Crap design!

A few years back, Bill bought me a lovely Singer sewing machine. I haven't used it much, running up a few drapes, some small projects (table cloths, a cover for a storage unit etc). It's hardly been over used.

While I was working on a project two weeks ago, the light burned out. Without a light on the work area, it's very hard to sew! Now, my mother's old machine had a fridge-type light. Unscrew old, insert new. No problem. But this one? I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to remove it. Nothing in the manual. And I couldn't find an exact part on the Sears site that matched the model of Singer machine I have. So I dropped a note to Singer (two weeks ago) asking how to change it. And now I get this reply:

Thank you for contacting Singer.  The light on your machine is an LED light.  It is part of a harness and cannot be changed by the owner.

So just to change the damned light, I have to take it to a service center; and since it is 'part of a harness' I'm betting a whole bunch of stuff has to be removed to replace it. I don't even want to think how much this 'repair' will cost. Talk about built-in obsolescence. It's a total FAIL in the design of a sewing machine to make the work light a 'service center repair' instead of a simple swap.

Amending, by the numbers

It's interesting that so many of the Republican candidates have now signed on to a pledge to amend the US constitution to permanently define marriage as being between one man and one woman. I wonder if any of them have considered how difficult that might be in practice?

Their first hurdle would be to get a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate. For such an amendment, it seems highly unlikely that would ever be possible. Assuming even a landslide to the Republicans in some future general election, the odds of them having super majorities in both houses in the near future is slim. (They could take control of the Senate in 2012, but they may actually lose control of the House; and in both cases, a super majority is unlikely).

But let's assume that they do in fact manage to pass the amendment. Then it has to go to the states, where 38 state legislatures must approve it. They'd have seven years or so to do that (not that the limit is set in the constitution, but there is precedent for a limit to the time taken to ratify).

Right now, we have marriage equality in six states: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York. We also have DC, but that doesn't count when amending the constitution. (Unfortunately, there is the possibility of a reversal in New Hampshire - fingers crossed on that one.) Coming up we have a good chance that it will pass in Washington state, and a slim chance in New Jersey. California may or may not reverse Prop 8 on appeal, and either way that's likely headed to the US Supreme Court. We also have civil union legislation in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. So we currently have a number of friendly states who (assuming legislatures don't vote against their own current legal positions) would refuse to ratify.

There are also a number of states that I suspect would not vote to have anything further added to the constitution, because they prefer the freedom of their own state to make decisions about such issues.

On the flip side, there is a formidable list of 37 states that now have a definition of marriage (as one man, one woman) in their state constitution:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut (though the provision was invalidated by state court), Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa (though the provision was invalidated by the US Supreme Court), Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington (though this may change in 2011), West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

But I'm not convinced all of those states would vote to ratify a US Constitutional change. The changes to the state constitutions were made with voter approval on those measures; it seems unlikely that the state legislatures would take it upon themselves to simply ratify a change to the US constitution without consulting their electorate in some way. Polling data shows that sentiment is continuing to move slowly toward acceptance of marriage equality.

Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic that any future Republican administration would be unsuccessful in adding such an amendment. We'd have a fight on our hands for sure; a fight that would energize both left and right. But in the end, I believe we've passed that critical point (probably back in the first GW administration) when such an amendment was really feasible.