusion to generate power, though there are still radioactive waste issues because used reactor parts and containment domes are still likely to get hit with neutrons and therefore become radioactive, but there'd presumably be less of that that with fission. But that's not what most of the research is about.
$10/MWH? I'm used to paying about $0.10 per kWH, which would be $100/MWH. Probably the price is lower in bulk, but I don't think it's that much lower.
On the other hand, $25M is the cost of the plant - there's also the cost of the materials they use, which are presumably some reasonably high fraction of the cost of the panels. You're going to amortize the cost of building the plant over a few years, especially because it's probably most of a year before you're getting full production rates, and the cost of the research and development also gets amortized.
And the economic return of the system as a whole is different from the economic return to the owners of the factory itself- that's going to depend on how much margin they can make on the sale price of the panels compared to raw material costs, though the sale price *will* be driven by the fact that it looks like a big win for the purchaser.
I don't think they meant to say Megawatts/year when they talked about coal plants, as opposed to just Megawatts. (They could have, e.g. $100M lets you build a 500-MW plant in a year, but I assume they didn't.)
Fortunately, peak electrical demand is in the daytime, so solar actually does help. Most of it's for air conditioning and for business use, and it you've got time-of-day pricing for electricity, it's more expensive in the daytime when the demand is high. And the places that get the most sunshine are generally going to use the most electricity as well, so you get extra slack on your distribution system capacity. So until solar makes up a large enough fraction of our total electricity usage, the fact that it's daytime-only isn't a problem. For now, that coal plant probably wouldn't be running at 100% of capacity all day - they'd probably run it at some fractional capacity at night anyway.
While solar energy obviously won't produce power for you at night, without either storage or some amazing round-the-globe distribution system, it's still a major win, because most electrical usage is in the daytime, for air conditioning and for business uses. If you've got time-of-day pricing on electricity, you'll see it's more expensive in the daytime than at night, because if supply-and-demand issues. So at least for reducing peak loads and improving overall capacity, solar just wins. Additionally, production can be fairly decentralized - you'll make more power in LA than in Seattle, but you'll probably be using more power there as well, and you can add lots more power to the system than the amount of carrying capacity you need to add to the grid.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution sort of pointed in that direction, but even it had limits. The Khmer Rouge were murderous total batshit crazy. Their leader said at one point that the Revolution could continue even if there were only a million Cambodians - this was at a time that there were about 8 million, and yes, he thought that killing 7/8 of them would be ok.
Now, I don't think that Bush is *that* bad. But he's clearly opposed to all of the core values that made America. Also, with television and competent propaganda, occasional actions like another Waco attack can help keep the population in line. For a while.
Rebuilding America's going to take a long time - there's too much institutionalized police state infrastructure and the attitudes that support it.
You might try contacing whoever's running the nameserver that's got your domain on it to point it at your own servers, if they're not the same as the miscreants.
You may end up having to pay the miscreants a transfer fee. They do have to release registrar locks in a reasonable time with some reasonable process, though they can also hold the domain for 60 days after registration.
If all that the credit card does is chargeback what you paid for the name to the registrar, then you've gotten $10-20 back and lost your domain name to somebody that you might have mildly annoyed. If you can convince them to stop paying anything to the registrar, that's a different level of winningness, but it's typically hard to get there.
Small claims court is more likely to get your domain back, but that may also depend on the contract you've got with the registrar.
Hi, John - You should see how Markey's positions on telecom and broadcasting regulations, which have been some of his bigger emphases during his time in Congress, get along with the First Amendment and Commerce Clause....
But remember, it's one thing to ask (such as on a bar exam) whether he knows what the Constitution is supposed to mean; it's another to see whether he has any intention of following it once he's got the authority to do something about it. Blame the voters for keeping him in office.
So they've got a news collector that's like Google News except it tries to rewrite the text into simpler grammar in ways that may be inadvertently funny, and play it as cartoons. If I want funny, I'd much rather see Jon Stewart take the news events and shred them in ways they deserve, and if I want news, I'd rather read it.
An American-born former coworker of mine moved to Belgium for a decade or so for a job, and he and his family tried to move back to the US and just couldn't readjust to the lifestyle here. They moved back; I think he was about 50 when he left.
Another friend of mine moved there to go to school after the Computer Boom busted, and liked it, though he's met a girl over here and moved back.
I think the vodka thing must be a combination of genetics and extensive practice, combined with living in Russia.
Yeah, tell me about it. A friend of mine lived in Yugoslavia before the wars of the 90s, and said it was really scary watching the local politicians whipping up ethnic hatred and fear because they got political power by doing it. The US during the early Bush presidency was starting to look that way, and then 9/11 happened; so much for a decent decade after the end of 40 years of Cold War global nuclear terrorism.
On the other hand, I've *been* hit by lightning, and was almost hit by it another time; comes with hanging around on tall mountains. Some commentator in September 2001 was asked what Americans could do to protect themselves, and replied "Quit smoking and wear your seatbelt".
Don't expect it to be problem-free - the same kind of small-town cops you disliked in Northern Wisconsin and I disliked in New Jersey and California have cousins in Costa Rica and just about everywhere else. There's a serious cluelessness about economic policy, so the government tries to "help" various industries by giving monopolies to their friends and relatives and the highest bidders, and bureaucrats are much more open about wanting bribes than they were back in New Jersey. And there's a lot of poverty and crime, though it's better than much of Central America.
And it'll take you a while to get to know locals and local culture well enough to be accepted, but that's sort of the same everywhere I suppose. Meanwhile, it's absolutely gorgeous, lots to do, high mountains and wide beaches and jungles and decent coffee, and it's relatively friendly to American expats.
The type of people who used to say "Love it or Leave it" always got really really pissed off if you did leave.
But I left the North American East Coast and moved here to California, and came five times as far as some farmer from Mexicali who lives down the block. And one main reason I live in the town I live in is that the main street has restaurants from a dozen different cultures, either run by people who got off their butts and left the country they grew up in, or by children of people who did that, except for some of the Mexicans and Chinese who've been here a lot longer.
Some people came because this was the Land of Opportunity and the place they were living wasn't. Some people left their homes because a bunch of evil insane people wanted to kill them. Some were just bored, or had friends out here, or their families were hard to deal with, or they just considered some fairly large chunk of the world to be enough like home to move there, or there was a babe involved, or there was a school that sounded good, or they wanted to see the world and liked what they saw here.
For a while it looked like America had been taken over by Pod People. A lot of the country has at least started to wake up, but even after Bush, Cheney, and Rove get tossed out for incompetence (and term limits) it's going to take a long long time to fix America, get rid of some of the appalling laws and government-run lawlessness, and try to get rid of some of the surveillance infrastructure that's grown synergistically with the military-industrial complex. I doubt we'll get it all back, which sucks.
A few years ago, somebody posted the point system rules for immigrating to Canada. If you're young, educated, and speak French and English, it's really easy. If you're 50 and educated but not bringing large quantities of money, you'd better start learning French now, and maybe throw in a First Nations language for good measure. If you're 70 and not educated, you'd better have immigrant kids or a lot more money. (Sorry - French *was* my second language, but only a little bit of it, and Canadian Immigration doesn't view Really Bad German as useful. Basically I'd have to learn French from almost-scratch and my wife would have to learn it also, even though Chinese would be more useful in Vancouver.)
Back in the 70s, when I was having to think about options to the Vietnam War draft, the only parts of Canada I'd seen had been the Frozen North, i.e. Toronto and Montreal Sudbury and other places within 50 miles of the US border and east of the Rockies. It was ok, but not attractive - when I visited Vancouver as an adult, I realized there'd been a whole other range of options I'd have been happy to have known about:-) Fortunately my lottery number was safe, and it was the last year of the draft, so I never had to explore it.
I used to live in upstate New York, where the winter temperatures were regularly 0-10F/-10--20C in the daytime, and grew up in the mid-Atlantic where it's usually cold though not usually that cold in the winter, and hot and humid in both places in the summer. You do get used to it, and it really is pretty in the winter sometimes.
Now I live in Silicon Valley, and except for two months of rain during the winter, if I don't like the temperature I can drive a short distance and find whatever temperature I'd prefer, though it's never really too hot or too cold, and the mountains and ocean are nearby. You get used to that too, surprisingly bloody fast - it's annoying to be a wimp about it, but hey, it was cold enough today that I wore a long-sleeved shirt. (My real problem with going to cold places these days is that most of my really-cold-weather clothing has worn out, so I don't have a decent ski jacket any more, and there's no reason to buy one around here.)
I once travelled to Canada to go to a political/economics conference. The Canadian officials saw that we had brochures with us, and were quite concerned that some of them discussed ordering books, because after all, if we were carrying material like that to a conference, we might be engaging in business or trying to sell things, and that just wouldn't do without lots of special licenses. We weren't, and eventually convinced them of that.
I used to do business with a Vancouver-based tech firm in the late 80s. One of their people was a dual citizen, and he'd occasionally smuggle lab equipment back and forth across the border in his car because he was tired of having it held up by Canadian customs when he shipped it formally.
My other dealings with Canadian officials have been relatively uneventful. On one trip we had papers saying our cat had all her shots, but she was hiding under the car seat asleep when we got to customs and they didn't notice her. I did get pulled over for speeding by a cop who on foot - he was standing by the side of the road with a radar gun, catching people coming over the hill from out in the country when they got to the town speed limit - but he decided that since we had a US rental car, the paperwork would be too much work to be worth the bother.
Back in the mid-90s, after one of the airline bombings or the non-bombing crashes that the Feds liked to pretend might have been terrorist, the airport hand-luggage inspectors were starting to insist that passengers do random things with laptops (usually having the passenger them on, or insisting that the rent-a-gorilla had to turn them on), Penn Gillette had a computer magazine column where he ranted about stupid computer tricks, civil liberties, and similar issues. He suggested that an obvious screen-saver or equivalent to have your PC play at startup was a large digital time display ticking backwards.
I think the Feds snarled at him, but at least it was back before they could throw people in Gitmo.
Most of the harassment I've been hit with internationally was coming back to the US. The Israelis liked to paw through everybodys' bags (this was in the mid 80s), and I remember them spending a lot of time on another passenger who had cassette tapes of music they didn't approve of. And of course the Singaporeans and people like that have signs up about "We kill drug dealers". The Moroccan customs thug was really annoyed at us for having one fewer bag than our tickets indicated, and my French wasn't good enough to explain to him that it was the airline's fault and we'd be perfectly *happy* if they brought us the other bag. And then there was flying into Miami from the Bahamas as a young shaggy bearded guy on a one-way cash ticket.
On the other hand, I took a ferryboat from Egypt to Jordan, and while the customs process still involved them poking though your bags, they were friendly about it. The tables where they handled the locals had a big pile between them of confiscated contraband, mostly videotapes and hash. They didn't give the people a hard time, just took their stuff, and of course presumably took it away at the end of their shift to go sell it, because that *is* the reason you get a job as a third-world customs inspector.
The worst I've seen border-guard thugs do was drag some Turkish guy off a train at the Germany-Czechoslovakia border; I don't remember which direction he'd been travelling, so I don't know if it was the Germans or Czechs being racist about Turks. It was early-90s, post-Communist, so it wasn't quite like the Soviets any more, but East European border guards were still getting jobs for the fun of shouting at people rather than confiscating contraband.
Slashdot Mirror
One catch is that the laws are US laws, so they don't really apply to telemarketers in India, unless they're sufficiently connected to their real customers in the US.
There's a big emerging market for phones for older people. The US baby boomer generation are mostly in our 50s and comfortable with technology, but most of our parents never really got into cellphones, and they're hitting physical limitations that make most of that unnecessary. We got my mother-in-law a phone that had basically two big buttons ("call the operator" and "hang up") and an overpriced per-minute rate for operator-assisted calls, and she could about handle that, but there are a lot more people who can use a bit more phone than that.
Some technical advantages of big simple phones are that they can be cheaper, because they're not trying to fit as much capability into a small space, and they can have much longer battery life because they've got the space to fit a bigger battery. They probably still need polyphonic ring-tones, not because their customers really care, but because the carriers want to sell ring tones, and you can always custom record something like "[ring-ring] MOM! PICK UP YOUR CELL PHONE! [ring-ring]".
This phone sounds like it has a great display, though some people may have better luck seeing brightly backlit displays. Having icons to tell you what you're doing sometimes works, if you've got a limited number of icons - but if you've got too many, you're basically reinventing Chinese ideograms. [cue the standard slashdot "Old People in Korea" meme.] (Actually, my mother used to read Korean and Chinese, but that was a long time ago - at this point she'd rather have big numbers and occasional phrases like "REDIAL")
GSM encourages world-wide compatibility (ahem) by having multiple frequency bands that aren't all supported everywhere. North America and most of Latin America use 1900 MHz and/or 850 MHz. Europe, Asia, and Australia mostly use 900 and 1800. Quad-band phones use all four, and US and EU/Asia have different tri-band combinatations that give you some coverage in most of the world.
On the other hand, if you're trying to decide about investing in the factory, a big issue is the granularity of the cost of producing factories (including the initial R&D). $25M is an amazingly low number - lots of investors could fund that, and assuming that the marginal costs are cheap enough to get customers, the technology should bootstrap nicely - more easily than with $100M startup costs. (I assume that some of the R&D gets paid off by licensing it to other investors.)
Getting to high volumes would crank up the demand for indium, so the marginal price of materials would probably go up after a while, but the costs of the manufacturing technology would go down with increasing volume.
This technology supposedly produces panels at much lower cost than competing silicon processes. Therefore, at least financially you'll have paid off the purchase debt much faster than the 5 years you're talking about. How much of that manufacturing cost translates to energy debt as opposed to toxic-waste debt or other kinds of ecological problems is TBD, but it's likely to be a much better deal. And once you're producing power from the panels, you're not only paying off the energy debt of the coal/oil/etc. that you're displacing, you're also reducing the other environmental damage from their production as well.
It would be nice if we could use fusion to generate power, though there are still radioactive waste issues because used reactor parts and containment domes are still likely to get hit with neutrons and therefore become radioactive, but there'd presumably be less of that that with fission. But that's not what most of the research is about.
On the other hand, $25M is the cost of the plant - there's also the cost of the materials they use, which are presumably some reasonably high fraction of the cost of the panels. You're going to amortize the cost of building the plant over a few years, especially because it's probably most of a year before you're getting full production rates, and the cost of the research and development also gets amortized.
And the economic return of the system as a whole is different from the economic return to the owners of the factory itself- that's going to depend on how much margin they can make on the sale price of the panels compared to raw material costs, though the sale price *will* be driven by the fact that it looks like a big win for the purchaser.
It still looks like a big win.
Fortunately, peak electrical demand is in the daytime, so solar actually does help. Most of it's for air conditioning and for business use, and it you've got time-of-day pricing for electricity, it's more expensive in the daytime when the demand is high. And the places that get the most sunshine are generally going to use the most electricity as well, so you get extra slack on your distribution system capacity. So until solar makes up a large enough fraction of our total electricity usage, the fact that it's daytime-only isn't a problem. For now, that coal plant probably wouldn't be running at 100% of capacity all day - they'd probably run it at some fractional capacity at night anyway.
While solar energy obviously won't produce power for you at night, without either storage or some amazing round-the-globe distribution system, it's still a major win, because most electrical usage is in the daytime, for air conditioning and for business uses. If you've got time-of-day pricing on electricity, you'll see it's more expensive in the daytime than at night, because if supply-and-demand issues. So at least for reducing peak loads and improving overall capacity, solar just wins. Additionally, production can be fairly decentralized - you'll make more power in LA than in Seattle, but you'll probably be using more power there as well, and you can add lots more power to the system than the amount of carrying capacity you need to add to the grid.
Now, I don't think that Bush is *that* bad. But he's clearly opposed to all of the core values that made America. Also, with television and competent propaganda, occasional actions like another Waco attack can help keep the population in line. For a while.
Rebuilding America's going to take a long time - there's too much institutionalized police state infrastructure and the attitudes that support it.
ICANN FAQ on Domain Registrar Problems.
ICANN Transfer Policies
ICANN Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy.
You may end up having to pay the miscreants a transfer fee. They do have to release registrar locks in a reasonable time with some reasonable process, though they can also hold the domain for 60 days after registration.
Small claims court is more likely to get your domain back, but that may also depend on the contract you've got with the registrar.
But remember, it's one thing to ask (such as on a bar exam) whether he knows what the Constitution is supposed to mean; it's another to see whether he has any intention of following it once he's got the authority to do something about it. Blame the voters for keeping him in office.
So they've got a news collector that's like Google News except it tries to rewrite the text into simpler grammar in ways that may be inadvertently funny, and play it as cartoons. If I want funny, I'd much rather see Jon Stewart take the news events and shred them in ways they deserve, and if I want news, I'd rather read it.
Another friend of mine moved there to go to school after the Computer Boom busted, and liked it, though he's met a girl over here and moved back.
I think the vodka thing must be a combination of genetics and extensive practice, combined with living in Russia.
On the other hand, I've *been* hit by lightning, and was almost hit by it another time; comes with hanging around on tall mountains. Some commentator in September 2001 was asked what Americans could do to protect themselves, and replied "Quit smoking and wear your seatbelt".
And it'll take you a while to get to know locals and local culture well enough to be accepted, but that's sort of the same everywhere I suppose. Meanwhile, it's absolutely gorgeous, lots to do, high mountains and wide beaches and jungles and decent coffee, and it's relatively friendly to American expats.
But I left the North American East Coast and moved here to California, and came five times as far as some farmer from Mexicali who lives down the block. And one main reason I live in the town I live in is that the main street has restaurants from a dozen different cultures, either run by people who got off their butts and left the country they grew up in, or by children of people who did that, except for some of the Mexicans and Chinese who've been here a lot longer.
Some people came because this was the Land of Opportunity and the place they were living wasn't. Some people left their homes because a bunch of evil insane people wanted to kill them. Some were just bored, or had friends out here, or their families were hard to deal with, or they just considered some fairly large chunk of the world to be enough like home to move there, or there was a babe involved, or there was a school that sounded good, or they wanted to see the world and liked what they saw here.
For a while it looked like America had been taken over by Pod People. A lot of the country has at least started to wake up, but even after Bush, Cheney, and Rove get tossed out for incompetence (and term limits) it's going to take a long long time to fix America, get rid of some of the appalling laws and government-run lawlessness, and try to get rid of some of the surveillance infrastructure that's grown synergistically with the military-industrial complex. I doubt we'll get it all back, which sucks.
A few years ago, somebody posted the point system rules for immigrating to Canada. If you're young, educated, and speak French and English, it's really easy. If you're 50 and educated but not bringing large quantities of money, you'd better start learning French now, and maybe throw in a First Nations language for good measure. If you're 70 and not educated, you'd better have immigrant kids or a lot more money. (Sorry - French *was* my second language, but only a little bit of it, and Canadian Immigration doesn't view Really Bad German as useful. Basically I'd have to learn French from almost-scratch and my wife would have to learn it also, even though Chinese would be more useful in Vancouver.)
Back in the 70s, when I was having to think about options to the Vietnam War draft, the only parts of Canada I'd seen had been the Frozen North, i.e. Toronto and Montreal Sudbury and other places within 50 miles of the US border and east of the Rockies. It was ok, but not attractive - when I visited Vancouver as an adult, I realized there'd been a whole other range of options I'd have been happy to have known about :-) Fortunately my lottery number was safe, and it was the last year of the draft, so I never had to explore it.
Now I live in Silicon Valley, and except for two months of rain during the winter, if I don't like the temperature I can drive a short distance and find whatever temperature I'd prefer, though it's never really too hot or too cold, and the mountains and ocean are nearby. You get used to that too, surprisingly bloody fast - it's annoying to be a wimp about it, but hey, it was cold enough today that I wore a long-sleeved shirt. (My real problem with going to cold places these days is that most of my really-cold-weather clothing has worn out, so I don't have a decent ski jacket any more, and there's no reason to buy one around here.)
I used to do business with a Vancouver-based tech firm in the late 80s. One of their people was a dual citizen, and he'd occasionally smuggle lab equipment back and forth across the border in his car because he was tired of having it held up by Canadian customs when he shipped it formally.
My other dealings with Canadian officials have been relatively uneventful. On one trip we had papers saying our cat had all her shots, but she was hiding under the car seat asleep when we got to customs and they didn't notice her. I did get pulled over for speeding by a cop who on foot - he was standing by the side of the road with a radar gun, catching people coming over the hill from out in the country when they got to the town speed limit - but he decided that since we had a US rental car, the paperwork would be too much work to be worth the bother.
I think the Feds snarled at him, but at least it was back before they could throw people in Gitmo.
On the other hand, I took a ferryboat from Egypt to Jordan, and while the customs process still involved them poking though your bags, they were friendly about it. The tables where they handled the locals had a big pile between them of confiscated contraband, mostly videotapes and hash. They didn't give the people a hard time, just took their stuff, and of course presumably took it away at the end of their shift to go sell it, because that *is* the reason you get a job as a third-world customs inspector.
The worst I've seen border-guard thugs do was drag some Turkish guy off a train at the Germany-Czechoslovakia border; I don't remember which direction he'd been travelling, so I don't know if it was the Germans or Czechs being racist about Turks. It was early-90s, post-Communist, so it wasn't quite like the Soviets any more, but East European border guards were still getting jobs for the fun of shouting at people rather than confiscating contraband.