Clancy and I have spent the week in Shoshone Valley. With most of our vacation time being spent seeing family and friends, we wanted a vacation with just the two of us.

We chose the Shoshone Valley primarily because Max Dalton, a favored musician of ours, was doing a show there. We came up to SV a couple other times back when we were living in Deseret for the same reason (once I came up with her, once by myself).

Dalton is a folk-country sort of singer. I introduced him to Clancy years ago and she took to him more than I ever did. He’s a great storyteller, though his music is generally dark in theme. I’ve only been to one of his shows before, but left about half way through because it was a long Friday at the end of a long week and I just wasn’t in the mood.

The show was mostly enjoyable, though Clancy and I both agreed that we probably won’t be making a special trip like this in the future. Part of it was the atmosphere (a lot of people there were not big fans, and many as interested in conversation as the music they paid for). Part of it, though, was that Dalton has almost no positive stage energy. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that his sourpuss music is the product of the fact that he is just not a very happy or pleasant individual. Dalton’s demeanor was accentuated by an opening act that was energetic and positive and thrilled to be opening for Max-friggin’-Dalton.

Musicians can run the spectrum. Sometimes you meet the guy who is bouncing around all over the place on the stage and discover that once they are off the stage they are cold and distant. Then there are others who seem uncomfortable on stage, but is all smiles after the show and as friendly as can be.

Back in my single days in Colosse, I went to 2-3 music shows a week. There was a thriving local music scene. I was young and single. It was fun. It turns out that it’s the sort of thing one grows out of when one can no longer drink seven beers and recognizes the ridiculousness of spending $20 on the privilege to do so. And as you get older, the average age of the audience stays the same, leaving you older and older…

Don’t you hate it when you see an article with a headline that suggests something rather outrageous (pertaining, to say, some policy), then when you read the story it’s actually a rather reasonable policy?

It makes it so you just can’t trust outrageous headlines anymore. And you have to read the article. Suck.

Do DC’s speed cameras count as extortion? As I’ve said before, if they ever want to get serious about speeders, they simply put cameras everywhere. It won’t be long before cars come equipped with GPS sensors that prevent you from unconsciously speeding and, because they know they will get caught, people will stop speeding. Of course, that creates a revenue problem.

Seven reason computer glitches are never going away. There’s actually a tidbit in there that relates to a commensation I had with Brandon Berg about Taiwan.

Some interesting tidbits about men and women and love.

A really interesting look at the short-term and long-term effects of marijuana from Wired.

This Washington Post article on Texas’ fast-track from the classroom to the courtroom is disturbing. At the same time, the deleterious effect that disruptions and the chaotic atmosphere can prevent almost everybody from learning. I think that part of the issue here is that the schools themselves are prevented from appropriate discipline, and so they turn to the courts.

Catherine Hakim on erotic capital.

I’m pretty sure I have a Linkluster item where I wrote on this previously, but stories like this make me think of the lemonade stands busted by health or permit inspectors. It’s antithetical to who we are. It’s a video about Los Angeles County’s attempts to chase people out of their dilapidated homes. Which sounds reasonable, until you realize how far away from everybody they are. I honestly didn’t know that such places existed in Los Angeles County.

Is productivity killing our economy?

The Onion has an amusing article on a man’s attempt to find a public restroom:

AMES, IA—A local resident’s search for a public bathroom became an epic odyssey of alienation, humiliation, and human cruelty Monday.

“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” said Pete Webster, 27, recovering from the harrowing ordeal in his apartment. “From endless ‘Bathroom For Paying Customers Only’ signs to toilets so disgusting they’re unsuitable for vomiting, I saw it all.”

Webster’s bathroom search began at approximately 1:15 a.m., 30 minutes after leaving Burrito Bob’s, where he consumed a double enchilada platter and a 32-ounce Pepsi. Though he felt fine upon exiting the popular late-night eatery, he soon felt an overwhelming need to defecate.

“I should’ve gone at Burrito Bob’s,” said Webster, who had spent the night barhopping with friends. “But I didn’t have to go when I left. Besides, I figured I could always just dart into a gas station or some 24-hour restaurant and do the deed.”

“What I failed to factor in,” Webster continued, “is the unfathomable darkness of the human soul.”

An amusing article, particularly because I can relate to it so. What I find odd, though, is that it appears under the new special “Suburbs” section. This strikes me as an anti-suburbs problem. Seriously, almost every case I have been unable to find a public restroom, it’s been in the city or way out in the country.

I am not sure why this was in the Suburbs section. I figure it’s one of two things:

1) Laziness. They have a suburbs section because it’s sponsored by a new TV show that is making fun of the suburbs. They needed articles for it and just threw this in there.

2) Stereotyping. The suburbs are supposed to be places of ” alienation, humiliation, and human cruelty” in the imagination of some. Therefore, this must be a suburban thing. If this is the case, it’s remarkably ignorant and clearly a case of stereotypes overwhelming reality. Sort of like how notions of suburban alienation (you never know your neighbors, nobody trusts anybody, etc.) overwhelm the studies that have suggested that no, in fact, suburbanites tend to know their neighbors more than anybody.

The restroom problem exists in the city precisely because it’s a low trust environment. In the suburbs, you are less likely to have to keep the bathroom locked because you don’t have to worry as much about what goes on. You have less to worry about with regard to transients and so on. The same actually applies to some rural areas for a different reason. If you have a convenience store on the side of the interstate, you have a lot of passers-through (as opposed to members of the community). And in both cases, where the restrooms are public, they are often in poor shape.

You noticed something similar when it came to gas pumps. The first places to start instituting pay-at-the-pump were either in urban areas or rural areas just off the Interstate. The suburban area I was raised was the last one to put them in. Why? Because in urban areas, and in rural passer-through stations, you had a lot more to worry about with drive-offs. The suburban areas? Less of a concern.

This is all really just common sense. But common sense holds no candle to the believe that (a) if a place is bad and (b) something bad is happening, then (c) the bad thing must be happening in the bad place.

One of the “no duh” things I have learned while substitute teaching is the extraordinary difference in time horizons between young people and older people. I don’t mean this in the typical sense that kids can’t think too far ahead. I mean it in the broader sense… that what we would consider a little time is actually a whole lot of time for them.

One place where this comes up is with recess. Recess at Redstone elementary schools runs at about 10-15 minutes. To me, 10-15 really isn’t enough time to do anything. But to say that they are thrilled about it is an understatement. Not just as a break from the tedious monotony of classwork. In the same 10-15 minutes that isn’t “time enough to do anything” they just bounce from one activity to another. They play this for a couple minutes, then that. And sometimes they ask for an extra five minutes. Five minutes is a half or a third of the time that isn’t sufficient to do anything, but it just makes their day if you give it to them. Five minutes.

Recess more generally is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s good for kids to be able to go out and play. I have become a believer that recess should not be considered a reward but rather a good thing in its own right. I didn’t used to really believe this all that much because back when I was in elementary school, we spent recess doing things other than running around as often as not. But judging by the Redstone kids, we are the exception. Or maybe it was related to the fact that we had PE almost every day and they get it once or twice a week.

On the other hand, as a substitute, that 10-15 minutes out of an 8-hour day (including lunch) tends to be the cause of about a half or a third of the major problems I’ve faced. A good portion of the time when they come back in, I hear stories about how so-and-so hit so-and-so. How it may have been an accident but the retaliation was real. And the bad blood from the playground can color the atmosphere for the rest of the day.

Slate’s got an interesting column today regarding the “fertility class divide” as they call it.

The basic structure is: Richer people have fewer kids. Poor people breed like rabbits.

Of course, this is nothing new. Jonathan Swift, ages ago, posited that the lower classes of Britain and Ireland had an overpopulation problem. The extent to which portents of a “decline” in British society resulted thereof, can be discussed ad nauseum. It doesn’t seem to have been as bad as the doomsayers indicated, though there’s definitely room to conclude that British society is not the world-spanning empire it once was.

However, today, we have some evidence to back up the problems of too many babies being born to the poor. To wit:

Research shows that women with unplanned pregnancies are more likely to smoke, drink, and go without prenatal care. Their births are more likely to be premature. Their children are less likely to be breastfed, and more likely to be neglected and to have various physical and mental health effects. Then, reinforcing the cycle, the very fact of having a child increases a woman’s chances of being poor.

Toledo cries foul:

Toledo wants Syracuse’s 33-30 overtime win against the Rockets to be vacated after a Big East Conference official acknowledged that replay officials wrongly awarded an extra point for a kick that was no good.

Toledo athletic director Mike O’Brien says he has asked the Mid-American Conference commissioner to request that the Big East give Toledo the victory.

Toledo made a field goal to force overtime Saturday, but the Orange came back with a field goal to win. The Rockets are upset because video showed Syracuse narrowly missed an extra-point attempt after an earlier touchdown. Officials who reviewed the kick let the extra point stand.

I feel for Toledo. This would have been a big win for the program and, indeed, they probably should have won. I say “probably” because there were two minutes in the game and if Syracuse had been up by two instead of three they might have had some extra urgency on stopping Toledo’s final field goal to put the game into overtime. The thing is, we’ll never know. That, to me, is another reason not to change the results of the game as it was played.

Several years ago when Southern Tech was playing a game against ESU where the conference title was (more or less) on the line, we got robbed on a particularly bad call as we were working towards the endzone to take over the lead in the final minutes of the game. The ESU defense had clearly not gotten off of the field. Flags were down everywhere. Our quarterback, who knew this, took the opportunity to throw a pass into the endzone to see if it took. Knowing that there would be a replay on the down. It was intercepted. The problem was that the flags that were down were for something on our side. ESU declined the penalty and got the ball on their twenty. They got a couple first downs and the victory formation and that was the end of the game.

It’s not exactly the same, because we hadn’t actually scored the touchdown (but there’s no question that we would have, we were on a roll). And arguably the QB shouldn’t have made the assumption on the flag. But just as clearly, there were 13 defensive men on the field. But that’s simply the way that it works. You pick up and move on. You don’t change the score after the fact. Much less the outcome or even the point spread. Human referees are an element of the game. If you don’t want them to matter, put yourself ahead by enough that they don’t.

A few weeks ago the Pac-12 did retroactively change the score on a game between USC and Utah. It didn’t change the results, but did change the point spread (to the collective groan of bookies everywhere). That was made worse by the fact that this was based on a new rule regarding celebration penalties that I do not believe should exist.

Late last season, in another game involving Syracuse, there was another excessive celebration penalty that ended up throwing the game over. And, of course, there was the Ty Willingham incident, where sports-writers everywhere were just outraged on behalf of Ty Willingham, only suddenly realizing that excessive celebration penalties can be kind of silly when the target is a media darling
.

A few seasons ago, it took Oklahoma fans half a season to stop demanding a reversal of the Oklahoma-Oregon game where the (Pac-10) refs consistently made mistakes in Oregon’s favor. It was actually the whining over that when I started digging my heels on the subject.

Historically, I’ve been against even so much as the Instant Replay, though over the last few seasons they have done a bang-up job of speeding up the process so that it’s not intrusive. The downside to that, of course, is that things like the above get missed. I wonder if a part of it is that the replay officials know the original call. Maybe what they ought to do is strip it of its context (”This is the game-winning field goal”) and strip them of knowledge of the original call. From there, they decide one way, the other way, or too close to call. And if it’s too close to call, they go with the original call. That would be harder to do with somethings (such as when there is a ref with arms signalling a touchdown or a good field goal in the footage), but I wonder if sometimes these mistakes are made in too great deference to the refs on the field. It seems that almost all of the weirdest calls are actually where they stand by the refs.

Though I am suspicious of the notion that “preventative medicine will save money,” I did get a kick out of this story:

Gawande talked to one of these health consulting companies, Verisk Health, which sorts through the medical data of over 15 million employees. One of their clients includes a “big information-technology company on the East Coast” with over seven thousand folks in its insurance plan. It hoped to reduce its $40 million in health care spending by raising its employees’ insurance co-payments, hoping that would make them rethink unnecessary doctor’s visits (Sniffly nose just needs a visit to the cold aisle of the pharmacy), think twice before getting frivolous tests (I’m sure that itch is just temporary!), and not treat prescription medicine like candy (Mother doesn’t need her little helper three times a day).

Instead of falling, the company’s medical spending increased, by 10 percent yearly. When Verisk analyzed the data, they discovered that the employers’ plan had back-fired. Medical costs for the majority of employees had been capped, but there was a flair-up coming from early retirees who were the “sickest links” in the insurance plan. They cut back on their medical costs by visiting doctors less and taking their prescription medicine less frequently after the co-payment increase, due in part to their fixed incomes. That made them sicker. One retiree wound up having a heart attack that “necessitated emergency surgery and left him disabled with chronic heart failure.”

The preventative medicine thing *may* be more true when it comes to some patients (like older ones). In any event, who doesn’t love a story when a greedy corporation gets bitten in the arse (in such a direct manner) for trying to cut corners?

We Need More Dogs!

Tommy West’s exit speech from Memphis. It’s not as colorful as the previous video, but a good call-to-arms to a school that needs it.

His successor went 1-11 and laid a huge egg against Sun Belt team Arkansas State a couple weeks ago and is 1-3 with its sole victory against a lower division team and a combined score of 44-154 (excluding the lower-division game: 17-127)

The folks at the Frum Forum have retracted their article in opposition to red light cameras, saying “they work.”

I don’t actually disagree with that. And honestly, if done in conjunction with other things, such as longer yellow lights and preferably a light timer, I would support them. There are two counterarguments to lengthening yellow lights. The first is that it causes all kinds of traffic problems because of the “very specific formula they use.” Which is interesting, because they don’t seem to have a problem shortening the duration of yellow lights. The second argument is that people adjust to the shorter duration and it doesn’t make any difference. Here’s a quote:

We did notice immediately that the number of violations dropped significantly. But within four days what we found was that people had changed their driving habits. They knew that they had extra time. And it was virtually the same number of red light runners occurred within 4 or 5 days after we changed that light.

Does this jump out at anybody else? Four or five days? How many people are going to even notice such a change, much less adapt to it? At least some drivers probably haven’t even driven through the intersection during these five days. It would have been more credible if he’d said “within six months” or something. Five days? That’s just… not credible.

And I don’t have to, because it’s been studied. The National Motorist Association, which is critical of red light cameras, has a host of studies on the subject, including one in Fairfax, Virgina:

Skrum continued, “Fairfax County records show that ‘events,’ red light violations, captured by the camera fell from an average daily rate of 52.1 per day before the yellow time increase to just 2 per day afterwards, a reduction of 94 percent.

“Fairfax County records also show that citations being issued dropped to just 0.82 citations a day on average during the 67 days after the yellow time was increased.

“This camera was activated February 8, 2001 by Lockheed Martin under an agreement with Fairfax County. The Virginia Department of Transportation is responsible for operating these signals. The decision to install a red light camera at this intersection confirms that this intersection was considered a location of serious violations with increased potential for accidents.

I could actually be convinced that it takes more than 67 days for people to adapt… but they’re already on the record as saying “4 or 5,” so there you go. Now, the NMA is a biased source. But what about the Texas Transportation Institute? They determine the following:

A before-after study is described and the resulting data used to quantify the effect of increasing the yellow interval on the frequency of red-light violations. Based on this research, it was concluded that: (1) an increase of 0.5 to 1.5 s in yellow duration (such that it does not exceed 5.5 s) will decrease the frequency of red-light-running by at least 50 percent; (2) drivers do adapt to the increase in yellow duration; however, this adaptation does not undo the benefit of an increase in yellow duration; and (3) increasing a yellow interval that is shorter than that obtained from a proposed recommended practice published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) is likely to yield the greatest return (in terms of a reduced number of red-light violations) relative to the cost of re-timing a yellow interval in the field.

Both #2 (highlighted) and #3 are important. If we are going to use red light cameras, part of the package has to be following the proposed recommended practices of the ITE or independent civil engineers of some sort.

There are two important things to note about the TTI. First, they have also studied red light cameras and have determined that they are effective (even taking into account the increase in rear-enders). So, unlike the NMA, they are not saying anything about yellow lights in order to further an argument about red light cameras. Second, the original article cites the authority of… the TTI… in making its case.

So what have we learned here? We’ve learned that maybe there is reason to believe that we should institute red light cameras. We’ve also learned that there might be alternatives. But really, these alternatives are not mutually exclusive. We can do all of them. And if the goal were public safety, we would do them as a matter of course.

Above I mention light timers. By which I mean the thing they have on crosswalks that tell you how much time you have before the light changes color. The lazy cynical response to this is that it will just encourage more people to wait to the wire. This assumes, however, that everybody who runs red lights does so intentionally. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the ambiguity of not knowing how long you have causes people to ramp up because by the time the light turns yellow, they don’t know how long they have to get through, and they weren’t ready for the yellow light to begin with. I’d happily accept the results of a study on the subject, though, provided that it’s by an organization like the TTI or ITE rather than by someone with a real skin in the game.

I saw an article titled “Men are living almost as long as women” and I suspected that this is because men are living longer rather than women living shorter and (b) was mock-surprised that they didn’t title it something like “Women losing ground on aging compared to men” because… you know… that’s how articles like this are so often framed. Sure enough, I get to the third paragraph:

So the guys are catching up to us. This trend is partly due to the advent of Lipitor, bypass surgery, and other medical advances that are helping to keep men from dying early of heart attacks. Yet even as their lifespans are getting longer, ours are not keeping up at our historic pace. Researchers say this is because women are so stressed out these days that they’re resorting to unhealthy habits such as skimping on sleep, grabbing fast food, and relying on meds, alcohol, and cigarettes to cope. Ouch! Here’s hoping we can learn to mend our ways and stop literally killing ourselves slowly.

So the moral of the story, as when we hear sob stories about how tough it is for women when men lose their jobs en masse, is that women are being cheated.

Not long after, I read this article about how you can wipe out the male spacial skill advantage with a female-empowered culture. So it’s the patriarchy that is preventing equality! Indeed, this new study “suggests that spatial reasoning differences may also be the product of society.”

Quite interesting! So what did they do? They looked at two societies, one which favors men and another which favors women. The result? In the society that favors men, men did better. In the society that favors women… it was a tie. What do I mean by “favors women”?:

Among other differences, the Karbi are patrilineal; women do not typically own land, and the oldest son inherits the family’s property after the death of the parents. The Khasi could not be more different in this regard. Men are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family.

So, if we want parity in this specific arena, all we have to do is strip men of all of their rights. Yay! This is going with the long theory that where women outpace men, it is earned and we should not concern ourselves with it. But when the inverse is true, it’s a problem that needs to be fixed. Here, apparently, lies the solution.

Less snarkily, if the study reveals anything, it’s this: If you give men every conceivable advantage, they unsurprisingly outperform women in this arena. But there is apparently no social order (short of just killing the men or refusing to educate them) where women can outperform men. This suggests the opposite of what the article says it suggests: there is something innate going on here.

From last night, two very different perspectives on a singular issue.

I didn’t stay up long enough to see the news happen for one. Troy Davis, who had a massive amount of public supporters saying he was innocent, was executed in Georgia for the murder of a police officer in 1989. In terms of cases, this is one of those “rough ones.” There were a large number of witness recantations. The case has been made into a textbook study of how cops can go around - unwittingly or not - prejudicing witnesses and tainting eyewitness testimony in identification of suspects. There was a strong reason to believe that one of the witnesses who fingered Davis could have been the real killer. In short, a gigantic mess. The problem for Davis, however, was that most of these changes had come 17 years after his original conviction, and by the time most of this came out, the vast majority of his appeals were already over with. A US district reevaluation of his case, which resulted in a 150-page decision by Judge William Moore, applied an incredibly high standard requiring that Davis’s lawyers not simply prove a likelihood that he would not be convicted today, but “actual innocence.”

For Death Penalty opponents, the Troy Davis case, along with a few others, serve as the points where “the system probably got it wrong” to argue to abolish.

On the same night, the State of Texas executed Lawrence Russell Brewer. Brewer, by all accounts, was as close as we usually get to a human “animal.” Nasty racial supremacist, supremely arrogant about his crime, and never repentant. Going over the details of it aren’t really worthwhile, but it’s been called “the most brutal hate crime of the post-Civil Rights era.”

So… on the one hand, someone who almost nobody could deny is guilty and probably deserved it. On the other, someone about who there are - at least for a lot of people, myself included - some serious doubts.

Argument to abolish, or just an argument to reform the system somehow?

I had my first two substituting assignments last week. Both involved the third grade.

It’s always a good sign when you’re substituting for a male teacher. That’s because he’s usually a coach. And coaches, at least in Redstone, really have the plum jobs. Something to justify their salary and little more. It was frequently the case in my district that they taught the most basic of subjects, but in Redstone it’s not even that.

The time when I was teaching at the alternative school and had six students over three periods? Coach!

The time when I was doing a votech class on “workforce studies”? Coach!

And last week, it was “library tech.” Computer class! Coach!

The main thing was to avoid being bored while they listened to their headsets and learned to type using some free web site involving animated rhinos. The teacher (coach) said all I had to do was prevent them from talking and make sure that their posture was good. He was very concerned about their posture. When he left, he yelled “Posture!” and everybody sat up straight.

At the end of the day, I got to tell a teacher that her students were very well behaved in computer lab. I like getting to tell teachers that their classes were good.

I met the principal at this school (the last one I hadn’t substituted at before, I’m pretty sure), and this time not for a bad reason (it’s typically not good when a principal knows who you, a substitute teacher, are). We had lunchroom duty at the same time. I told a couple kids to stop running and he said “Actually, let them run. They fall, they hurt themselves, they are more careful about running in the future.” I’m not sold on the school itself (though the building itself is awesome), but I respect the attitude. On the other hand, during my off-period I was walking out to my car and a bunch of first graders were playing outside on a lawn near the parking lot with a huge hill unattended. I can think of 100 ways for something to go wrong with that.

There is a story in the background on all of this I cannot divulge because it actually got national news coverage and would give away my location. Frustrating.

The next day was a standard third grade class for a full day. It was at Creston, one of the “good schools.” The difference between a good school and a bad school is that (a) a good school you spend 50-75% of your time teaching or helping them learn and 25-50% of your time putting out fires and in a bad school you spend 50-75% of your time on classroom management, and (b) in a good school when you scream at the kids to be quiet, they do or at least try.

Things started breaking down towards the end of the day. The third grade is the first grade in which they have to stay all the way to 3:00 and the kids seemed to mentally check out at about 1, when they used to leave. I had to leave a less-than-stellar note for the teacher. She showed up before I left, however, and I talked to her about it in person. I told her that the kids weren’t bad, they just had trouble keeping quiet. She pounced on the latter part and said that she would give them a good talking-to.

It sort of feels like leaving reviews on eBay or the Subaru questionnaire where anything less than a perfect review is a bad review. It makes me almost want to say that they were perfect, because they were more good than bad.

In Illinois, a man faces up to 75 years for recording police. This hopefully could be the beginning of the end, of however. A circuit judge has declared use of the wiretapping law unconstitutional a young woman in Illinois was acquitted of a similar charge in what can only be described as jury nullification.

Is a major automaker fudging its mileage numbers? I’d be surprised if it were only one. I was disappointed in the mileage of our new Forester, which wasn’t living up to the posted mileage, but actually determined that the problem was all of the uphill/downhill. Still, that others might be lying is hardly surprising.

Three funky things about sweat. Allegedly, the optimal sleeping temperature is 68 degrees, rending this entire piece suspect. The optimal sleeping temperature is 78 degrees at the lowest.

So a dog walks into a bar… well it can’t. Not in New York City anymore. It was actually already on the books but rarely enforced. I do understand that there are some health risks, but this definitely falls under the category of letting the consumer decide.

So apparently, we should go with our gut.

A good, and surprisingly fair, analysis of density and productivity. Yes, density does increase productivity. And people in the cities make more with wages improving at a faster rate. However, it’s really hard to compensate for the astronomical costs of living.

A couple of articles on decision fatigue. It’s worth noting here that this sort of thing plays a role in weight management. Since dieting (or “lifestyle change”) is a matter of choosing, over and over and over again, not to eat something, the system is prone to break down.

When women want to be romantically desirable, they shy away from STEM majors.

Jon Last has a really interesting article about toys and Chinese knockoffs. When both the originals and the knockoffs are cheap plastic made in China, what exactly is the difference?

The subject of indoctrination came up in my recent Captain Planet post and we started making a list of things that kids are indoctrinated about: the environment, drugs, and smoking.

One of the things I remember quite clearly is drinking and driving. Or rather, a bunch of kids being brought into an auditorium and being shown some grisly pictures of drinking/driving ads. They told us about how terrible it was to drink and drive.

What they were apparently less clear about was that “drinking” was specifically a reference to alcohol. I mean, I’m sure they mentioned alcohol, but they weren’t as clear as they needed to be that it was only alcohol that was a bad idea. A lot of kids went home and freaked out when their parents were drinking a soft drink or coffee in the car.

A few days later, the principal clarified over the intercom that it was okay if our parents drank coffee or soft drinks while driving, and that it’s only a problem if it’s alcohol.

What’s kind of funny about all of this is that I wouldn’t be surprised if years from now, drinking a soft drink on the road will be fully incorporated into the War on Distracted Driving.

Maybe you had to go through presentations like this in school, but I not only literally laughed out loud when I saw this (which I don’t generally do), but I laughed myself red.

Jon Huntsman attacks China’s One Child policy, saying it causes instability and sex trafficking. It’s interesting how, a couple of years ago I completely misread Huntsman. When he took the China Ambassadorship, I assumed that it meant two things: (1) He had decided not to run for president, which he had already been considering at the time, and (2) he was, in essence, cashing out. An ambassadorship to China can be very lucrative in the long run, especially to someone who speaks Chinese. And yet, here he is running against Obama and potentially burning his bridge to China.

I have to wonder if there’s something more going on in the Romney/Huntsman rivalry than mere political positioning. Huntsman has to know that he’s not going to get the nomination by picking off Romney support. Both come from very old and established Mormon families. Perhaps the writer in me likes to think that it’s a War of the Roses sort of thing, where Huntsman’s quest isn’t quixotic so much as a good Hatfield trying to settle some old score with a McCoy. The town of Phillippi in Delosa had this dynamic. You had two patriarchs (both white, conservative-ish Democrats) who repeatedly traded the mayorship every 4 or 8 years for about twenty or so years. One of them died and the the other moved on to another elected position (becoming a Republican in the process), but even after all of that each of the families continued to recruit people (sometimes family members, sometimes outsiders) to run so that there was always a Hatfield candidate and a McCoy candidate. You always know who won because they would rename the Phillippi Fairgrounds whenever they took office to either the Hatfield Fairgrounds (he founded it) or Phillippi Fairgrounds (to prevent Hatfield credit for getting it done).

For David Alexander: High-speed rail lines rarely pay their way. Britain’s government should ditch its plan to build one.

As amazing as it sounds, we may already be losing the housing surplus. Meanwhile, homes in Baltimore are selling for $10,000 and less.

California prisons are isolating inmates for years at a time. The deleterious effects are hard to fully state. It’s not hard to make the case that this is a passive form of torture.

It’s commonly argued that high-stakes testing is killing arts and music programs. It really doesn’t appear to be the case outside of isolated incidents and Arizona. The Redstone district has a music and an art teacher with weekly classes for each. That’s exactly what I had. The main difference: We had PE daily. They get it once or twice a week.

Statistics on country music (references to mama, booze, etc.). One of the odd things about country music, the “conservative” genre, is how often men cry about being women and women cry about being strong.

A while back, Conor Friedersdorf explored why the media has been paying so much attention to Huntsman and so little attention to the likes of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, given their respective poll numbers. I would dispute that the media hasn’t been paying attention to Ron Paul. More like, the media simply isn’t taking him seriously, compared even to Michelle Bachmann whose chances of winning the presidency were always roughly the same (roughly 0%). Now Gary Johnson they are ignoring. Why? I think Friedersdorf is right that Huntsman tells the media what they want to hear, but I think it goes beyond that. Huntsman fits a John Anderson mold. Bachmann fits the new Tea Party mold. Johnson and, to a lesser extent Ron Paul, don’t fit the recognizable pattern. So they treat the former like he doesn’t exist and the latter like a Lyndon LaRouche who simply polls better.

Misconceptions about war.

A little while ago I wrote about sticky wages and how employers might be responsible for it. I concluded:

My personal experience doesn’t really bear out the notion that it’s on the employer’s side. I got my first 9-5 job essentially by offering to work for substantially less than the job advertised for. The interview was not going well and it was a sort of hail mary. But it worked. And a number of jobs I have gotten since I have been overqualified for. Which is not exactly the same thing, but you’re confronting the same obstacle: I am worth x, but am asking for less than x. Only once have I been turned down for a job that I was overqualified for, as near as I can recall. It’s a little different, though, when you’re taking industry wages for a lesser job. There’s always the dangle of advancement. Getting raises for doing the same job seems to almost never happen anymore. Even before the recession.

According to a new paper, it may actually be the unemployeds’ decision:

[T]oday’s job seekers seem more picky. According to an analysis of surveys of 6,000 job seekers, the minimum wages that the unemployed are willing to accept are very close to their previous salary and drop little over time, says Mr. Mueller. That could help explain in part why they have so much trouble finding work, he says.

Of course, part of the issue is that people are overleveraged and household incomes don’t allow for a whole lot of flexibility. One of the problems with home ownership is that it fixes your housing costs at a particular rate. And if you’ve been living close to the edge, taking a pay-cut can hurt pretty deeply. The same applies to people who take 5-year car payment obligations. My inlaws paid cash for the houses that they bought. With housing costs being what they are, though, that’s a pretty difficult thing to do. But our tax laws reward home ownership, our regulatory laws may be making buying a house and renting it out less desirable, and so if you want to live somewhere larger than an apartment, it can be quite hard to get what you want without buying.

Of course, these things would be less of an issue if people were to live more within their means. You could afford to take the financial hit on the mortgage by cutting back elsewhere. That’s easier to do in some parts of the country than others, naturally. But even among those with comparatively low fixed expenses (no children, for example, and no mortgage), the degree to which a lot of my peers live on the edge doesn’t cease to surprise me.

According to a study, criminals are not so forward-thinking as to consider the punishment for their crimes:

The findings suggest that 76% of active criminals and 89% of the most violent criminals either perceive no risk of apprehension or are incognizant of the likely punishments for their crimes.

Of course, you could look at that the other way: Punishment acts as a deterrent for nearly a quarter of criminals and over a tenth of the most violent criminals. Of course, to really get their attention, the level of punishment may be such that it would be unconscionable. In any case, I find the lead-in to this to be problematic:

The tenet that harsher penalties could substantially reduce crime rates rests on the assumption that currently active criminals weigh the costs and benefits of their contemplated acts. Existing and proposed crime strategies exhibit this belief, as does a large and growing segment of the crime literature.

Actually, it can just as easily rest on the notion that a criminal in jail isn’t committing crimes against the general public while in jail. I’m not saying that I agree with this, but it’s there. As some proponents of the death penalty are inclined to point out, the only way to make sure that someone never murders again is if they are dead. It’s one of the reasons why death penalty opponents should vigorously support real life with possibility of parole sentencing.

As most of you know, I am a critic of the iPhone. Truth be told, though, if you say that the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market, I won’t entirely disagree. The question, of course, is “best for whom?” For people that want a phone of its type (simple, tightly integrated design, thin, no keyboard, outstanding app selection), it is far and away the best. But that’s sort of giving it a heck of a home field advantage. Tim Lee sums up my thoughts better than I have yet to be able to:

A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel. At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end. {…}

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market. There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc. No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

Armed & Dangerous talks about the success that Android has been having:

More interesting, perhaps, is what is not happening in the latest figures. Tragically for the contrarians, it is Apple’s U.S market-share growth rather than Android’s that has stalled. Android share growth continues to bucket along at about 2% a month, while Apple’s shows no increase in the latest figures.

The future is another country, of course, but right now it looks like those of us who thought that multicarrier iPhone was going to be largely unable to fix Apple’s long-term positioning problem were correct. The iPhone’s market isn’t exactly saturated in the normal sense, but sales volumes are only growing as fast as the smartphone userbase as a whole; the multicarrier ‘breakout’ only netted Apple about a 1% competitive gain, and that gain now appears to be over.

Apple is now relying on smartphones for 68% of revenue, so they’d be very vulnerable to an actual drop in marketshare. I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying the company looks like a late-stage sustainer with a principal product line about to experience disruptive collapse, but this is yet another straw in the wind. If next month’s figures show an actual share drop, expect it to be self-reinforcing and get the hell out of Apple stock.

It sounds ominous to talk about how much of Apple’s revenue comes from smartphones. That could just as easily be pointing out the other thing: Apple is actually making money from its smartphones.

There are a lot of questions as to why Google has taken it upon itself to purchase Motorola. Here is Farhad Manjoo’s take:

That’s why I’m betting that this deal will represent a turning point in how Google operates Android. Today, the platform is “open” but chaotic—because phone-makers get the software for free and can do whatever they want with it, Android is available on some good phones as well as lots and lots of cheap, bad ones. In the aftermath of this deal, Google will seek to exert greater influence over hardware companies. Eventually, the deal will help reduce the number of new Android devices that are released every year, and the few that are released will be of generally higher quality—and sell for higher prices—than what we see in the Android device market today.

This won’t happen overnight. Indeed, in a conference call announcing the deal, Google executives argued that the huge purchase won’t change anything about Android. The Motorola division will run as a separate entity within Google. This arrangement is meant to reduce Motorola’s ability to get preferential access to Android over other handset makers that use the OS. This is a signal that at Google, “openness” is still the ideal.

My hope is that Google’s main plan is to create a flagship product. That there are many products and designs that carry different versions of Android is not as much a problem as the fact that there is no real central design that they are all drifting from. If Google can create a serious of flagship products, it would be in the best interest of Samsung and others to fly relatively close to the formation so that the Android apps created for the Flagship will work on their product. Motorola is one of the big makers of Android phones, and with direct ownership over the product, it’s possible that they can be central enough to get the others to “fly right.” That’s my hope anyway.

It also allows them the opportunity to actually make money with their product.

The big news with Apple is, of course, the departure (and likely imminent death) of Steve Jobs. Not being an Apple guy, I don’t have much to say about it other than that I wish the best for him. Despite my disagreements with the direction he took it, he did make everyone take smartphones seriously. Before him, there was serious resistance on the part of carriers because they couldn’t control a smartphone the way that they could control feature phones where ringtones and apps could be required to come from the company store. Jobs didn’t do me any favors, since I was perfectly willing to seek out a product that not everyone else was using, and preferred the niche devices over the standard that Jobs set. But… he introduced smartphoning to a whole lot of people.

However, even though I am not a Mac user and an iPhone user, there was one thing that he did that I loved. One of his “failed” ventures was a company called NeXT, which worked on OSes. In addition to kind of setting up their own shop, they created a front-end shell for Windows 3.1, which was the first Windows operating system that I ever used. Windows 3.1 relied on Program Manager, which was as user unfriendly as it was inflexible. NeXT made Windows 3.1 really easy to use and set the standard for how I would later customize Windows 95 and beyond.