I have a love/hate relationship with The Economist. I love the way it covers the world and gives me a non-US perspective; I love the witty writing; I love the culture and science sections; I love the year-end special issues. I hate to skip anything in the issue, and I hate the price ($249/year).

My subscription came up for renewal this week. I noticed that they have a discount for a three-year subscription ($629), so I tried to get that price. It’s easy if you’re not a subscriber yet, but if you are, you have to work through their customer service desk. I tried to do it last night through their Live Chat – I got disconnected three times and gave up.

This morning, the customer service phone line was open, so I called and started my way down the voice menu tree, when I heard “Press ‘1’ if you’re considering cancelling your subscription.” I wasn’t planning to cancel, but I pressed ‘1’ anyway and two minutes later, I had renewed for one year at half-price. It’s just like dealing with the cable company!

We took the Prius back to the mechanic and they put in another new coolant pump (under warranty, so all it cost us was time) – I hope this one is good.

I didn’t have much time to work on restoring the Mac mini; I’m in the middle of copying all of my data (it takes hours). I won’t have much time to deal with it tomorrow, either; we will be walking the Turkey Trot in the morning and joining friends for Thanksgiving dinner later on.

I was too confident in yesterday’s posting.

The “Check Engine” light returned this afternoon; I took the car to the mechanic and they ordered another coolant pump and will install it tomorrow. I hope.

I spent hours trying to solve the permissions problem on the Mac. Web searching turned up a few useful leads (this one from Rainforest, this one from Sentinel Labs, and this one from Howard Oakley at Eclectic Light Company), all of which pointed to the tcc.db database in the system and user Application Support directory. I had copied the system tcc.db database from my other Mac last night and things seemed to be working – but this morning, I had the same raft of permissions problems.

So I deleted the database (both copies) and rebooted. As expected, the system asked me to reauthorize a lot of apps. Then I logged off and back on, and everything was still OK. I left the machine alone for a couple of hours and the screen turned off (as expected), but when I logged back in, I had the same problems (all of my running tasks had been killed, and the permissions problems were back).

I gave up. I made sure my backup was good, and then I nuked the SSD so I could do a truly clean reinstall. I nuked it so hard that the system lost its pairing with my keyboard and trackpad – luckily, I have a wired keyboard and trackball for emergencies!

So far, I’ve let the system reinstall Monterey (the version of Mac OS that came with the computer) and have upgraded it to Ventura (the current version). I haven’t installed any software or copied my data yet – that’s tomorrow’s project.