One of the shows on the new Fall TV season I am enjoying is Person of Interest. The premise is the show is that Michael Emerson (Ben Linas from LOST) developed a comprehensive surveillance/intelligence for the government. For fear of it being found out, the government shows remarkable restraint and doesn’t act on the information the system puts together unless it’s very large-scale. It can, among other things, figure out when murders are about to happen. Emerson hires a former secret agent man (James Cavaziel, aka Jesus) to stop these crimes. In order for the government not to know he hacked the system, all they have to go on is a social security number. The SSN may belong to a victim or a perpetrator. They don’t really know.

It sounds absurd and, of course, is. But it tickles my imagination. The notion that you could capture and decipher so much information. You can’t, of course, but… again, it tickles my imagination. You see some things from the cameras’ point of view, where it’s essentially watching and identifying and listening in on people all day. Then the computers go to work figuring out what’s important. Reading the tea leaves.

Such a system would, of course, be terrifying. Because, of course, the government wouldn’t show that kind of restraint. Or discipline. The temptation would be too great. In addition to the War on Terror, we have a War on Drugs, right? So we should use it there, too. And child porn! And porn! And sex crimes! But from the point of view of an administrator…

Anyhow, I was totally reminded of all of this when I read about google goggles. Can you imagine wearing these things while driving? Or trying to drive?

http://gizmodo.com/5869614/will-real+life-google-goggles-replace-your-dorky-eyeglasses

I am gradually making the transition from Windows XP to Windows 7. I miss the flexible quicklaunch bar, but other than that I am really starting to enjoy it. The ability to put in more than 3GB of RAM is very helpful and outstrips any performance hit from the hardware requirements.

The persistent problem, though, has been malware and adware. My laptop has been plagued with a potential problem for most of my trip, which is unfortunate because (for reasons I am not getting into) I am wanting/needing to check my bank account twice a day and am less than enthusiastic about doing so when there are things going on under the hood that I don’t know about. The main problems I am having at the moment are a PING.EXE file that is taking up a fair amount of memory and random pop-ups within Firefox.

The latter problem wouldn’t bother me if they weren’t salacious. I’ve had to pre-emptively warn my inlaws that no, I am not looking at pornography in their living room.

I can’t remember the last time I had a remotely similar problem on XP, and I’ve seen worse from Win7 in the last six months alone.

A long while back I wrote a post about the Collins family:

When I was a kid, my mother and Mrs. Collins, the mother of an equally-aged girl named Lindsay used to take care of a lot of chores together and swap babysitting duties. Both Lindsay and I had fathers that worked at the Air Force Base and mothers that stayed at home. At the time I think we thought we had nothing in common because she was from Mars and I Jupiter (before the men take over Mars and the women migrate to Venus, the girls are from Mars because they’re superstars and the boys are from Jupiter because they’re stupider), but our backgrounds were nearly identical. Her brother Richie was in little league with my brothers Mitch and Ollie, and since they were all from Jupiter, even moreso.

Though our families aren’t as close as they once were, the Collins family throws an annual party on the weekend night before Christmas Eve . I attended this year and was reminded how meticulous the Collins household is. It is in many ways what one would think the perfect family would have. They have a complete Dickens library on the shelf. Beethoven’s works are on the piano. Christmas is more nativity scene and less Santa Claus. There is no television in the living room. The entire place feels like it was geared towards young human development the way that all the experts say that they should be developed. As near as I can tell, that’s the only difference between the Collinses and Trumans, and it speaks better of the former.

The Collins stopped having their annual Christmas Party a few years ago (in fact, the one mentioned there may have been the last one). What used to be a rather full plate of Christmas Eve parties has dwindled and their was actually a good chance for me to see a bunch of old schoolmates and get caught up. I was sad to see it go.

The real tragedy of the Collins family, however, was what happened to their kids (explained in the above-linked post). The daughter joined a religious cult. The son moved hundreds and hundreds of miles away and broke off contact entirely. Upon returning home, I heard that Richie and his parents reconciled. Less than six months later he was diagnosed with a fatal cancer. Less than six months after that (just recently), he died. He was 38. I can only imagine how grateful they are that they were able to reconcile before his death. But before the reconciliation, and before his death, there was at least the potential of reconciliation and life.

I’m at place that I didn’t know was legal in the city of Colosse or the state of Delosa: A coffee and tobacco bar. Smoking has been banned from most public establishments for at least half a decade now. But here I am and here it is.

Doing a little research, there was some movement to allow for hookah places. For some reason, this was viewed differently than good old fashioned cigarettes. In an effort to be worldly and tolerant, the city chose to allow it. But not cigarettes. That was, apparently a bridge too far. Treating cigarettes as being particularly pernicious as far as tobacco goes is nothing new, of course. But the frame of mind is striking and a reminder that smoker demographics is at least partially a driver behind anti-smoking regs. It’s one thing to tell the imagined stereotypical smoker to beat it, but some of the same people that are more than happy to do that feel kind of bad when it starts seeming intolerant towards other cultures. I still need to write my extended piece on smoking policy, but that’ll have to wait.

Anyhow, it didn’t take long before they decided “okay, we’ll go ahead and let people smoke cigarettes within these small parameters, too. Smoking (cigarettes or otherwise) in tobacco shops was legal, but until recently it was not allowed in places that sold other things (such as alcohol or, in this case, coffee).

It’s actually kind of a neat atmosphere here. You have a fair number of South Asians and Middle Easterners (”Sammies”) here (the Mayne area having notable populations of each). A girl in front of me is playing the violin. A few stoner kids (18, I would assume, though they don’t look it…) are sharing a hookah to my right. At the “bar” area are some good ole boys. The last time I was here there was a black man chatting with them. The Sammies are half-cigarette, half-hookah smokers. The guys at the bar or cigarettes. Periodically a couple middle aged guys come in with (or buy from the store) cigars.

You could totally use this place as a setting for a Cheers-like program, if you could get Lowe’s to keep from pulling its advertisements.

Anyhow, this reminds me of one of the things that really is remarkable about smoking in this country, at least historically: it manages to bring people from all sorts of walks of like together. In a lung-destructive way, to be sure, but in a way that few other things due. And anti-smoking regs helped put all of these people together. A CEO smoking side-by-side with dockworker. Good Ole Boys at the bar talking to young Indian-American men at the table, in this case.

It’s something we’re losing, of course, as tobacco use gets a class marker. Eventually it will be more like Deseret, where the smoker’s circle consisted mostly of the insurgent non-LDS population. Even there, you had born-against next to atheists. But in Deseret, as long as you’re not a Mormon, you have something significant in common with everybody who isn’t a Mormon (even if some of them believe that others of them are hell-bound). But this represents a renaissance of sorts. The CEO long left the smokers’ dock at my former employer. Smoking (cigarettes) increasingly becomes something poor people do. But maybe hookah will provide something people are more reluctant to criticize so acrimoniously.

Postscript: The funny thing is that I am not here because it is a “smoking coffee shop,” but rather because it has better coffee than the other place and much, much better hours (fantastic hours for suburbia). Even here, I go outside to smoke. I’ve apparently been conditioned against smoking indoors even where it is allowed. Actual bars may be an exception, and I would make an exception if it were a hundred degrees or zero degrees outside. But it’s pleasant out. And maybe bad weather wouldn’t make a difference. Yesterday I smoked outside in the rain under the insufficient canopy outside.

Someone who owes somebody some money used to have our phone number (assuming they didn’t choose it at random). We no longer answer calls from “Toll Free” because I’m tired of being pestered by Mike Huckabee and Steve Forbes about this or that (I guess an upside of his run for the presidency is that I used to get pestered by Newt Gingrich and don’t anymore). Historically, none of them ever left a message. But the debt collectors are starting to. They call about twice a day.

The message goes something like “This call is for Jane Jones. If this is not Jane Jones, please hand up now. This involves debt collection and if you are not Jane Jones and you do not hang up, you are guilty of violating federal confidentiality laws.”

Of course, my answering machine doesn’t hang up. So, it’s a felon. I guess I am, too, since I have listened to the message all the way through. Oddly, there’s nothing after the stern warning that tells me anything that I didn’t already know from before the warning except for the name of the debt collection agency and the 1-800 number to call in order to pay up. But you know, that would actually be a helpful thing to tell me before the warning, if only so that I can call them back and let them know that Jane Jones can no longer be reached at this number. If I call back, though, they will know that I listened longer than I should have (and that my answering machine and I are both felons).

I do actually question what legal liability, if any, I would have here. I can’t imagine that it is any. Or any of significance. I’ve read that those disclaimers at the bottom of emails saying “If you are not the intended recipient, you are legally bound to delete this email and pretend that you never read it.” And that has a stronger case than the phone messages, since at least they don’t presume I am going to not read it (or, in the case of phone messages, listen to it).

So no doubt it’s just a matter of covering their posteriors in case they get sued for some confidentiality breach.

Anyway, one of these days I will answer the phone and let them know about Ms. Jones. I already fielded some debt collection calls shortly after we moved in for somebody else. After the second or third time, they stopped calling. These calls from “California State Debt Collection*” have been going on for several weeks now.

* - This debt collection agency - not actually named CSDC - has a very official-sounding name. I think it might be supposed to make it sound more serious. You’re not dealing with a debt collection agency, you’re dealing with a government agency. Even if it’s not a government you actually live in the jurisdiction of. It’s kind of clever, when you think about it.

By brother Mitch got my father a book about a national championship football season of Dad’s University of Ouachita Warthogs football team that culminated in a great bowl game.

I got my father a DVD of the bowl game in particular.

Dad was impressed that we worked together to get such complimentary gifts. It was, however, completely a coincidence. Mitch and I shared a look that it would be better, and Dad happier, if he thought we worked together on it.

I am in a hotel near the airport of Deseret’s capital city. I was supposed to be flying back to Colosse today, but things did not work out as planned. After a few hours in the car driving down here, I was informed that the first leg of my flight was postponed due to weather. That postponement would mean that I would miss my connecting flight. No other flights, on any other airlines, were going to get me to Colosse. And because it was an “Act of God” I would not get lodging for the night. So I type this from a hotel room.

What’s particularly annoying is that I paid for extra legroom for the flight down and according to the contract, I won’t be getting that money back. Also, I prepaid for checked luggage. Tomorrow, I will have to pay for my checked luggage again.

It’s well documented, and not an altogether negative thing, that airlines are keeping their fares low by nickel and diming. I say that this is not an altogether negative thing because it makes sense for people who bring along extra stuff and want extra legroom to pay more. However, while they are required to make alternate arrangements for Acts of God to get passengers to their destination, and not upcharge you for the ability to do so, I guess they get a pass on the nickel and diming.

Either that or the lady behind the counter really hated me and none of the above is true.

It’s for alcoholism and suicidal threats. Anyone? This is time-sensitive.

You might think I’d be good at telling people what to do, given what I do for a living, but it’s different when you’re not being paid to give advice. And in my job, I make a big point of (acting like I’m) not judging people. Plus I don’t really have the moral upper hand — I’d hate to quit drinking. Just thinking about this made me drink. I’m friends with this person probably in part because we both like to drink.

By way of demographics, it’s a guy, of course. A not-unexpected outgrowth of this.

So apparently Alec Baldwin was kicked off an American Airlines flight for electronic device use:

Alec Baldwin was booted from an American Airlines flight in Los Angeles on Tuesday, apparently after he used an electronic device to play a Scrabble-like game before the plane departed.

“Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS while we sat at the gate, not moving. #nowonderamericaairisbankrupt,” Baldwin tweeted.

Now, by most accounts, Baldwin is something of an arse. So I believe American Airlines when they say that there was more to it than the use of the electronic device. But what caught my interest is that they did not dispute that the plane was parked at the time of the incident:

American Airlines chimed in on its own Twitter account, writing, “Our flight attendants were following federal safety procedures on electronic devices when aircraft door is closed.”

Is this the rule? I turn off my electronic devices when they tell me to (or at least give the appearance of turning them off), but I thought that pertained to the safety instructions and plane movement, not just closed doors. Am I misremembering? Do other airlines just not enforce this rule (I never fly American)? I am pretty certain that cell phones go on while taxiing after landing (when the door is presumably closed). And I know for a fact when we’re stuck on the runway, electronics and cell phones are okay (where again, the door is presumably closed).

Forbes has an article on how to make a good impression and such. There are basically five bits of advice, that range from the obvious to the OCD. The main advice is “don’t be lame.” The most interesting advice is “think about your ornaments”:

Clothes, make-up, jewelry, watches and shoes are all types of ornamentation and people definitely take these into account when making initial judgments. I highly recommend getting some of your favorite outfits or ornaments together and asking friends you trust what they think of when they see them. For many men, they do not realize that their watch can say a lot about them. For women, purses and large earrings or jewelry can also indicate a lot to a new person they are meeting. Make sure that what you are wearing and how you do your hair or make-up says what you want it to say to the people you are meeting for the first time.

Most of this advice is geared towards women, but it was the part about men that caught my attention. Particularly since I am a big watch guy.

Seriously, what do my watches say about me? I have about six watches that I choose between depending on what I am doing and wearing a given day, but I thought this was because I was OCD and weird. Now I realize I am apparently making a statement. But what statement?!

I suppose I am making a statement of a different sort with my steel-toed boots that I almost always wear. I don’t suspect that it is “probably works in a factory.” Maybe that I am eclectic? I actually have them because I did work in a warehouse. Not in these shoes, but once you get used to steel toes, it’s hard to go back. You discover that you picked up the habit of kicking things. And without steel toes, that hurts.

Other than that, my dress is pretty typical. I don’t know if my persistence in tucking in my shirt counts for something. It’s a little atypical. Though in a business environment, which this is geared towards, it’s the standard (outside of some geeky and lower-rent casual environments).

As for my watches, I have two that can more-or-less be worn with nice clothes. They’re pretty standard watches. Two of them are US Polo Association watches, which are a little… stylistic? They’re my all-purpose watches. I also have two Casios, or “geek-watches” because they have both analog and digital time on them. But they fill two different voids, one of which has a canvas strap (thus making it appropriate only for casual wear) and the other with a rubber strap (which would be the same, except that it actually has a nice-looking design on it. (The reason that they break down in twos is because I have black and brown of each kind, so as to match my belt and boots, in both cases where I have black and brown variations.) I suspect that despite all of the thought and effort I put into watches, whatever they say about me is not good. None of them cost over $50 and the two that cost over $25 are the Casios, which have a geek factor but not a nice factor. At some point I do plan to buy a nicer watch (Invectas often look really cool), but I don’t really want to until I get a handle on the smoking.

Until then, I will wear watches that will send off unknown, but probably negative, signals.

The BCS wants you to know it’s sorry:

“I don’t think any of us are happy that the BCS is one of the contributing factors to conference realignment,” BCS executive director Bill Hancock said Monday after a meeting of conference commissioners and university presidents. “It’s certainly not the only (factor), by any means. The BCS was never intended to be a divisive event. To the extent that the BCS can be a part of lending stability to the conferences, I think that’s what everybody would like to see.”

The current BCS TV and bowl contracts run through the 2013 season. Beyond that nothing about the BCS is a given.

Sorry for what? The role that the BCS has played in realignment has been almost non-existent. That hasn’t stopped a lot of people from blaming the BCS, but there’s absolutely no there there. Let’s track all of the conference changes:

Nebraska from Big 12 to Big Ten - Nebraska went from one BCS conference to another. The issues at stake almost entirely involved internal disagreements with the Big 12 and perceived instability. The Big Ten was expanding so that they could have a championship game and so that they could make more TV money.

Boise State from Western Athletic Conference to Mountain West Conference - Neither the WAC now the MWC have a BCS bid. The MWC may have been on the road to one, but Boise had already gone to two BCS bowls and the WAC provided an easier path to one than the MWC. This one was primarily about conference prestige.

Colorado from Big 12 to Pac-10 - The Pac-10 expanded for TV-related reasons. Colorado has always felt itself more of a western than Great Plains school and has a significant alumni basis in California. Instability was also a factor. The Big 12 was in no danger of losing its BCS bid.

Utah from the Mountain West Conference to the Pac-10 - This is closer to being BCS-related than the others, but it still falls short. The MWC was arguably on its way to becoming a BCS conference, but it didn’t matter. The conference was sitting on a bad TV contract. Plus, the Pac-10 is the Pac-10. It’s a desirable conference for western schools to be in for a whole host of reasons. Even if MWC had the BCS slot in hand, they still would have gone. As would BYU have.

Fresno State and Nevada from the Western Athletic Conference to the Mountain West Conference - See Boise State, more or less. It was apparent by this point that there was no AQ status in the MWC’s future, so to whatever extent it might have been a motivator for Boise it wasn’t for these two. The MWC, for all of its faults, was and is a better place to be than the WAC.

BYU from the Mountain West Conference to Independent and the West Coast Conference - BYU got no special Notre Dame type of consideration from the BCS. In fact, going indy made making a BCS bowl game more rather than less difficult. But the money was better, the MWC’s TV deal was terrible, and they didn’t want to be left behind by Utah.

Hawaii from the Western Athletic Conference to the Mountain West Conference (football only) and Big West Conference - See Nevada, Fresno State, and Boise State.

TCU from the Mountain West Conference to Big East - Okay, this was one was all about the BCS. The TV contract also played a role, but a secondary one.

Texas A&M from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference - From one BCS conference to another. Texas A&M felt overshadowed by UT in the Big 12 and there were issues with the TV deal and Texas’s lucrative TV network deal.

Pittsburgh and Syracuse from the Big East to the Atlantic Coast Conference - This one had a BCS component to it, but they were still sitting in a conference that had an AQ spot within Conference USA and, with the addition of TCU, was likely to keep it. They were also in a very dysfunctional conference, however, half-full with basketball schools and half-full with football ones. The basketball schools were making expansion on the football side difficult. Plus, the ACC is a more prestigious conference academically.

TCU from the Big East to the Big 12 - This one had a BCS component to it as well, but at the end of the day they went from a conference where the nearest school was in northern Kentucky to one where there were three other schools in their state and two in the neighboring state northward.

West Virginia from the Big East to the Big 12 - This one is also BCS-related.

Missouri from the Big 12 to the SEC - Despite its losses, the Big 12 is not remotely in danger of losing its AQ bid. They left the Big 12 for the same reason that everybody else did. It’s an uncomfortable place to be compared to the greener pastures of a more stable conference.

Now, from here we are going to be seeing some more BCS-related changes. It’s certainly the case that the Big East would not be looking at Boise State for any other reason. If BYU joins, it would be due in good part to the BCS status of the conference (but not just that). On the other hand, despite its losses, the Big East is expected to pull in a pretty lucrative TV deal. So with the exception of BYU, all of the other rumored schools are as much motivated by money as anything. And, with the exception of Boise State, it’s true the other way as well. Houston, SMU, and UCF offer good TV markets for the conference (East Carolina would probably help their numbers more, but they don’t appear to be interested in ECU). BYU has a national market and should help their TV deal considerably, if they choose to join. If BYU chooses not to join, they’re supposedly looking at Temple and San Diego State, both of which offer more in TV sets than in BCS calculations.

In six months, dad, you’re probably going to lose your kids for good. I think you do suspect this, but won’t admit it to yourself. And you don’t want me to tell you why. They’ve been gone a year already, yet you don’t really want to know why.

I can tell this because you make it extremely unpleasant to interact with you. That is what scammers do. When you’re in a situation where you have some power, this may be very effective. It’s called bullying. People want to avoid the conflict, so maybe they get nervous and don’t scrutinize you appropriately, and your bad check or stolen credit card is accepted. Or maybe they give you the refund you want, even without the required receipt, so you’ll go away. But you are not in a one-on-one conflict. Your adversaries are not your equals, and they have very little duty toward you. You are fighting a court and a powerful government agency, backed closely by the police. Your arguments are worth nothing against that. And I’m your only friend in the fight. You shouldn’t want to make me avoid you.

Yet you make it miserable to talk with you, so I do the minimum. I’m just your lawyer; all I have to do is give you adequate legal advice and make sure you don’t get screwed legally. You decide what to do with that. Confronting you with stuff about yourself that you don’t want to hear, well, that goes beyond adequate. I didn’t have the energy or the time yesterday to deal with you arguing and yelling at me for an hour, which is the minimum it would have taken to have even a small chance of getting this through to you. So I’m in that gray area where I know I did my job, butI still feel bad because I know you’ll still fail. I don’t like my clients to lose, even when they’re assholes.

And that is the number one reason why the social worker will not recommend you getting your kids back and the court will follow that recommendation, regardless of what your lawyer argues at trial, regardless of what complaints about the system you have when you take the stand against your lawyer’s advice and ramble on over sustained objections. ( “Motion to strike after ‘Yes.’” “Sustained. SUSTAINED. That means the witness needs to STOP TALKING.” Bailiff approaches menacingly.)

There are a few reasons, and they build on each other to create something we call the totality of circumstances. In summary:

1) You’re a hothead.

2) You’re a hothead who smokes pot.

3) You’re a hothead who smokes pot and has a criminal background, and misses lots of drug tests and skips lots of scheduled visits with your kids because of things that are always someone else’s fault, and is 30 and has never held a job, and has absolutely no shame about telling a social worker that you need your children back so you can get the welfare turned back on. You make this demand to a social worker in your children’s mother’s publicly subsidized Section 8 apartment, where you shamelessly acknowledge that you live illegally because your criminal background precludes you from living there, but there’s no way anyone’s gonna come between you and her. NO WAY! GOT THAT? And during this conversation, your video game station is turned on. Yes, you have a video game system, a newish one, while you are moaning that you have to sell plasma to get by and have no time to do your weekly drug tests and visit your kids AND go to rehab classes three days a week.

If that’s too complicated, I’ll boil it down further: You are the kind of person that taxpaying citizens consider the scum of the earth. When you’re that kind of person, you don’t get to smoke marijuana and parent, even though the voters of California have (graciously! compassionately!) empowered a doctor to defy federal law and grant you a certificate that protects you from criminal conviction for possession (and he/she can do this for virtually any ailment you claim, even if it’s something ridiculous like having eating problems when you’re obviously obese).

And your children are under the control of a system that can, and does, kick parents like that out of their children’s lives permanently. Even when the kids love them and want to go home, like yours do. Under the law, you don’t have to beat your kids to lose them. You just have to be, well, crappy. Legally, it’s called “the nexus,” meaning a connection between substance use and risk of harm to the children. But what the nexus often means is, “you’re crappy, so you don’t get to.”

General crappiness, coupled with almost any illegal activity or use of a mind-altering substance, is enough. That’s the real trouble with medical marijuana. It’s not the bulletproof vest people think it is, not when you have kids. And that’s the problem with you, dad. You either can’t see, or refuse to see, that you’re one of those people whose ice is too thin to stomp around on. I wish I could figure out how to explain it so you’d understand. Lots of crappy people love their kids, and their kids love them back. But the law won’t protect both your family, and your way of life.

Over at the League - heck, over at the whole blogosphere - you get a lot of right-wing pundits and libertarian types talking about how regulatory capture or rent-seeking behavior wouldn’t be a problem “if government were just smaller with less regulation” because then there’d be no reason for large corporations to try to capture the government.

But in a Slashdot discussion about an incredibly slanted set of congressional hearings today, I saw a gem. To wit:

The core problem is not that government has gotten too big. The core problem is that businesses have become bigger than government, big enough to engage in regulatory capture and rent-seeking behaviors.

This is something that’s happened time and again. The British East India company essentially took over the British government for far too long, leading to the ruin of Britain as a nation for some time. In the early 1900s, we needed a major slew of trust-busting activities BY the government [u-s-history.com] because of abusive companies like Standard Oil and Nortnern Securities who had engaged in regulatory capture and were exerting unfair monopoly controls, slowly taking over more and more sectors of the economy.

Sound familiar? Strike any parallels at all to the incredibly abusive megacorporations of today that gobble up sectors at an alarming rate? Or did you notice - for instance, that of the “fast food chains” in the US, more than 50% of them are actually owned by ONE company, “Yum Brands”, which is itself owned by Pepsi - which also owns Lay’s potato chips, Ruffles, Lipton, Doritos, “Quaker” brand, and on and on…

Still think there’s any real competition left in the bullshit “free market” the Republicans worship so much? Might as well melt your coins down to a golden calf right now, buddy. There’s not a real christian left on the “religious right”, they’re worshiping greed instead.

This struck a nerve. Many of the parallels today to the trusts of the late 1800s/early 1900s are very apt. You have one factory making multiple labels of a food type. Or two. Or three. You have 101 brands of cat food contaminated because a single company is involved in making them all. You have single companies that make the entire array of supposed “competing products” that people believe are competing with each other.

There’s something very wrong about this. It seems to me that the anonymous commenter on Slashdot is hitting the point quite close to home; we wouldn’t have a problem with regulatory capture if there weren’t huge, overarching megacorporations running fake “competing brands”, exerting monopoly or near-monopoly pressures that destroy the idea of the “free market” that the libertarian/conservatives believe exists.

So I’d like to ask some readers from both sides of the aisle here (not political parties mind you, but just economics-wise): do we actually have a “free market” today? Can we even consider our market a “free market” when there are megacorps like Kraft, or Pepsico/”Yum Brands”, or any of the other giants that constitute monopolies, skewing the result? If not, is there a fix to be had, short of another round of trust-busting and the re-institution of most of the anti-monopolist rules that it seems have been done away with in the “deregulation fever” of the past few decades?

I don’t keep up with the celebrity gossip, but apparently some woman that pop sensation Justin Bieber (allegedly?) had sex with is claiming that she is pregnant by him. The problem is that he was below the California age of consent:

Mariah Yeater, the woman who claims Justin Bieber fathered her baby in a backstage bathroom, could be investigated for having sex with a minor because the singer was 16 at the time.

While no crime has been reported, Los Angeles Police Commander Andrew Smith told The Associated Press on Thursday that the department could investigate after Yeater filed the paternity suit against the teen heartthrob in San Diego Superior Court.

“If it’s brought to our attention, of course we’ll look into it,” Smith said.

Of course, even if the child was a product of “rape”, Bieber would still be on the hook for child support:

“The issue of statutory rape, even if she’s guilty, hypothetically, that has no bearing on the duties to provide child support,” said one of Yeater’s lawyers, Matthew Pare. “It’s a totally separate issue.”

He absolutely should be on the hook for child support, if the kid is his. But that’s not indicative that it should be “separate issue[s],” but rather that the sex should not have been illegal in the first place.

Seriously, the age of consent in California is 18? I would not have guessed that it would be particularly high in that particular state.

–{This post is somewhat touched off by Patrick Cahalan’s over at The League; his story has some similarities to my own. Due in part to the lesser information I have on hand, and in part to the anonymity level of this blog vs the League, I’m going to be slightly vague. I hope my point comes across, though.– Web

Today is Veteran’s Day. It’s supposed to be a day where ALL of America honors our veterans of military service. Those who served and lived, those who served and didn’t come home. Those who served in time of war, those who served in times without.

A lot of stories of remembrance will go out today. For my part, I honor my currently living grandfather and uncle, who have served in various capacities in the Army. I honor another uncle, who served with distinction in the air force. I honor my cousin, currently in the US Navy and training to become an officer. I honor my friends who have served, and the family of friends who have served or are currently serving.

And I honor my other grandfather. He died when I was nine. His tale is not so grand. He enlisted in the US Army during World War II. War did terrible things to him - physical and mental both. By all accounts, he and my father were never on very good terms, something I know still haunts my father to this day because they never did reconcile; my father was mostly raised by my great-grandmother, taking care of his own siblings while my grandmother tried to take care of my grandfather. My grandfather was physically disabled, mentally destroyed, and spent most of his day in a bottle. He died when I was 9 years old in a VA hospital, the result of complications from diabetes and alcoholism. To the best of my knowledge, this is the ONLY time after his discharge when the US government or army gave a crap about him.

The most vivid memory I have of my grandfather is from a christmas eve when he, my grandmother, and my aunts and uncles came over to visit. It was one of my father’s attempts to make things better between them. I remember him sitting in a recliner, watching TV, drinking a few beers as the two attempted to talk with each other, or at least my dad was trying to talk with him. I remember going over to give him a hug; I don’t remember being hugged back. I’m not certain he was coherent enough to do so. A little over 6 months after that, he was gone.

Because of this, Veteran’s Day always carries mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, I have relatives alive to thank and remember. I have friends, and their family, to think of as well.

On the other… I remember my grandfather. And every year at this time, I see a bunch of politicians getting up and making speeches. Some do so sincerely. Some are veterans themselves. Some say something respectful, meaningful, and get it right. Others… well, some of them are trying to claim all the veterans to themselves. Trying to claim that “the other side” doesn’t care about the military, doesn’t care about the veterans. And that infuriates me to an endless degree, because Veteran’s day is NOT supposed to be about politics. I want to grab them by the shirt. I want to shake them. I want to shout at them. I want to say “Where the hell was your political party when my grandfather needed help? Where the hell was your political party when my father and siblings were put through all the hurt of watching a family member in that pain? Where the hell was your political party for all the other veterans who went through things similar to what my grandfather went through?” I want to look them dead in the eye and ask them “where the hell were you, where the FUCK was your supposed caring about the veterans, when the neglect you heaped on them stole my grandfather from his family?”

Rest in peace, Grandpa R. You deserved so much better.

And I am willing to pay 40-something cents not to have to. I had to pay the water bill the other day. Our water bill goes to City Hall. But instead of dropping it off, I put a stamp on an envelope and dropped it off at the nearest drop-box.

The nearest drop-box is right in front of City Hall.

The Oakland police are a little confused over the mixed signals they are getting from the city on the whole Occupy Oakland thing.

Some really disturbing stuff involving the Hershey Candy Company taking advantage of exchange students.

The TSA is for trasportation security, at least theoretically. But this sure seems more like drug enforcement to me.

You know, I hadn’t thought about it, but this actually sounds like it might have merit. It’s one thing to disclose things that are uncontestable facts. It’s another thing to have to display images that almost certainly qualify as advocacy.

So this man is getting a smartphone dock built into his prosthetic arm. Sounds cool, but I see a logistical problem. The dock is built for the phone that’s in it. Smartphones get out of date kind of fast. Does he get a new arm when he needs a new phone?

Donnie Moore arguably (but not entirely) cost the California Angels the 1986 World Series. Later, he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself. He has become known as the man that killed himself for a single pitch. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t that simple. As an aficionado of 1986 Major League Baseball, I find the whole story fascinating.

Discussed here and there on Hit Coffee has been the administration’s attempts to lower the burden on campus sexual harassment. Apparently, Patrick Leahy is attempting to codify this in legislation. I think the damage has been done and a future president is not going to want to be saddled as Friend of Sexual Harrassers. But in case I’m wrong, I hope this does not come to fruition.

The most bullied Americans are Asian-Americans. It’s not surprising, but I thought I would pass it along.

The 8 worst fonts in the world. Namely, the fonts that everybody actually uses. I used to be a real font collector. But when you have a font that nobody else does, they become less than entirely usable for anything but going on images.

The last major college football sex scandal involved a young lady having sex with a bunch of athletes. The current sex scandal involves a single coach having sex with a lot of young boys. If you were a university president, which would you rather have to deal with? That question answered itself pretty quickly.

James Joyner and I had a back-and-forth on Twitter about too-old trick-or-treaters. He commented that they were many, I commented that they have the benefit of getting rid of excess candy, and he agreed.

It got me thinking, though. After the Great Candy Scares, Halloween was never the same in my old neighborhood, nor in places I have lived since (this may be coincidentals). While that’s a post in and of itself, I’ll just make that observation to get to a greater point: With the paucity of houses offering candy, ToTing takes notably more time than it used to. I bought a bag of candy from the store for $8. If they ToT for over an hour, they are unlikely to get as much candy as I bought. At least that was the case in the old neighborhood. And even here, in a very child-centric town, there seems to be relatively few houses around.

It seems to me that if the older kids were to just work an hour, they’d end up further ahead than they are by ToTing. In other words, the “free is free” comment I made to Joyner has its limitations. Because it is, in effect, being paid to walk around and ask people for candy. Except that you’re getting paid in candy, which has non-transferable value.

Further, after Halloween, they practically give the stuff the away. So even if I’m wrong in my initial calculation, I am right insofar as you could, if you worked for an hour or two at some other job, buy the candy and have a little left over for, well, I don’t know what.

On the other hand, due to child labor laws, they often can’t go out and work. Or their options for work are limited. We do get kids stopping by asking to mow our lawn. There are also ads for baby sitters and bet sitters on the bulletin board at Safeway. So in a way, this is not something that they do in lieu of work, but rather is the best “work” they can find. It pays in candy, but it actually pays.

When I was a kid, I used to deliver the local newsletter. It was about $7 for doing something not much different that ToTing, except that I was dropping off rather than picking up. It took roughly two hours to earn the money, which was less than minimum wage. But it was a great deal because I was thirteen and there weren’t a whole lot of ways to make regular money. As delivery-boys would “retire” I took on additional routes. By the time I was 16, I was doing three a month for $21. Even though I was eligible to work at that point, it was still a good deal* because it was a way to make money without committing to a regular schedule. So ToTing has that benefit, too. You do it one night, make your money, and then don’t have to quit.

* - Not that I had a choice. My mother was the chief editor of said newsletter. Since she knew that I would deliver it, she didn’t want me to quit and I would have done it out of obligation anyway.

-{Crossposted on NaPP}-

In keeping with Hit Coffee policy, political party has been left out of this post, as it’s irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Please remember that when commenting.

There’s an old quote, often attributed to Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli, or any number of other famous wonks of the past) that goes something along the line that there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

It’s such a popular line that it’s been made into a well-selling book series by Joel Best, as well as being featured on many news shows. It’s even the title of an Episode of The West Wing.

The root of recent disagreement is a statistic trotted out by a number of news personalities, talk radio personalities, and politicians of late. The quote often is to the effect that either “53% of Americans bear the burden of federal income tax” or “47% of Americans don’t pay any federal income tax” - usually followed very quickly by a quip about how “more people need to have some skin in the game” or something similar.

Unfortunately, this is one of those “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” times. You see, federal income tax is a small part of the whole tax story. When you do your taxes for the year - your federal tax return - there are multiple lines even on the simple form. Yes, you have your “federal tax withholding” if you are an employee somewhere (or if you file quarterlies as an independent business owner or consultant) line. But there are another two lines there, flagged to social security and medicare taxes, e.g. “payroll taxes.” Once you add these to the equation, the number of people who had “no tax burden” (still under the “federal, reflected on your paycheck” criteria) drops to roughly 24%.

But wait - we’re not done yet! The next piece of the puzzle is state deductions, specifically, state taxes. You’re allowed to deduct either your state income tax (if your state has one) or any state sales taxes you paid during the year from your federal income tax. That “hides” another set of people from the statistics - with poverty at an all time high in the US, being able to deduct even a small amount from the assessed federal income can make the difference from a net positive or negative federal income report.

Amazingly, we’re still not done! After you add in other state taxes and fees, it’s pretty clear that this is where the poor get shafted - and it’s a situation that hasn’t changed at all in the last two decades. The actual percentage of people who have “no tax burden” is, mathematically speaking, frighteningly close to the number of people who are out of work or working well below the poverty line - and even they see a hefty tax burden (as a percentage of income) from things that better-off people see as mere nuisances such as vehicle registration and inspection fees, sales taxes, and the other miscellaneous fees and hidden charges imposed by state and local governments around the country.

When I hear people talking about “the 53%”, or how “more people need to have skin in the game”, I cringe. If past conversations are any guide, from this point on, the discussion is over; nothing seems to dissuade anyone wedded to the idea that “almost half the country aren’t paying in”, even if it’s fundamentally untrue.

{Post edited to reflect better judgement on my final words. My apologies if I offended anyone.}

For those of you who stopped checking (and care), Hit Coffee regular Phi is now Dr. Phi and has started blogging again. Early on in his return, he wrote a piece on networking:

And yet . . . when I needed it, the network was there. Not, mind you, in the obvious place: my boss. Or her boss. But coworkers. Neighbors. Friends from church. My advisor. People I Know.

What’s scary about this is that, with one exception, all the callbacks I’ve received from potential employers have been with the support of the network I didn’t even know I had. Supposedly, employers actually prefer to hire people this way, but this strikes me as counterintuitive. From an employer’s perspective, why would I want to limit my applicant pool to people my current employees happen to know, or to hire people whose loyalty is less to the company than to their own network?

And from an job seeker’s perspective . . . well, what if my next door neighbor hadn’t worked for an engineering firm with a new contract? What if a friend from church wasn’t a program manager with a research institute and could put my resume in front of the right people? These all seem like pretty close-run things, especially since my wife usually puts most of the effort into maintaining these friendships in the first place.

I think this is particularly true in the current economy. When any posted job can receive hundreds and hundreds of applicants, you have three options:

1. Just look at a few applications and hire the first person that meets your criteria.
2. Hire more people to go through them all.
3. Up the posted requirements to the nth degree.
4. Leave the job unposted and ask around.

The first one is… dissatisfying. You want to hire the best person, not the person who randomly turned in their application at just the right time in order to be at the top of the stack. The second is obviously a non-starter. The third is a common complaint among job-seekers. Like just looking at the applicants with the most qualifications, it also runs the risk of hiring someone too good for the job and will perhaps be bored (this bothers some, but not others). Or nobody with the qualifications applies and you’re stuck looking through the applications of people who ignored the requirements in the first place. They’re either “go-getters” or “people who disregard what you say,” depending on how you look at it.

Then there’s the last option. You don’t actually have to leave the job unposted. But you can ignore the random applicants and give special attention to that guy that somebody knows. This is a common, and reasonably logical, way of going about it. You can judge the quality of the applicant by the quality of the person endorsing them. It’s not always the case, but frequently quality people hang around quality people. Or if they hang around non-quality people, they’re not likely to put their own career or social standing in jeopardy by recommending them.

This whole situation is, of course, dreadfully unfair. Especially to introverts. And insofar as the connections are professional, it takes a job to know professional people to recommend you for another professional job. Dr. Phi goes on to say that this hits fresh college graduates the hardest. I would argue it actually hits smart people from lower social classes the hardest. These people may be college students, so it’s not mutually exclusive. Of course, when I think of college graduates, I think of those that I knew in college. More specifically the Honors College. They lived on campus, for the most part, and didn’t have jobs. So they had time to make friends and so on. So when we graduated, we automatically knew people. I got my roommate his first job, who turned around and got a later roommate his first job, who turned around and pointed me on a later job, and so on.

If you’re in college, commuting, and working, it’s harder to form those kinds of relationships. When you go to Online U, it’s unlikely to happen. When you go to junior college, you’re with a lot of people that are not necessarily going to be good networking folks in the world of white collar employment.

Of course, that changes if you’re not looking at white collar employment. When I was living at Belle Rieve, my ex-con neighbor tried to get me a gig at a ketchup factory. Another to work the wheat fields. So I suppose there is that.