A judge has ruled that a four year old can be sued for running into someone (in this case, an old lady) on her bike. ED Kain brilliantly responds:

What we really need are more reasons to keep kids from playing outside, engaging in physical activity, and generally engaging in traditional ‘childhood’ or ‘kid’ behavior. Why let them ride real bikes – obviously a recipe for death and mayhem – when they could be playing biking games on their Wii? Better yet, we should keep them in school all day, year round, so they can learn to be productive individuals contributing to society, rather than little monsters gleefully running down old ladies.

Lawsuits are a good first step, of course, but certainly not enough to stave off the coming epidemic of overly active children. 4-year-olds found biking recklessly – training wheels or no – should be prosecuted by the full force of the law. Our prisons are under populated, and especially so in regards to this particular demographic. Time to crack down on these little hooligans, show them we mean business.

Furthermore, parents need to engage in pre-emptive measures to ensure this sort of behavior doesn’t come to pass in the first place. It is quite likely your child suffers from ADHD and should be promptly medicated. A combination of television, prescription drugs, and repetitive schooling should do the trick.

This ties in nicely with a link passed on by Abel about Halloween:

Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

There was actually an episode of The Commish dedicated to the topic. They had a psych-profile workup of the type of people that would poison children. And, of course, a resident of Eastbridge was trying to do just that. I figured it was one of those vanishingly rare things that the media blew out of proportion. I didn’t know that it didn’t exist. I suppose it’s like the Toyota unintended acceleration problem. Parents swore that they didn’t let their kids eat too much candy and so when their kids ended up getting sick, they feared poison.

CNN has an article about church-going (black) women having difficulty finding a man:

In raising the issue, {San Fransisco Examiner writer Deborrah} Cooper ignited a public conversation about a topic that is increasingly getting attention in the black community and beyond. Oprah Winfrey, among others, recently hosted a show about single black women and relationships after a Yale University study found that 42 percent of African-American women in the United States were unmarried.

Big Miller Grove Missionary Baptist Church, a predominately African-American Baptist church in Atlanta, is holding a seminar on the question of faith’s role in marital status on August 20.

“Black women are interpreting the scriptures too literally. They want a man to which they are ‘equally yoked’ — a man that goes to church five times a week and every Sunday just like they do,” Cooper said in a recent interview.

“If they meet a black man that is not in church, they are automatically eliminated as a potential suitor. This is just limiting their dating pool.”

This, of course, runs headlong into a lot of what we hear around these parts, which is that women usually have the option of a good man if they want one and if they end up with something else that’s because it’s their preference. The theory goes that women purposefully bypass nice and stable men in favor of bad boy alpha males.

Some women, of course, do this. Sometimes because the women are rather dysfunctional themselves (like bring attracted to like) and some women just have bad taste. The implication, however, is that women are the ones pulling the levers and men (with the exception of precious few) are just along for the ride. In some environments this may be true, but in others it most definitely is not.

This is important to recognize because it is in these environments that single motherhood typically thrive. A lot of times we look at women that go it alone or get impregnated by some ne’er-do-well and wonder why they didn’t make better decisions when it came to men. Sometimes, of course, this is valid as some women have awful choice in men (just as the reverse is true). But it’s often the case that they are simply considering the options they have. A lot of women are sleeping with guys outside of the context of a relationship not because they would “prefer 5 minutes with an alpha over a lifetime with a beta” but rather because they lack other options. Their options are not to sleep with some guy that won’t treat them right or find some good fella who will, but rather accept the fleeting companionship of someone that demands sex as a prerequisite - often someone that otherwise treats them poorly - or being alone.

This is particularly true in certain segments of the population where there is a man shortage. Or a shortage of men with any discernible quality. The black community in particular is hit hard by the number of men going in and out of prison, exceptionally high unemployment rates, and high crime rates in general. When it comes to the black community, the number of decent women (defined as being self-supporting and having a relatively clean criminal record) vastly outnumber that of decent men. Now, maybe it’s true that these women should look outside the black community, but as others have pointed out, black women (like Asian men) are the losers in the musical chairs of interracial dating. It’s not clear that white, Asian, and Hispanic men are lining up at the opportunity. And most people want to date people with similar backgrounds.

But this isn’t just an issue in the black community (and this post is not really about the black community). If you look at the poor white communities you will often see the same sort of thing. While white men are substantially less likely than black men to end up in prison, they’re still far more likely than white women to end up there. Or homeless. Or, these days, perpetually jobless and unemployable. Society’s most successful and least successful participants are typically men. Women seem, generally, most likely to populate the center (after school is over with, anyway).

So imagine a graph to this effect. Women with a tall curve towards the center and men with a flatter curve and higher numbers on each end. Women on the left (dysfunctional) side of the curve, in the third quartile, are going to pretty substantially outnumber the men. Look at the third and fourth quartile as a whole and women are going to populate the most functional half and men the least. Women in the third quartile that are close to the halfway point are sometimes going to be able to get men in the second quartile, but you don’t have to move too far to the left before the general dearth of men in the middle is going to be a problem.

The long and short of it is that a lot of women on the left side of the curve are going to be stuck in their own half. That half is one in which women are going to generally be more functional than men. In other words, they are going to either end up with someone less functional than they are or they’re going to end up alone. Even the women on the fourth quartile are not in as advantageous a position as we might think because though they are outnumbered by men, a substantial portion of the men are either completely unavailable or undateable by any standard because they’re dead, in prison, completely dysfunctional alcoholics, pedophiles, homeless, or have a serious anti-social personality disorder. So at best these women have their pick of a very bad lot. The kind of lot that if they did date these men they would be further proof of how women are attracted to awful and dysfunctional men.

In reference to mail-order brides, Phi objects that women can be critical of the dating choices of men that they wouldn’t date. This is a fair observation. But I think it behooves us men to ask ourselves if we do the same thing. Case and point: Anne McClaren. It is unlikely that Phi or I would ever seriously contemplate dating such a woman (for any substantial period of time) even if she were quite attractive (and, actually, she is). Even if you set aside the fact that she’s got three kids (and a fourth on the way) to men of varying degrees of worthlessness and that she may be attracted to this sort, she has a host of other drawbacks that would be dealbreakers even if she had sober taste in men. She can’t hold down a job, can’t support herself, can’t take care of children, and has a history with drugs. If she’s half as smart as her sister is, you can’t tell it by virtue of the fact that she’s a walking, talking wreck. And, to be honest, given that I wouldn’t have dated her if I were her age and living in Appalachia and unmarried unless I was absolutely desperate, I am disinclined to be all that condemning towards her taste in men.

Not just, I should add, because of the kids in tow. In fact, since all three have been taken up by her parents, they don’t even factor in. But the kids and the drugs and all that are the result of an impulsive and reckless nature that I would find unattractive even if it all the bad stuff hadn’t happened yet.

And so it goes with a lot of the women that become single mothers to some guy that wouldn’t commit to a weekend much less to nuptials. I remember a while back when I was at Dharla’s birthday party and met an attractive and seemingly smart girl that got knocked up by some guy who promptly disappeared. A part of me wondered why she seemed to have such bad taste in men. I got to know her and discovered that she was really quite bitchy and entitled - and beautiful or not most decent men wouldn’t want to be with her anyway. And this girl did not seem remotely as incompetent as Anne. Neither Anne nor this girl is unworthy of criticism, but their removal (or the removal of people like them) from my dating sphere was really no great loss.

And not because she wasn’t attracted to men like me. Lots of women were unattracted to men like me. Some real quality women were very, very unattracted to me. But those women didn’t get knocked up by some semi-functional jerk or throw away a promising future for parties and pot and directionless hanging out. They weren’t the type of woman to do so.

Those that I’ve kept in touch with (thanks, Facebook) mostly married guys who were… a lot like them. A couple married guys that seem kinda like me, actually, except better looking or with better job prospects. Others married guys that were more… well, normal, like they were and I wasn’t.

I think along similar lines when it came to the ones I never asked out. Will Tyson’s sister was cute and, though she never made any romantic overtures, oddly nice to me. I briefly considered making a move but was enthusiastically warned against it. And I thank them for it because even if she had said yes, nothing good would have come of it on my end. On her end… she might not be in prison right now if I’d tried. She and a later boyfriend tried were convicted of armed robbery (he robbed, she was in the car). Women attracted to jerks? Women finding a suitable mate? Women just doing the best they can? Chances are she was never interested in me because I wasn’t her type. But neither was she mine in any meaningful sense, my temporary infatuation notwithstanding.

This post isn’t a full-frontal assault on notions of hypergamy or the Alpha-Beta Theory. Merely, it’s to point out that a good portion of the women removed from the dating scene because they got knocked up or because they date losers aren’t really women that we would consider dating anyway. They’re women with two strikes against them often trying to get the most out of their situation or women making the same poor choices in romance that they make in other aspects of their life that make them not our type anyway. And oftentimes they’re actually quite decent people, but somewhat unintelligent or socialized in a way that we would be hard-pressed to want to introduce them to our families or simply from a subculture with which we are not likely to be able to relate all that well to.

Jon Last writes about rage against the breeders. Last also wrote a (long, long and) comprehensive article on America’s one-child policy.

The death of embarrassment.

China has enough vacant properties to house half of America.

The science of multitasking.

Why smartphones all seem to go for $199. When I was working for a smartphone-related company, the goal was actually $99. It’s extremely hard to get there.

Canadian authorities are trying to slow drivers down with 3D images of children. It’s a fascinating concept and I love Nudge’s idea of shortening freeway stripes to slow drivers down, but I wonder if things like this might have the potential to backfire. Somebody only marginally paying attention may completely freak out or alternately doing such things could lead to compensating individuals not to take notice of things they ought to take notice of because most of it’s trickery anyway.

I’ve commented in the past that I do not view Peak Oil as imminent. Some are speculating that we’re headed towards a glut.

Does switching to diet hinder weight loss? At best, it seems to have no effect despite what should be an enormous gain in calories. It just goes to prove my long-standing contention that despite soft drinks being alleged “empty calories”, they do actually fill you up. I mean, I don’t know that there are any worse calories out there, but if you give up soft drinks you probably need a plan in place for what you’re going to do when your appetite peaks.

Russia is pondering its own operating system. It seems kind of unclear as to whether or not said operating system will be a variation of Linux or simply built on it. It would be kind of cool if a government would put its resources into actually making a version of Linux good for non-geeks to use, but I’m not sure the Russians would be my first pick.

Some ideas on how to save NBC. There are actually some good ones in there (particularly “theme night”), though I disagree with the author’s taste and stridency. NBC is assuredly in trouble, but “it’s ridiculously awful” is wildly inexact code for “I don’t care for it.”

Occasionally, I wander over to a certain blog whose name I don’t really want to link to (yeah, we’re small, but why give him the traffic?), just to see how things are.

For those who wish to piecemeal the name together, it starts with “little”, has a color, and then mentions the name of the ball associated with the most popular pro sport in America today and/or the name of the ball used by the other “worldwide most popular sport.” I’m sure our readers are smart enough to figure it out.

The commentariat has changed there, and yet has not. Once, it was pretty much a rabidly right-wing echo chamber that consisted of many people shouting epithets. Now, due to a conversion for unknown reasons, it has morphed into a rabidly left-wing echo chamber that consists of… many people shouting epithets. The blogger’s style of shouting epithets and making guilt-by-association attacks, of course, indicates to the commentariat that this is what he wants - an echo chamber that agrees with him at all times.

What intrigued me, however, wasn’t that. It was the way the owner of the blog made his “point” in attacking someone who strayed outside of the enforced groupthink.

First, he blocked their account. He has a long history of doing this to enforce groupthink.

Second… he removed all the vowels from their posts.

It’s the second that gets me. Specifically, it gets me because this individual has made a habit of accusing people he is kicking out of the blog of making crazy/racist/offensive statements on his blog. Many people have said, previously, that anything in his site is suspect. He’s been caught re-editing old posts before, “disappearing” many things from the past lest they be referenced today.

More to the point, a number of the banned posters have indicated that they did NOT make the statements that are held up on his site as the “reason” they were banned.

There is an integrity question for bloggers. People know that posts can be deleted. They know that people can be banned for crossing certain lines. But at some point, a blogger crosses the line to where it seems an entirely reasonable suggestion that the “banned” users were actually the target of a frame-up job.

And that’s just not cool.

Editor’s note: I previously covered this blog in an earlier post as well.

One of my frustrations, when I was just getting in the working world, was that jobs listed as “entry-level” would require five years or more of experience. It seems to me that entry-level, as I would define it, means that you don’t have to come in having much, if any, experience. Of course, the term lends itself to multiple interpretations. Entry-level is also euphemistic for “bottom of the food chain” and in the event that the job market is so crappy that they can require experience even for the bottom jobs, I guess that’s not an unfair definition.

Now that I have more experience, a part of me is very sympathetic to employers picking off more qualified candidates for positions that they are overqualified for. For my last several jobs (even before the economy got bad) I somewhat relied on it. Of my last four IT-related jobs, I was overqualified for three of them. But I didn’t care because my main goal was to get a job. Clancy wasn’t making enough to support us both and so even a job that paid less than required to get by on was helpful (though none of my jobs were that bad, thanks in part to having mostly lived in parts of the country with lower costs of living). I remember being asked in various interviews what my career goal was. I didn’t know how to say “to do computer work that people will pay me for, whatever that work is” and that wasn’t the “right” answer anyway.

Things have changed somewhat now that Clancy is pulling in an actual doctor’s salary. Now I don’t have to take any job that comes around. That didn’t stop me from applying for a job for which I was overqualified at the hospital (or taking a job with the census bureau), but it has kept me from looking too hard for work in Redstone, an hour away. Also at issues are taxes, where any job I take has nearly 40% chopped off of it (worse when the tax cuts expire) now that we’re in a higher tax bracket and in a state with a significant income tax. All of this is my way of saying that I don’t need a job right now and the marginal benefit of my taking one (or the cost of not having one) is not what it used to be.

All of this leads me to The Atlantic Wire’s collection of articles on the phenomenon of employers hiring overqualified workers. The 22-year old in me hates employers doing this, the 28-year old in me loves them doing it. The 30-something in me just kind of shrugs as he realizes that his opinion doesn’t matter much, now does it? But the pros and cons listed in the article do strike home because they are things that I have considered. When the hospital didn’t hire me, a part of me was happy that someone that needed the job more actually got it. Score one against the generation of unskilled workers, who can’t get experience because they don’t have a job and can’t find a job because they don’t have any experience.

The concerns about unmotivated workers also applies to me because I am not sure how enthusiastic I would be about driving two hours a day for a job in Redstone that I don’t need doing things some local kid could do. Of course, employers can sidestep this by how they treat their workers - my job with Mindstorm was pretty tedious but they treated me well so I liked being there - but it’s economies like this when employers start getting short-sighted in their belief that they don’t have to give an inch cause there are fifty people waiting for every position they open. Falstaff in Deseret worked this way and I was always looking for better opportunities despite the friendships I had forged.

So I still don’t entirely know what to do with myself. I tried to volunteer at the local community center, but they never got back to me. That was probably just as well since I was mostly looking at doing so as an excuse to get out of the house only to find out that they had made it a work-from-home sort of thing. My attempts to crack into open source software testing has proven to be more complicated than I had initially expected. I am good at tackling steep learning curves, but I do apparently need a little guidance in how to get started and since it’s all informal and unpaid there’s no “boss” to provide such guidance. My plans for starting my own business also hit a snag, which I won’t get into. So the end result may well be that I snatch a job in Redstone away from some pimply kid who really needs it.

Maura Kelly, mentioning Hit Coffee favorite Mike & Molly, raised some eyebrows with this:

My initial response was: Hmm, being overweight is one thing — those people are downright obese! And while I think our country’s obsession with physical perfection is unhealthy, I also think it’s at least equally crazy, albeit in the other direction, to be implicitly promoting obesity! Yes, anorexia is sick, but at least some slim models are simply naturally skinny. No one who is as fat as Mike and Molly can be healthy. And obesity is costing our country far more in terms of all the related health problems we are paying for, by way of our insurance, than any other health problem, even cancer.

So anyway, yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

Just as am discomforted being in an elevator with someone that has massive burn scarring that has consumed their face. It’s not an unnatural reaction to respond negatively to someone aesthetically displeasing. Of course, the difference when it comes to obesity is that we get to tuck it into something self-righteous. It seems wrong to be disgusted with someone that had the misfortune to be in their house as it burns down. But the obesity thing, you see, is about health. Maura herself says that of course they could lose the weight if they only tried. Trying. If only they’d thought of that. To be fair, this is something I used to agree with until (a) I saw how abysmal the numbers actually were on sustained weight-loss of large amounts of weight and (b) that weight-loss through force-of-will was a losing proposition (or a not-losing proposition, depending on how you look at it).

I would actually be more understanding of Maura’s point if the show were about fat-and-happy people that were reveling in it by calling each other Big Mama and the like. While Mike and Molly make jokes about it, they’re pretty self-conscious jokes in nature. They don’t accept their weight so much as it is a personal struggle that they’re losing.

Maura has taken (in my view) an excessive amount of heat for this article, though. Her bio page now has some hateful comments and she has since issued an apology. I think this, as with many things, is something that people should approach more carefully. Not just Maura, but her critics. The fact is that a whole lot of people think like she does. Invective against her is invective against all of those that feel that way, which is most people who are not nor have ever been fat themselves. It’s better to simply point out the problems with being so glib about problems that they have never really faced and point out the statistics about how truly difficult sustained weight-loss (of large amounts of weight) actually is.

Commented on here in the past has been interchange fees on credit cards. My position at the time was that it was probably a good thing that credit cards forced retailers not to pass on the interchange fees (because it encouraged people to get used to the concept of cards) but that maybe it wasn’t needed anymore (because we’re too comfortable with it). In the course of our conversation, Web won me over to the point of view that regardless of whether or not masking the fees was a good thing at the start that the time has come for retailers to be able to start passing these charges along.

One of the things that convinced me was the research I did based on some of the things he said, which demonstrated that one of the most damning things about the card/retailer relationship was that the latter would have absolutely no idea what the fees would be at the end of the day. That sort of lack of transparency is really problematic. As is, on a larger scale, the consumers being unaware of what the interchange fees are, exactly, is also something that I am less than comfortable with. I know people who get agitated and angry when retailers put minimum purchases on card purchases (which they’re not supposed to do, but sometimes do anyway) without any real idea that there are absolute reasons why they would do this. It also provides credit card companies the ability to inflate interchange fees without the consumer objecting, despite the fact that we get bit in the end. All of this aggravated by the fact that which card the consumer uses ends up mattering because some cut the retailers less than others. All of this provides no incentive for banks to keep charges down. After all, you can’t accept a low-interchange card without also accepting a high-interchange one if they’re under the same banner (Visa, Mastercard, etc). And so, I decided that passing these charges on to the consumer in a more transparent manner is a win/win for everyone except the card companies.

Apparently a little while ago an agreement was reached with Mastercard and Visa that allows retailers to cut slack to people that use the lower-intercharge cards. With all of the above in mind, this strikes me as a good thing. Some of the ways in which this will make things even more complicated for the consumer make me cringe, but the entire system was set up in a very complicated fashion and it’s not realistic for the consumer to be immune from this. Ultimately, I’m not sure how much good this is actually going to do since really only for the largest of the large retailers will it be worthwhile to complicate the system. But it’s a start. And it seems that it would have to provide more leeway for cash discounts, which are allowed but for which the rules are a bit ambiguous.

This would all be much easier if retailers would be allowed to do what my old comic shop used to do. They basically said that for any purchase under $10, they wanted a $.50 fee for using a debit card. They were actually upfront that they couldn’t do this and framed it more as a request. Even though money was tight, I complied.

Ultimately, what would be really nice is market pressure to simplify the process. I’m not entirely sure how to get there from here, though. The barriers-to-entry are so tough that those at the top can stick together without formal agreements that would violate anti-trust law and nobody is going to come along with vanilla-only cards and none of them are going to simplify things for the sake of a consumer that is likely to remain oblivious to the deals that are going on behind the curtains. You could try to regulate simplicity by forcing interchange caps and the like, but I’m not there yet for supporting that.

The bright side of wrong.

This is really the only way to combat prostitution, in my view. Go after those with the most to lose. That’s more likely to be the johns than the prostitutes. Speaking of Sweden, they have awesome thieves.

There seems to be a slate of “things you think you know are wrong” and this falls into that category. Stretching was considered sacrosanct in PE.

Happy to see that Happy Burger (the regional chain from where I grew up, pseudonymmed) rates so well by Consumer Reports.

Beijing is raising its minimum wage. As I’ve said, Chinese labor won’t be this cheap forever. Of course, they have quite a long ways to go before closing the gap with us.

Why innocent people confess. There’s really a thin line between interrogating the guilty to get them to confess and confusing the innocent into thinking that confession is their best option. Relatedly, dogs have been declared unreliable witnesses.

This sounds like a pretty sweet gig.

Does early voting hurt turnout? It’s counterintuitive, but makes sense in its own way. Even aside from this, I think that something is lost when we no longer have an “election day.” Our votes essentially don’t matter individual basis, particularly when it comes to the presidential vote. I mostly do it to reserve bitching rights and to participate in the process. By my perhaps old-fashioned way of thinking, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November is a part of that process.

I am all about increasing the gasoline tax and other things so that our roads pay for themselves. However, the conversion of existing roads into toll roads for some reason bothers me a bit. I like toll roads as a concept, but I think I like it better when there is a free, slower option.

Are family films sexist?

They have all been smash hits: Finding Nemo, Madagascar, Ice Age, Toy Story. Fish, penguins, rats, stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right? Sure, except there are few female characters in those films. There are certainly few doing anything meaningful or heroic—and no, Bo Peep doesn’t count. I know, there’s the ditzy, amnesiac Dory in Nemo, and the cute cowgirl in Toy Story, but these are sidekicks and exceptions. It’s weird, isn’t it? It was one area in which I optimistically thought progress must have been made—the realm of children’s films, of fantasy, slapstick, cute animals, and moral tales. Haven’t we just finally seen a black heroine in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog? It was startling to discover that a new study has found that there is only one female character to every three male characters in family movies. Even creepier is the fact that many of the female characters are scantily clad, and hot (the Little Mermaid wasn’t always depicted popping out of a tiny bikini top).

In the comic business, there is (or was, but probably still is) an ongoing debate on the subject. Why so few female heroines? Even accounting for the fact that comic book fandom is predominately male, female leads are dramatically unrepresented even when compared to said fandom. At some point in one of the conversation, someone came forward with a study that demonstrated one pretty big reason: males, and young boys in particular, are far less likely to read a book with a female lead than vice-versa. The girls rally behind Superman far more readily than do the boys around Wonder Woman. In comic books, this is far from the only reason. Comics are generally written by men and people veer towards writing their own gender. Further, the lack of female characters makes it so that female characters run the risk of being The Female Character. It’s not enough that Wonder Woman is female, for instance, but she must embody feminism or femininity. She must come from a culture of women. She must represent women everywhere. It’s not so surprising that the character would be unappealing to men. And so it becomes a sort of cycle that female characters are few and therefore their femininity must be enhanced and so guys don’t buy the comic book and so fewer comic books with female leads get put out. And to add on top of that, men have their choices of comics with male leads and can ignore the female leads altogether while women, if they’re interested in comics, have to collect those with male leads.

Some, but not all, of this apply to family movies. I don’t know the demographics of family movie writers, so I don’t know what that role plays. Unlike comics, family movie consumers are not predominantly male to my knowledge (and it’s more likely to be women that select the movies their kids are going to see). However, the fact that male leads are common does allow boys to avoid leaving the comfort zone of lead characters that share their gender (if not their species!). And it’s possible that there is something inherent in boys (either biologically or in terms of social conditioning) that make them less likely to see themselves in female characters.

But the study about male characters versus female ones does ring true to me. And I think that these things do matter. One of my favorite comic book characters of all time, Helena (Huntress) Bertinelli is female*. Another one of them, Ted (Blue Beetle) Kord, is male. While I love both of these characters, Kord was more of an idol to me. Partially because of the peculiarities of his character (his battle with his weight, for instance), but in part because it’s easier to see myself in Ted than in Helena even though, at the time, my personality was far more aligned with the latter. Having icons to look up to is important even if they’re bears or attendees of a wizarding academy.

* - The Huntress managed to avoid what befell Wonder Woman by virtue of the fact that she started out as a supporting character. Batman’s daughter, in her original iteration. When they brought the character back after a re-sorting of the internal history of DC Comics, they severed the familial relationship and she did actually start off in her own series. It failed, in part due to the comparative unattractiveness of the character (they intentionally made her plain looking at the outset), and she became a supporting character in the Batman line. Her character grew mostly in the context of her being a supporting character, though. A really good comic book series, Birds of Prey (which included the Huntress, among other), featured some of the most interesting female characters in comics. All of them got their start or became well-known primarily due to their association with male characters (Black Canary as Green Arrow’s ex-girlfriend, Oracle as the former Batgirl, Huntress as a rival to Batman, Lady Shiva as a villain, Hawkgirl as Hawkman’s partner, Big Barda as Mister Miracle’s wife, and Power Girl as an exception). It is positive, I suppose, that female characters can become quite dynamic and well-developed over the course of a male-dominated series, but in another sense it’s depressing when that’s the only real way it seems to happen.

When our current byzantine system of home loans was created, nobody really expected this:

Representatives of Deutsche Bank told The Daily Caller via email that the bank’s involvement in the Jeffs case [wherein a guy named Jeffs was denied the opportunity to show up at a foreclosure trial -ed] was merely nominal, as it had to be named as the plaintiff in the case because it ultimately held the right to foreclose, not Chase, which originally made the loan and which was accepting Jeffs’ payments and forwarding them to the proper recipients. But Chase had tried to work out a loan modification with Jeffs, and he was current on his payments when Chase abruptly informed him that his modification was denied without explanation. Several days later, Jeffs found out that he supposedly no longer owned his home. He stopped making payments, and he hasn’t made them since. But no bank has been able to successfully repossess and sell the property. To the banking system, the asset backed by the house—the mortgage—has simply vanished into thin air.

Does that mean that Jeffs is finally in the clear? Not exactly. “Quite often, what happens in these cases is the bank creates new documents to fix the old documents,” said Goldman. “One of the most common things we see is a paper with a notary stamp that gives the bank the legal authority to foreclose. Well, anyone can buy those stamps. I can buy those stamps. A lot of what’s going on is law firms desperate to win a case are hired by banks who don’t know what those law firms are up to. Then the bank thinks it can foreclose, even though other banks also think they have that right, and those banks might not figure out what happened for a long time because the system is absolutely overloaded with foreclosures. And even if they do figure it out, suing to repossess a property that another bank already sold is a long and arduous process. So you wind up with a scenario in which the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

It’s easy to look at this situation and say “Oh, that’s all just a bunch of buck-passing. Of course they expected it and this is their way out of it!” or something to that effect. The problem is that the system they created is disadvantaging them more than anyone else. They have enough legitimate foreclosures that they don’t need to toss legitimate homeowners out of their house. And it’s not like once the homeowners are gone they’re going to make a killing in the re-selling. As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence (well, incompetence and reckless disregard). This isn’t to let the banks off the hook. Right now I am not sure how much they care about “false positive” evictions except insofar as it is an inconvenience to them. As such, of course, we need to make it as inconvenient to them as possible. Congress and the White House have been trying to meddle in the housing meltdown since the start (well, before the start, many will point out) with forcing re-negotiations and the like. It strikes me as a flypaper sort of thing where the more they try to do the more they mess things up.

However, if they wanted to set up a system wherein someone erroneously foreclosed on is guaranteed a reward, I wouldn’t object. You would have to be kind of careful, though, because it’s easy to find a goof-up in the paperwork of even legitimate foreclosures due to the system’s inadequacies. You might want to limit it so that the only ones who get compensation are those that are actually up to date on their mortgage or owe none. This is one of those cases where it’s really tempting to stick it to the banks, but I’m not sure it’s in our interest. It is in our interest, though, for a lot of the pending foreclosures to actually go through. We can’t recover until we know where we are. If the foreclosures are delayed and smattered over the next decade, it’s going to prevent any rebound or growth in the market. Of course, growth in the market helped start this whole mess, but that was in part because the growth was a bubble. Suggesting that we don’t want a robust housing economy because of the housing bubble is like suggesting that we want Dow Jones to stay as low as possible because of what happened in the early naughts.

Clancy and I were talking about our plans for our future living arrangements (now that we’ve signed a longer-term contract, do we want to consider buying?). I know that for my part, buying is the last thing I am interested in until we know what the actual value of a house is within a reasonable margin of error. We can’t know that until we know how many vacancies we have.

As they say, it’s funny because it’s true.

Another one that I stumbled across looking for that first one:

I almost called this “TV Review:” to fit in with the other reviews of new shows, but this is less about the quality of the show and more about a couple of themes it brought up. The basic premise of the Better With You (as with other shows such as “Til Death” and “Rules of Engagement” as well as the British show “Cold Feet”) is following the adventures of three couples at different stages in their relationship. In this case, you have long-married Joel and Vicky, long-term yuppie cohabitants Ben and Maddie, and newly-coupled Mia and Casey. The only two other things you need to know are that Joel and Vickey are Maddie and Mia’s parents and that Casey knocked Mia up and so she’s pregnant and they are immediately engaged.

In the first episode, everyone meets Casey and the situation that she and Mia are in. Maddie and Ben are stunned when the parents are extremely supportive and excited about the engagement and the grandchild. Though he’s a dimwit and not responsible like Ben, Casey is immediately accepted as a member of the family. The entire situation accentuates the fact that Ben and Maddie have been together for nine years and are neither married nor parents. Leaving aside the marriage issue (I’ll get to that in a minute), the parenthood issue struck home a bit with me because in that sense they are doing the “responsible” thing and waiting until they are settled down and entirely ready before taking that next step. And for all of these shows of responsibility, the parents start half-favoring the irresponsible ones that are unintentionally giving them a grandkid.

It hit home with me because my parents are getting antsy about grandkids. My brother Ollie has kids, but it’s not quite the same since Ollie has always been so independent, a little different, and not a Truman by blood. He did buy us some time, but they still want both Mitch and I to have kids. And since Mitch has already said that he won’t… well… we become the designated grandchildren-bearers. Naturally, they want us to do it the right way. But we’re already married and now that we’re not moving around every year or two (we hope) the timing is getting good. But for reasons I’m not getting into, it’s not going to happen for another year or so, assuming that everything goes account to plan. According to plan. Though they want us to do things the right way and though having a baby back when she was a resident would have been a logistical nightmare, they would have been ecstatic nonetheless. They probably would have been happy even if Clancy and I hadn’t been married yet, cultural disapproval aside. Sometimes, I wonder in retrospect if they would have been happier if one of those pre-Clancy pregnancy scares with others would have at least given them that grandkid.

In that sense, I could relate Maddie and Ben. “Wait… all we had to do to get you this excited for us is f*ck up?!” That’s pretty unfair, though, as they were very happy for us at our wedding and they do like Clancy a great deal (a lot more than they expected to like any woman that I would marry - they expected me to find someone that they disliked). But… it’s hard to overlook that had a pregnancy test with Julianne actually come up positive, they would have an 11-year old grandkid. A divorced son, most likely, but a grandkid nonetheless. Maybe more than one before the likely divorce.

While I could relate to Maddie and Ben on the issue or monogamy and children, they lose a lot of my sympathy on the marriage issue. On the third episode, they are upset that Ben is not allowed to be in the family Christmas card while Casey is. Joel, the father, had pretty simple reasoning. “They’re having a kid and you’re not and they’re getting married and you’re not. If you get married, he gets to be in the Christmas Card.” They object on the basis that he’s really family and that Joel is being unfair.

I don’t think he is. I mean, to me it’s something that could go either way, but something I see on TV pretty frequently is this notion that non-married, long-term cohabitants deserve the same respect as married couples. The nature and love of the relationship is more important than the piece of paper. I don’t think that’s inherently true at all. If you want the respect that marriage brings, then you should get married. If you want the rights and privileges of being married, you should get married*. This has been an issue on some legal shows I watch where unmarried people claim that they are being discriminated against because they’re functionally married but didn’t want to be bound by that piece of paper. Sorry. That piece of paper carries meaning. Legally, but also culturally. If you choose not to respect the institution of marriage, the rest of us do not have to go along.

Both Clancy’s and my parents held the same attitudes, so that’s probably where I get it from. No matter how obvious it was that we were serious about one another, when visiting we slept in different rooms right up until the logistics of it made it too impractical (our wedding, at that point, was imminent). It never occurred to us to complain. I suppose with our own future kids Clancy and I will be ridiculously old-fashioned by maintaining the same standard. It’s something I expect we will do even if they are cohabitating like Ben and Maddie.

* - Assuming you legally can. Gay couples get a pass outside states that allow them to marry.

My father was raised in a small town in Ouachita in the state’s smallest county. It’s not a town that you hear a whole lot about. It is, however, the hometown of two former NFL players. Brothers, in fact. The older brother Luke Dawson was known for being a stand-up guy who was big into helping inner-city kids (despite the fact he was from the sticks) above and beyond what the league called for. His younger brother (over a decade younger), Mack, on the other hand, was known for being a problem case. He was the more talented of the two, but his career kept getting interrupted by team suspensions and trips to jail. When Dad told me this, he was never very specific. He just told me that Mack Dawson was bad news.

On a lark, I decided to look up Mack on a lark to find out more about him. Turns out that everything he got in trouble with was pot. Pot?! Seriously? But yeah. He got arrested for it, suspended for it, and imprisoned for it. I was expecting him to be something more along the lines of Ray Lewis. Well, not the murder part, but maybe assault. With a deadly weapon or something. Or maybe serious drugs.

But no… pot.

It’s taken for granted among some that preventative care is one of the keys to reducing medical costs. The problem is that the evidence for it is suspect. That’s not to say that preventative care is a bad idea as an ounce of prevention can be a pound of cure in the health sense. In the financial sense, it often just means a lot of money spent on prevention and when prevention in achieved you live to need more health care another day. Further, discovering something beyond the point of being able to do anything about it means that no money is spent trying to do something about it. Lastly, we talk about preventative care as though it is something that is up to hospitals and doctors and insurance companies, but some of the most effective preventative care out there is how well you take care of yourself.

The average (British?) woman dates 24 men and spends over $3000 finding Mr. Right. You know, the more of these statistics I read, the less awkward I feel about my romantic past. I didn’t date 24 women, but I don’t think I spent remotely near $3000.

Why women apologize more than men.

Things you didn’t know about sports.

Inside Canada’s black market tobacco industry.

The net worths of US Presidents. With some major outliers (Lincoln, perhaps Harry Truman), it seems that most successful presidents were successful at being wealthy, too.

Is college worth the investment? Some interesting charts. I’m not surprised that BYU ranks so high as it is very affordable for Mormons and you can’t match the networking opportunities short of the Ivy League. I am a bit surprised that so few colleges have no rate of return (when student loans are factored in).

The City of San Fransisco is looking at implementing a bait car setup. For those of you that don’t know what a bait car is, it’s a car that is left with the keys in the ignition (sometimes running), theoretically in a part of town where car theft is a problem. Now, most anybody here if you pass a car with the keys in the ignition, your response is to maybe say “idiot” and walk on. A car thief, of course, thinks differently.

Hit Coffee has been pointedly critical of a lot of police behavior on this subject and that… and so it continues!

I mean, you look at a setup like this and say “How could it go wrong?” Nobody accidentally steals a car the same way they might accidentally speed or accidentally run a red light. It’s not something that is going to affect people who aren’t, well, criminals. On the face of it, the only real objection I might have is whether or not this is the best use of resources. But even then, the cars themselves are often donated by insurance companies. There’s still the manpower issue and all that, but this is actually one of those cases where they don’t have the financial incentives that they do with traffic tickets. I mean, these aren’t people that are just going to pay a fine and move on to get caught another day. They’re charged with felonies. They’ll cost the system far more than they will pay back.

And yet… somehow, the police department in Austin, Texas, managed to screw it up. There was a case where a couple noticed the car sitting near his house and their first response was… to call the police. It seemed odd to them that someone would leave a car there with the keys in the ignition and all. Their imaginations were running away with them, but their first instinct was one of civic duty. The officers who showed up expressed no interest and said that as long as the car was legally parked they should just ignore it. And maybe they should have, but after three days or so they became concerned and their imaginations got a bit carried away with some of the oddities of the car (broken window, rope, men’s work boots, bikini top in back. They decided to investigate. They were arrested thereafter and charged with burglary of a vehicle.

Now, the two could be lying, but their police call is a matter of record and it seems pretty clear they were investigating rather than thieving. Ledford, the man in question, has it right when he said that maybe he’s guilty of trespassing but not burglary. Even so, the evidence that they were acting on anything but good faith is pretty slight. Obviously, you don’t want people going vigilante, but when people see something curious and they’ve already tried to contact the authorities, do you want them to just ignore it for fear that they might be criminally charged for their concern?

So why did Austin charge forward with this? I can think of a couple reasons. First, perhaps they were worried that Ledford was going to muck up their investigation. But the criminal charges were completely unnecessary. Instead, I fear the reason is that once you have a setup like this going with thousands of dollars put into it, you have to get results wherever you can find them. I have similar concerns with some checkpoints run by officers in departments that I expressly don’t trust (a relatively small number of departments, in the overall, to be honest). Here they are getting grant money as well as some free equipment. It may not be enough for the system to pay for itself, but the need for results is still there if you want to keep getting the money that you can (it’s not a cop’s job to try to keep expenditures down).

San Fransisco is apparently lining up with TruTV (formerly Court TV) in order to put their findings on television. On the one hand, it leads to somewhat questionable motives. On the other hand, the SFPD would probably be embarrassed to charge Ledford if he was a TV star.

They convinced Ledford to plead guilty of something irrelevant. I can’t remember what because it post-dates the article and I don’t care to listen to the whole NPR sequence where I first heard it.

In a tangent on my post about lateral upgrades, Rob mentioned that it took Apple to realize that people might want laptops in some color other than black or gray. David commented that there are people that will never get a ThinkPad (The Trumwill Choice) because of their unattractive exterior.

I want to push back, but I really can’t. Not to denigrate the virtues of their OSes or the non-superficial aspects of the products themselves (they have their merits), but Apple has pretty clearly demonstrated that they are correct. But I want to push back due to both aesthetics and the unimportance of aesthetics. On the aesthetic end of things, I actually like the way that the ThinkPads look. I like it to be boxy and unshowy (and unreflective!). Aesthetically, my favorite smartphone far-and-away is the Droid, which gets knocks on its appearance. My current smartphone is smoother around the edges and I guess looks “better”, but if I were choosing based on looks alone instead of the things that Windows Mobile can do that Android can’t, I would go with the Droid.

But mostly I want to object because I don’t understand why it should really matter what the exterior form is so long as it is unobtrusive. And so I look at these devices that intentionally try to look interesting and neat and good and just roll my eyes. I noticed this most recently when I was putting together my newest computer. It used to be that computer cases came in beige and that was pretty much it. At some point there was a transition to black, which I mildly prefer aesthetically but don’t really care. My only real complaint about that transition is that it made my old CD/DVD drives more conspicuous because they were beige while the rest of the computer black. Then silver came along, which is fine though I still wish they would just stick with one color because now there are three colors that I have to coordinate. Not to make my computer look good, exactly, but to make it look, well, inconspicuous, which to me is all that should really matter.

I miss the good old days when a computer case was meant to house a computer. There were no pointless LED lights and colors on it to make it “look better” and crap like that. The computer is not the centerpiece of my computer room. It’s something that does computing.

I suppose I am not entirely immune. The last time around I went ahead and got a black case rather than have a patchwork beige-silver-black computer. But it wasn’t a choice I should have had to make, dag-nabbit. If everything was just beige, I could simply get the case that works.

On the other hand, if my laptops came in different colors, I suppose I wouldn’t have to use electrical tape in order to be able to tell them apart…

In a comment section on Unfogged, this comment got general approval:

I associate “My self-respect requires me to fuck myself over rather than accept an unpleasant situation,” with men rather than women.

The conversation on this particular thread that followed was whether this is part of the situation that benefits men because it’s part-and-parcel of men being more aggressive about wages and such, or whether it is simply a case of men being more stupid and less rational than women.

The thing is, though, that the premise doesn’t correspond with my experience all that much. I can think of a single guy that just upped and quit a pretty good situation for a pretty stupid reason. I can think of multiple women that have done the same. Men may get pissed off more about stupid things, but our response in my experience is that we simply start looking for other work. Sometimes to find a job, sometimes just to vent, saying in effect “HA! I don’t have to work here! See! There’s another job right there, there, and there.” without ever actually applying. I would take it a step further and apply for jobs that I knew I would never get an interview for. Usually because they were located far away. But it always felt so good to send out that resume.

I attribute this difference between men and women not because men are inherently more rational (because applying for jobs in Cleveland isn’t exactly rational), but because men generally identify with their careers and their career progression moreso than women do. That’s not to say that women don’t identify with their job. Many do first and foremost. It’s just that women are more often judged on other metrics as well. For instance, I think that cleanliness in the house is a bigger issue for women than men in part because women are judged on it in a way that men generally are not. And parenting is a competitive sport among far more women than it is among men. For men, having a job and not having a job is far more likely to affect self-esteem, not to mention dating/marriage prospects.

I was going to put the quitting examples in a Ghostland post, but I’ll go ahead and put it here. Back at Falstaff, there was a girl named Catherine who upped and quitted multiple times over incredibly dumb things. One time there was a power outage and while everyone else was enjoying the time off by chit-chatting, out of nowhere she just stood up, screamed profanities, and left. She was really good at her job, so they tried and succeeded in convincing her to come back. The last time she quit, nobody really knew why. I was sitting across from her at the time. She just got up at around 10am and left. That afternoon people were wondering where she was. They finally got ahold of her and she tendered her resignation. Nobody ever knew why.

She wasn’t the only female Falstaff employee to quit dramatically. One flew into a rage at another employee and quit. She was back the following week (or maybe the week after). I’m not sure how many of these count because there was sort of an understanding that if you were good the door would remain open for you. I commented to my boss Willard that it was getting to the point that if you wanted a 4-day weekend you just dramatically quit on Thursday and agree to come back on Tuesday. At some point, the policy was changed. Catherine herself tried to come back eventually, but she was declined.

The guy who quit was my early nemesis, Teddy Forbes. His department had been shifted to another division of higher stature. It was a poorly-conceived idea and within a month or two everything was shifted back, which meant that Teddy had to go back to a smaller cubicle and had to report to Willard, which he did not want to do. So he issued an ultimatum: promote me or I quit. He quit and the last I heard from him he was a part-time employee for the school district.

It was also the case at Monmark/Soyokaze, the company I worked for in Estacado, that periodically women would up and quit for reasons that were never fully explained or understood. But I can’t recall a guy ever doing to the same.

Then there was Mindstorm, where there was another girl named Catherine that reminded me of the first Catherine. I was fond of both Catherines, actually. They were mostly quiet sorts with sweet temperaments (most of the time) who were serious about their jobs and good at what they did. My only complaint about them was that they were too shy and difficult to talk to. The second Catherine quit due to an argument that arose over email signatures. Her boss had declared that everyone needed to have a uniform email signature. She explained that she had put a lot of time and effort into her signature and she did not appreciate one bit that he should be able to arbitrarily decide what her email signature should be. He, being the boss and all, was rather insistent. She then decided that she would no longer speak to him. At all. If he wanted to communicate with her, he would have to do so through her agency handler. She was fired the next day, though I still count that as “quitting”.

I remember being blown away at the time. Actually, I didn’t find out about it until sometime later. I didn’t understand how you could just quit a job like that. Even for somebody kind of weird (though delightfully so, when you could actually get her to open up), that was just alien to me. I’ve never been remarkably career-focused, but leaving a job for the unemployment line (absent some unavoidable reason) strikes me as a sort of surrender of identity into an abyss. It seems odd to say this as someone that has been unemployed for over a year, I guess, but I am also somebody that took a job driving my car around just to have a job and someone that applied for a permanent position that I was two-steps beyond overqualified for just so I could have a job. And that’s for money that we don’t really need. Back when I didn’t have a breadwinning wife, I tried a job taking customer support calls and I hate talking on the phone.

I don’t understand Teddy Forbes, either. Don’t get me wrong, I can have a pretty short temper when it comes to things at work being organized in a way that I disapproved. This blog was founded mostly as an outlet for my work frustrations. But I started blogging. I didn’t quit. One time I was so furious at Teddy Forbes over something that I almost wanted to quit just to spite him (long story, but it would have spited him). But I also recognized how stupid this was. Instead I just told my boss Willard that I needed to walk around the building a few times to calm down. I was cool about it and Teddy was informally reprimanded for what had gotten me pissed off. And life went on and things got better (particular after Teddy left).

I am sure that Teddy is not the only male offender. Maybe my experiences are unusual. Male or female, nobody with families pulled any crap like that and most of my career has been working with mostly single or childless people. The Catherines were particularly weird even beyond their dramatic exits. But the dramatic exit is still not something I see men do all that much.

Well, except Teddy Forbes and Stephen Slater. What’s y’all’s experience?

Update: Actually, when it comes to low-skill labor, I actually can think of a couple more male examples. Julianne’s ex-boyfriend cussed his ex-boss out for “being mean” and left in a huff from the fast food place where he worked. When I was working at a different fast food place, a guy quit because the boss used the word “niggardly” (in its correct usage). In the defense of the second dude, though, there were already some… questions… about management of that particular establishment in that regard apart from this non-incident. It could have been a last (and ignorant) straw or the manager could have used that particular word specifically to provoke a reaction.

They left out what I think might have been the best one (or is it two) in one of the best episodes of the series. Liz is preparing to go to a high school reunion and thinks back to how mean everyone was to her. Later in the episode, another set of memories by her peers paints a rather different picture. I particularly appreciated it because I think a lot of us who were unpopular in our younger years often forget to take into account the role we played in it. Specifically when we were so used to being rejected, we would sometimes pre-emptively be antagonistic against people that might have actually been reaching out to us.

I may have posted on this before. If so, I apologize for the redundancy. Every now and again I hear (generally urban, generally liberal, almost always one or the other) types talk about how the suburbs are unsustainable in the long term and when energy prices start rising, people are going to move back to the city. They won’t have much of a choice.

This could be, but it isn’t nearly so imminent as many believe. They tend to look at things through the lens of two options. The option of living the right way, in densely populated cities, and the other, wrong option, which is the current suburban model. The latter, they say, will be unsustainable in the long term and therefore we will Manhattanize while the suburbs become slums as is the case in Paris and many other world cities. Often though not always attached to these beliefs are the following assumptions:

• People don’t actually want to live in the suburbs. They live there because the suburbs are subsidized by public policy. Because…
• Suburbs are dreadful places to live. They often make statements and suggestions that are empirically untrue such as that the suburbs are socially isolating. In fact, suburbanites are more likely to know their neighbors than urban apartment-dwellers. What is lost in distance is made up for in continuity. Also, parents with children are more bound to their neighborhoods and more likely to want to make sure they know who their neighbors are so that they know their kids are safe. It is possible (maybe probable) that you put these same people in a downtown condominium together you will get even better results, but it is not the case that suburbs are inherently isolating in a way that our cities are not.
• If they do want to live in the suburbs, it’s for stupid reasons like racism or because they’ve been duped by capitalism. Nevermind the advantages of larger houses and larger yards and the peacefulness of being at a little distance from one another. No doubt some of the rationales can be tied to racism if looked at in a particular way (they’re worried about crime and/or want good schools, ergo they hate minorities), but it’s a rather myopic view in my opinion. But they kind of get away with saying it because most of the logical responses to it are politically incorrect and not things that people like talking about.
• Living in cities is more environmentally sound. This assumption is not particularly faulty except to the extent that suburbanization in some parts of the country lead to irrigation and forest-planting that turn deserts and otherwise barren places into towns where developers believe that people want to live. But on the whole, the urban planners are right insofar as something can be designed that’s easier on the environment than the current model. But as The Onion has pointed out, people want public transportation and the like for other people.
• People are irrationally addicted to cars. Once you put them in walkable neighborhoods, they will prefer them. They have studies to back this up and often their own personal experience. But… cars are convenient, man, and people like “walkability” in the same way that they like “lower taxes” or “more government services.” People like walkability, but once you start talking about the costs involves (taking away their cars, living in a smaller place) I think you start to see a different picture.

So while people say “they won’t have a choice,” they are often operating under assumptions that minimize the resistance to re-urbanization that would develop.

But underneath it all, I believe people will have a choice. Some choices that are not great, but choices nonetheless. It strikes me as far more likely than everyone packing up and moving back into the city that the features of the city will instead follow them to suburbs. As it stands now, there are a whole lot of people in the suburbs that actually don’t pay all that much in gasoline costs. My father commuted less than five miles to work every day. One of my brothers does the same and his wife commutes less than twenty. I barely knew anyone that actually commuted to the city. My other brother commutes over an hour, but he doesn’t commute to the city. Rather, he commutes from one suburb to another suburb.

And that is the case far, far more often than people realize when it comes to cities like Colosse that cover a wide geographical area. Nearly every job I’ve had has been in the suburbs. In Colosse, I ended up driving from the outskirts of town to the suburbs or from one suburb to another. In Estacado and Cascadia, I actually drove from a city core to a suburb or exurb. My ex-roommate Hubert commutes from one suburb to another, well over an hour away. When people start really feeling the pinch, one of the things you’re going to start seeing is people relocating to live closer to the suburb that they work. Right now it’s lost time and some lost money, but once it starts hitting their pocketbooks more heavily, that’s what you’re likely to start seeing.

None of this is to say that nobody commutes to the city. I know a number of people that do (including Web), even if they’re outnumbered by the suburban workforce. Besides, you start driving on an inbound freeway during rush hour, the fact that a lot of people live in the suburbs and work downtown is patently obvious. But as people start feeling the pinch, what do you think is more likely… people giving up their space and their yards and all that to spend ten times as much on half the space (the strength of the suburban housing market keeps urban housing markets more manageable than they otherwise would be) or more businesses opening up satellite offices in the suburbs or relocating there entirely? You have to make the assumption that people would really prefer to live in the city for it even to be a contest.

It does strike me as likely that more people would indeed move closer to the city, but nowhere near enough to make the suburbs some sort of wasteland ghetto. It also seems likely that a number of people will start doing things that urbanists and liberals both love like carpooling and utilizing public transportation. Commuter rail will probably garner support, for instance. And park-n-rides will probably increase ridership significantly. Maybe private busing* companies will be able to turn a profit by keeping poor people off their buses*.

There is at least one major hole in my argument, though. Energy prices are not limited solely to gasoline. In addition to commuting expenses, in places like Colosse you can also have extensive electricity bills and the like because keeping these places hospitable during the summer can be expensive. In this sense, you might start seeing a decline in the size of the average house. Or you might start seeing smarter air conditioners where the goal ceases to be keeping the whole house cool and instead becomes keeping portions of the house cool. On the other hand, household energy is also a lot more amenable to alternative forms of energy that will start to look a lot more attractive when/if peak oil occurs.

Of course, this is a different subject entirely that I’m not going to get into, but my views on peak oil are rather out of the mainstream. It really strikes me as one of those things that is going to be “right around the corner” for my entire lifetime and probably my children’s. So this is, to me, a mostly academic argument. Or an argument about what happens if we start leaning more heavily on heavy commuters through gasoline taxes and the like. I am actually quite amenable to gasoline taxes and tolls as a way of paying for the roads and to reduce wasteful driving. But I don’t see it doing what a lot of people argue it will.

When I look at rapidly escalating gasoline prices, though (either through taxation or supply/demand) it’s not actually our driving and housing habits that I think will be most important. Rather, the bigger issue, I think, will be that commodities will suddenly start becoming noticeably more expensive due to increased shipping costs. This has its pluses and minuses. Even here, the urbanists argue that their way-of-life will be vindicated when places like Walmart won’t make sense anymore. For better or worse, I think the opposite is true. As gasoline prices increases, it will be the Walmarts of the world with their own distribution networks that will likely be at the greatest advantage. And the sort of one-stop shopping that places like Walmart and Target supply will probably become more rather than less desirable compared to having something shipped (really expensive) or driving all around town to get this and that in lieu of being able to get most of them from a single location.

* - Gawd I hate the spelling of these words. It should totally be busses and bussing.

There is a large debate in the US today regarding economic theory, Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Tea Party, etc… and everyone seems to have their own opinion on theories of economics. I figured I might as well throw my hat into the ring.

For a truly “free market” to function, contradictory to what many believe, a certain level of government regulation is needed. Not too much regulation, which can become burdensome and choking, but not too little either, because too little regulation inevitably ends in disasters of vertical and horizontal monopoly and the cessation of the “freedom” of the market to function.

To wit, the definition of a “free market” ought to contain the following points:
#1 - For a given commodity/service, a consumer should be reasonably and easily able to take their business to a competitor.
#2 - For a given commodity/service, a consumer should be reasonably and easily able to understand and verify precisely what they are purchasing.
#3 - For a given commodity/service, a consumer should be reasonably and easily able to compare and contrast the offering of one competitor with that of another.
#4 - Providers should be penalized for producing poor products or failure to service.
#5 - Supply chains should necessarily be clear and streamlined enough so that if a failure occurs, either the failure can be replaced by service/product from another vendor, or corrected, rather than the producer/industry saying “well that’s just the way it is done.”
#6 - Profit structure should rely primarily on the profit from customer purchases, instead of tangential investments.

Today in the US, most retail products fail these criteria. Vertical monopolies cause the supply chain for production to cease to be competitive. Horizontal monopolies - many government-granted - have prevented service competition in areas such as television and internet service. “Service contracts”, fine print, and hidden-fee scams in industries like cell phones make it difficult if not impossible to compare the differences between vendors in an open and honest way. “Hidden monopolies”, such as the distribution centers and “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price” on so many items, make it so that price-competition between stores is quite often either transitory or illusory.

Sad but true, the underlying principle in the US is not a “free market,” and anyone who says differently is likely selling something. The US markets are better described as a market run to a large extent by a number of oversized, collectively-collusionary agencies who behave as a secondary government underneath the radar of, or by coopting the representatives of, the US government.

Thus, as much as I hate to state it, I believe that more US government intervention into the markets - not less - is currently needed. More specifically, the US government should be engaging in trust-busting efforts against the gigantic, semi-monolithic (polylithic?) entities that seem to have their fingers in every single market, “competing” in most senses only against other entities of the same polylithic makeup with whom they have a variety of written or implied noncompetition agreements, in order to create better conditions for the growth of what we usually term “small businesses” that tend to employ more workers and reinvest most of the income received from customers, rather than simply gobble up and eat (in the way Half Sigma would describe the “upper part” of the leech classes) the profits themselves.