This article is a weird mixture of “hear me roar” and “the boys aren’t playing fair!!!!!” An article about women actually trying to accomplish something in IT is a lot better than stuff like this suggesting that they are cause they have awesome MySpace pages and rocking emoticons, but it still strikes the same chord with me as this article and the general tone of media coverage, wherein male success in a particular area (such a technology) is a sign of failure whereas increasing female dominance (in, say, the number of college degrees awarded) is a sign of progress even when men are falling behind.

What got my attention is this:

Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to “act like a man” in order to succeed.

I ran across this article because that 56% statistic was cited in another article. That stat sounded so far out of left field that I had to follow the link. And I am rather dumbfounded as to where that statistic comes from. Actually, I suspect I know where that statistic comes from. 56% is about (or just below) the percentage of overall (and not just science and engineering) graduates are women. There’s just no way that science and engineering mirror that statistic so closely. Look at any school known largely for its science and engineering programs and you’re likely to find a skew towards men (and I doubt it’s because men are making up for their minority-status in science by taking liberal arts coursework).

I could say that this is deliberate misinformation, but I don’t think it is. Pointing out that only about a third or two-fifths of S&E graduates are women is often used to make the argument that there is discrimination at the university level. In fact, the notion that 56% of S&E graduates are women undermines a number of the points the author was trying to make.

In any event, the great thing about statistics like this is that they get forwarded, accepted as true, and really hard to subdue.

Last week I wrote about Prop 19 in California and the kooky provision that doesn’t allow employers to discriminate against pot users the same way they can discriminate against the users of other legal products:

If it doesn’t affect job performance, I believe it should be a non-issue. However, it not-infrequently is going to cause problems in the workplace the same way that alcohol consumption does. Adding a layer making it more difficult to fire people that smoke pot compared to people that don’t is highly concerning.

Mike Hunt noted in the comments:

Can we admit that the whole medical marijuana thing is a scam?

I never responded to that snippit, but my response was going to be “Maybe. But it’s not just a scam. It’s also a start.”

As if to bring these two thoughts together, I ran across this article about how the new medicinal marijuana law in Arizona puts employers in the same bind as employers in California would have been if the law had passed:

“If the positive drug test is of a person who’s a cardholder, the law has a presumption that the marijuana use was for medical purposes, not recreational,” Phoenix attorney David Selden.

That, Selden said, presents a new hurdle for a company that wants to fire a worker: proving impairment.

“One of the most common ways is through symptoms,” he said, “a delayed reaction, a lack of perception, loss of energy, bloodshot eyes, dilated pupils - those kinds of things that people remember from college,” Selden said.

“It’s turning employers into the equivalent of a field sobriety test,” he continued. “There is a not a scientific measurement of impairment the way there is for alcohol.”

This is where the fact that medicinal marijuana is a scam is problematic. If medicinal marijuana were regulated like other drugs with prescriptions and all those other buzzkills, I might actually agree with this provision. If someone has a condition for which they need the drug, perhaps they should not be discriminated against unless their job performance suffers. But… come on. It’s not being used that way. This is something that Arapaho learned very quickly after implementing their system. It’s a backdoor to legalization. And as such, I think that discrimination against card-holders (on the basis of a failed drug test) ought to be legal unless they’re willing to undergo the exact same procedures that other people do for other medications. Or at the very least have put together a proposal to make really look like it was for dying cancer patients.

Of course, for that to happen, you would probably have to get pharmaceutical companies involved rather than letting people grow it on their own. Which defeats the real purpose of it. And lets profits go to the “bad guys” who non-libertarian supporters of medmar hate. And is just generally a buzzkill. Of course, if it ever really becomes legal, the profits will start going to you know who. Which will be a buzzkill even before they start putting pictures of people dying on the boxes.

The other day I noticed something weird was going on with my vision. First there was irritation for several hours after I took out my contacts. That’s nothing unusual, though it persisted longer than usual. Then a day or so later my eye became rather blurry and I had no idea why. It was as though my eye were fogged up. Foggy vision was not unusual because the cold weather makes my glasses fog up. But the fogging persisted whether I was wearing glasses or not. Clancy had to drive us to our T-Day dinner.

It got better over the course of that evening, but then got worse again the next day. Then the pain returned. It was a familiar pain. The pain of having a contact lense folded somewhere beneath the lid. Except I wasn’t wearing a contact, was I? Sure, I’d lost my right-eye contact when I was taking it out, but that wasn’t unusual. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the contact must be in my eye somewhere. It’s been known to cause blurriness before, though not in quite this way (usually blurriness in the upper part of the eye where my eyeball was eclipsed by the lens).

I went through the usual steps, though the contact was nowhere to be seen no matter how much I peeled my eyelids back or pulled my skin around. It was several rounds later when I determined that it was in there and must have been folded twice over. Since the blurry vision as not come back, I assume that was the cause of it one way or another. Mystery solved, though the fact that I had the thing tucked away in my lid for three days or so without noticing is unusual. I guess my discomfort threshold is increasing as usually it takes only a few hours before I can’t take it anymore.

Not sure if any of you have seen this, but for those who don’t want to view the video, what happened is that a quarterback pretended that the ball needed to be moved 5 yards downfield due to a penalty. While everyone was standing around, he made a break for it and scored the game-winning touchdown.

There was also a recent case when a Cal coach was suspended for having his players fake injury:

Because they run a tempo offense, this sort of thing happens to the Southern Tech Packers with regularity. Pack fans have taken some heat because we’ve come to start booing injured players from certain teams, which is a no-no. It doesn’t help that it often happens with one of Sotech’s rivals, the Piermont Riptide.

Some rivalries are made (due to proximity, usually) and some are born. Sotech and Piermont actually have next to nothing in common as universities (Piermont is a small, private school with a mildly religious background while Sotech is a large public school) who had a rivalry born with a long history of playing one another in games with a lot at stake. Also, Sotech used to be in the habit of running up the score on and on a couple of occasions posted victories with more than 90 points on the board, and Piermont has never forgotten (and they consider it further proof that we are a low-class school). Adding to all of this is an immense dislike by Packer fans of Piermont’s coach, Rod Gandi for reasons I won’t get into.

Anyhow, a couple of seasons ago Piermont inexplicably redesigned their uniforms for a game to emulate ours. Presumably to confuse our players. Typical Gandi, we thought. Then, as we were driving down the field to win the game, over and over again they kept getting “injured” and slowing us down as we were trying to catch their defense off-guard with high-tempo, no-huddle play. Same two players. After the game, Piermont fans were bragging about that it’s not against the rules or anything (actually, as the video demonstrates, it is) and we should just suck it up.

Flash forward to the next season and the our team and our fans are going ballistic every time a player gets hurt. The Piermont fans (on the message board) complained and again suggested that it just showed how low-class our fans were. Others even admitted that they had faked injuries before but that the benefit of the doubt should always go to the limping player. Our fans, obviously, disagreed.

The problem with trick plays like this, whether they are against the rules or not, are that they often lead to things like fans getting angry at injured players for the other team (for the record, one Piermont player we booed was out for the season). I don’t like injured players getting booed. And I want to give every seemingly-injured player the benefit of the doubt. But our coaches and players are left to appeal to the refs every time a player doesn’t get up right until the stretcher comes out and it becomes apparent that there might be a real injury here.

As cute as the high middle school play shown above is, it creates a similar problem. In the event that there is any sort of confusion, what should the defensive players do? If they’re wrong in one direction, it’s a touchdown. If they’re wrong in the other direction, it’s a 15-yard penalty (and possible ejection from the game). Ultimately, it’s not just a trick play, it’s a bad-faith play. A few of the articles talking about the play are saying that it’s a play you only get away with once. Maybe. And maybe some kid will get tackled because some defensive lineman thinks that play has started. In this case, the player walked past the defenders, but next time he may just start walking to the sideline with the ball. Maybe he will genuinely be confused. Maybe not. When there’s not a clear indication of what the defense is supposed to be doing, it’s a recipe for potential problems.

Which is a shame. Cause it really is kind of a cool play.

Apparently, tribes that run casinos are far more likely than tribes that don’t to embrace stereotypes. The question is whether they do this because they recognize that a number of the stereotypes are not meant all that negatively, or because they’re willing to endure being made light of when it is in their financial interest?

One of the big surprises when I first moved out west was how much the local tribe in Deseret embraced the stereotypes. I had been raised to believe that calling them Indians is wrong (which, technically, it is) and that the proper term is Native Americans (which is not wrong so much as inspecific). But the local reservation doesn’t say “Get your Native American Ornamentals here!” but rather “Indian Gear! Next Exit!” (often selling things that have no ties to the local tribes but are associated with tribes in general). After that, it became hard to ever use the “Native American” term. So I’ve transitioned to using “tribes” generically. I wish we could go back to the drawing board and use “Amerindians” as the CIA World Factbook and other sources do.

The question of embracing or resisting the stereotypes is one of those things that comes up when it comes to sports mascots. It’s difficult to understand why Redskins might be considered an offensive mascot. I am generally indifferent on the subject of tribal mascots, believing that appropriateness depends a great deal on context, but that one does make me squirm a little bit. On the other side of the equation is Braves, which seems pretty obviously meant to be complimentary. Everything else is somewhere in between.

The NCAA passed down a ruling several years back that forced many colleges to reconsider their mascots. The ruling essentially required any use of tribal mascots to be approved of by the applicable tribe. Some rather generic names, such as Indians, had no applicable tribe to appeal to and so Arkansas State and Louisiana-Monroe changed their mascot from the Indians to the Red Wolves and Warhawks. Had the Miami Redskins not already changed their name to the RedHawks, they likely would have had to change their name, too. William & Mary called themselves the Tribe and responded by removing the feather from their logo and becoming a generic tribe rather than an Indian Tribe.

Others, though, got away with it by securing the approval of their local tribe. At least that’s the official reason. The Utah Utes were cool despite a most heinously uncool name. The Illinois Illini had to get rid of the guy in the costume, but got to keep the name. The Florida State Seminoles were initially on the Bad List, but they got on the Good List by securing the approval of the local Seminole tribe. Other Seminole tribes objected.

In a similar situation, though still on the Bad List, is the North Dakota Fighting Sioux. They got the approval of one Sioux tribe, but not of others. Unlike Florida State, however, this was deemed insufficient. This ruling lead some to believe that the Big Boys were being allowed to get away with what the lesser schools were not. The NCAA can afford to irritate North Dakota, but not so much Florida State. Being a big school also would presumably make it easier to donate money to their sponsoring tribe to garner their goodwill. More on this in a minute.

North Dakota in particular has been hit hard because their boosters are vociferously opposed to changing the mascot and have threatened to withhold donations if they comply. They tried to gradually transition to the North Dakota Force, but then a minor league hockey team swooped in and took that name. UND was further hurt because their limbo prevented them from being invited into an athletic conference (The Summit League) with a number of nearby schools (North Dakota State, South Dakota State, and South Dakota). North Dakota also sports a first-class hockey team and they have to cover up their logos anytime they make the hockey playoffs. When the Board of Regents tried to change the name, they were sued (though they won in court). They’ve decided to change the name, but have not decided what to.

I have some rather mixed feelings about these rules. On the one hand, I do wish that the tribes would take it as the compliment it often is. The mascots are in the same warrior tradition as the Spartans and Trojans. Of course, you also have the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, though there is a decent argument to be made that a group using itself as a mascot is different than a group using some other group as a mascot. Ultimately, though as a WASP, it’s hard for me to tell other people how they should respond in circumstances like that. It’s always easy to tell the other guy when they should and should not be offended.

My main objection to the Indians name is that it is such a generic and boring name. The fact that there were two teams in the Sun Belt Conference (not to mention a professional Major League Baseball team) with that name is a testament to that (Utah State and New Mexico State should reconsider Aggies, too). On the other hand, the names that they chose are equally uninspiring. When an actual tribe’s name is being used, it actually makes a good deal of sense to have to obtain their approval in a backaround trademark sort of way. But that only really requires the approval of one tribe and therefore North Dakota should have gotten the same pass as Florida State. Requiring these universities to pay for the rights also does not seem unfair.

There’s also the question as to what right the NCAA should have to dictate these terms to begin with, but I think that they are within their rights there. North Dakota is always free to leave the NCAA for the NAIA. In fact, it’s the overall lack of leverage that forced them to accommodate Illinois and Florida State. The NCAA can afford to lose North Dakota, but not FSU. In some ways, the NCAA’s grasp on its member institutions is actually somewhat weak, which is why they cannot impose any sort of football playoff.

Unfortunately, I have no post today. I had something I was going to post, but decided I wanted to mull it over a bit more before putting it up.

Virginia Postrel argues that our accumulation of stuff is easing the pain of the recession:

In today’s sour economy, however, what once seemed like waste is starting to look like wealth: assets to draw on when times get tough (and not just because of all those ads promising top dollar for your gold jewelry). Material abundance, it turns out, produces economic resilience. Even if today’s recession approached Great Depression levels of unemployment, the hardship wouldn’t be as severe, because today’s consumers aren’t living as close to the edge.

Take clothes. In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas, according to Cotton Inc.’s Lifestyle Monitor survey, which includes consumers, age 13 to 70. The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits—a clothing cornucopia.

Then the economy crashed. Consumers drew down their inventories instead of replacing clothes that wore out or no longer fit. In the 2009 survey, the average wardrobe had shrunk—to a still-abundant 88 items. We may not be shopping like we used to, but we aren’t exactly going threadbare. Bad news for customer-hungry retailers, and perhaps for economic recovery, is good news for our standard of living.

It’s a fair point. There’s something to be said for the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. Even in a society with lots of inequality, it’s better to be poor in a wealthy society than in a poor one. And there is an argument to be made that the whole notion that it is “better” to spend one’s excess income on memories rather than things doesn’t runs headlong into this problem. At least if you spend the money on shoes, the shoes will be around when you lose your job while the trip to Italy won’t.

But the more I think about it, the more wary I am of buying into the notion that the accumulation of stuff is a virtue in itself. To take Postrel’s shoes example, yeah it’s nice that you have these shoes so you don’t need to buy them later. Forgive me for making the perfect the enemy of the good, however. If she had simply bought six pairs of shoes and saved the rest, she would have the money for an additional pair of shoes or two and then have some extra money to, I don’t know, eat and stuff.

The hardest part about being unemployed is not the sporadic expenses. You can often timeshift and downsize those. When I am unemployed and need to get some clothes, I can go to the thrift store. Or Walmart. Or I can decide that my older clothes will do just fine after all until I get a new job. I can’t unpurchase the stuff I’ve already got. And rent needs to be paid. I can move to a cheaper place, but even that is going to require a fair amount of money - particularly if I have a lot of stuff.

The thinking involved in this is awfully tempting, though. I’ve found myself, when about to be unemployed, thinking along similar lines. If I buy a laptop now, it will last me through the unemployment! See, it’s not a dumb purchase to make after all. Sometimes I even give into this logic, but I am rarely proud of myself afterward.

I say this as someone that does have an excess of stuff. My wardrobe is actually bigger than my wife’s. In my own defense, part of it is a preference for quantity over quality. I don’t buy high-end laptops, so I can have more of them. I don’t buy nice clothes, so I can go three weeks without doing laundry by virtue of having more cheap stuff. But it’s hard to say that I would not have been in a better financial position if I simply went with one or two weeks worth of clothes and a single laptop. This is when I say that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, undermining my previous argument a bit.

Cars are another issue where this comes up. Part of me is sympathetic to buying a new or late-model used car on the basis that if I buy it and if we high-tail it out of Callie to somewhere else in three years, at least then I won’t have to worry about replacing the car at that point. Logically, though, I can buy an old used car, save the money, and replace the engine or transmission down the road if required and the chances are better than not that we will still end up ahead financially*. If we go with a newer car, it will be because we want a newer car and the features and intermediate reliability that comes with it. From a purely financial perspective, it’s hard to make a very strong case for it.

* - I’ve done the math on this. Essentially, we get a car that’s 6 or 7 years old, we end up ahead even if we have to replace the engine or the transmission. If we have to replace both we end up slightly behind… but we will be driving a car with a new engine and transmission and a shelf-life that’s going to last longer than if we buy a new car today.

The snow started falling, almost apologetically, on Thursday. The thing is… it didn’t really stop. It didn’t start coming down hard. It just didn’t stop coming down. And so the accumulation began. And continued. And suddenly, all of this pleasant little snow was covering everything. This isn’t the first Arapaho snow that we’ve had. It actually snowed this past June. But I can’t remember anything like this. According to the neighbors, it doesn’t usually snow like this until January or February.

The basement has become virtually uninhabitable. Which is interesting, because one of our basement apartments in Deseret never got nearly this cold. Of course, that was a finished apartment and this one is mostly finished. Even so, I figured the ground would provide at least some insulation as it did out there. But no. I was planning to start using the exercise bike again soon, but it’s down there and I’m not sure about using that in freezing cold.

In Cascadia, I commented that though it never got as cold as it got in Deseret, the humidity made it feel like a hand that had been dipped in icewater was reaching under your shirt. In addition to changing the heat (by making it feel hotter) the humidity also makes cold feel colder. Or, at least, being in the sun doesn’t help a whole lot while it makes a big difference in arid Deseret and Arapaho. Forty degrees is pretty pleasant here with sunlight but is unbearable in Colosse. I say all of this to get to the next point, which is that humidity and dryness cease to matter when it’s 2 degrees outside.

The upshot to all of this was supposed to be that there’s nothing like this kind of weather to make me cut down on my smoking. There’s nothing like standing out there with your hands and ears about to freeze off to remind you how absolutely stupid that habit is. It’s just miserable. You struggle to finish one cigarette. I don’t get cravings all the time like some people do, but I do tend to get them when I feel pent up and trapped, which is how I feel when I am “snowed in,” which gives me a craving, which has me going outside, which makes me miserable and want to get back inside, which makes me feel trapped, which makes me want to go out and smoke, and on and on. I remember this from Deseret. It was one of the big factors in helping me quit for a while before moving down to Estacado. Eventually the cycle reaches a breaking point. So hopefully it’ll turn up aces in the end.

I really had forgotten what it was like to be snowed in. As in, unable to really go anywhere. The combination of illness on my part and the weather outside made leaving a real chore. Particularly with the car stuck in the garage. Having gotten the car out (more on that later) I can now drive around Callie, but I don’t dare try to make it out to Redstone or Alexandria and other signs of civilization. I would if my life depended on it, but since it doesn’t my trips to Walmart, Petsmart, and other retailers will have to wait. It’s like being grounded.

As luck would have it, we had her car parked out front when it all started, so it was quite easy for either of us to use the car if we needed to go somewhere and were willing the brave the streets. I’d actually kept her car parked out front because I had intended to get studded tires for… the next time it snowed. We have a garage, but it’s a long bendy driveway to get to the garage. Once the snow reached a certain level, I figured the car (and by extension me, when Clancy was at work) grounded. Already feeling under the weather, I figured, wrongly, that I was just going to have to wait it out.

Lisby seems to have mixed feelings about the snow. On the one hand, when it’s coming from the sky it’s suspiciously like rain which is suspiciously like running water, which she hates. On the other hand, once it’s on the ground it’s something interesting and new. Back on the first hand, when it’s deep enough to come up to her posterior, it’s hard for her to vacate without sticking her bottom into the snow. She is also fond of eating the snow, so it’s like there is food everywhere for her. Lisby is a little sack of warmth, which is nice when I come in with freezing hands. First, she doesn’t mind me putting my hands on her no matter how cold they are. Second, she likes to like my hands when they’re cold (I’m not sure if it’s because she likes the sensation or she’s trying to help warm them up) and her tongue is warm. Warm enough for me to forget the fact that she eats poop (though hasn’t lately!).

There’s something about snowy weather outside that makes me not want to do anything. I had a host of indoor chores to do, but mostly I wanted to lay back and watch TV. Despite being unemployed, I am behind on almost all of my favorite programs (not to mention the ones I am unsure about).

The snow finally stopped last night. There is a rule in our town about shoveling the sidewalks clear within 24 hours of the snow stopping. So first thing when I got up this morning, I started getting all of my stuff together to do so. This took a lot longer than expected because I didn’t know where anything (the shovel, my gloves, etc) was. Then, after about half an hour of getting everything together, I go out there and discover that some good samaritan already took care of it. I had looked out the window earlier and it looked undone because the sidewalk was still white. But the sidewalk was both white and cleared, so long as you’re not worried about a thin layer of ice. Nobody in Callie appears to be. At all.

It was a rather obvious point made by my neighbor, but given that the temperature had been hovering below 10 degrees, the snow was going to stay on the lawns (and by extension our driveway) for quite sometime. In other words, unless I didn’t want to go anywhere for a week, I was going to need to take care of the driveway after all. That was my chore for the afternoon. And a very long chore it was. The sidewalk starts on the northeast side of the property and the garage is in the west just south of the house and we live on a lot that’s over half an acre.

Now I know why, whenever I complained about the heat in Colosse, people said “At least you never have to shovel snow.” In the unlikely event that we end up buying this place, I am going to invest in a little ATV-plow.

The subject of cheating seems to be coming up here and there. A lot of it pertaining to this article, written by a professional ghostwriter for college papers. Further commentary by Otherwill and Rufus at The League.

Longtime readers of Hit Coffee may remember that once upon a time, I was a ghostwriter for my then-girlfriend Julianne at the college level. She and I took three classes together and she shrugged off all three. The end-result was that I would get upset calls at 2 in the morning from Julianne saying that she hadn’t started the paper due the next day, had no idea what to write, and little or no knowledge of the subject-matter because of all of the classes that she missed. So I would take care of it for her. I was happy to the first few times, though after enough reiterations of how these last-minute deadlines came at her suddenly without any warning (when she’d groused at me for reminding her of it as the date approaches) and her being caught flatfooted, it gets exasperating.

Anyhow, I’m sure that you’re shocked to hear this, but I can be a kind of wordy fellow and so when a paper was meant to be 3-5 pages long, I usually had to struggle to meet the five-page maximum. So there was usually an abundance of material for a half-hearted rewrite for Julie’s benefit. I would cut out several points, usually add a couple, or if it was a paper that we had flexibility on, topic-wise, pick up on something that got cut from my paper and run with it. The papers were junk. Typically mindless, unoriginal, and about as by-the-numbers as you could possibly imagine.

They also - every single one of them - got a higher grade than the papers that I turned in with my own name. And it was never that I was overtly docked for failing to stay on-point or for rambling on. Quite the opposite. I would get docked for failing to address a particular point. Her paper failed to address it, too, but it only seemed to matter on mine. I have a number of theories as to why hers graded better than mine, though none make a whole lot of sense. By the third class I though about simply reversing the names on the papers, but though a cheater I was I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was proud of my A- papers and her A+ papers were, as far as I was concerned, parrot droppings. In two of the three classes I got a higher grade than her simply because I couldn’t take the test for her as well. In the third class I actually could help her with the tests, too, and she scored the highest grade in the class and got an email from the prof saying as much.

I’m sure if there are any Game-types that read this, they are thinking how pathetically beta my behavior is. Probably thinking that she lost all respect for me as I bent over backwards doing these things for her. The problem is that it couldn’t be further from the truth. She was actually very appreciative and did not lead her to dump by ass or cheat on me with an alpha. She did kind of take it for granted, and that caused some ill-will on my part, but she never took me for granted. After the third class together where she almost never showed up at all, I resolved that I wouldn’t take any more classes with her. It didn’t matter as our relationship collapsed at the end of that semester and she had flunked out of Southern Tech University anyway.

The second, and to me more interesting story, is this one from the University of Central Florida. Basically, some students got ahold of the test bank and the professor caught wind of it. There is a video of the lecture that the professor gave to his students, offering them an out:

“I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.”

That’s a pretty generous deal. In fact, so generous that even if I didn’t cheat* I might fess up to having done so simply out of fear of their algorithms incorrectly identifying me as a cheater. I mean, the overall cost is lost face in the eyes of a professor and a four-hour ethics course. That punishment is guaranteed. But if the algorithms are wrong and you are incorrectly identified, the consequences are absolutely ruinous. It’s the same dynamic that leads people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit because they’re allowed to confess on a lesser charge. I mean, how much faith would you have in their algorithms? Probably a lot now, but back when I was in college? I’d probably grant at least a 5-10% chance of it being wrong. And I wouldn’t like those odds.

I wonder how many of the people that confessed were innocent but making that same calculation?

I never cheated on a college exam. I came close once, having printed out all my notes on a little piece of paper. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In addition to helping Julianne out with her college studies, I also helped out some kids in junior high and high school for various reasons (some I regret, others I don’t). I did get caught trying to copy someone’s paper during a Spanish exam. I needed glasses and did not yet have them. The teacher did not have to be particularly perceptive to catch me. My friend Clint, incidentally, was caught by the exact same teacher trying to change his grade in her gradebook. She threatened to get a handwriting expert and he broke.

Wow:

Only one end zone will be used for offense Saturday at Wrigley Field for the Illinois-Northwestern game because of safety concerns, the Big Ten announced Friday, and the Chicago Cubs said the decision caught them by surprise.

NCAA rules state the field dimensions must have adequate space surrounding the playing surface: “Limit lines shall be marked … 12 feet outside the sidelines and the end lines, except in stadiums where total field surface does not permit. In these stadiums, the limit lines shall not be less than 6 feet from the sidelines and end lines.”

Wrigley’s east end zone is a few feet away from the right-field wall, and although there is padding, there were concerns players could be injured there.

I had to read the article two or three times before I could actually believe that was reading. But it sounds to me like every time a team gets the ball they’re going to march to the corresponding yard line on the other side of the field. There have been a few instances in Delosa over the years where special accommodations had to be made or just weren’t made when some bleachers were declared unsafe or an endzone was discovered to be unsafe because of a misplaced cart. In one sense, the first incident was worse than this because people who had bought tickets suddenly no longer had tickets and at least everyone is going to get to see this game. And unlike the second case, nobody had their leg shattered. Even so… wow. What a disaster and an embarrassment for both the Chicago Cubs and the people that organized this.

On the other hand, it’s brilliant in its own way. I am going to surf all of the channels tomorrow and see if I can catch this game. Otherwise, I couldn’t be less interested in a game given my antipathy towards the Big Ten and that neither of these teams are real national contenders. So in that sense, I guess it works out. It does bring a lot of attention to a game that would otherwise be ignored.

Update: The game is on now. They definitely made the right decision. This was very poorly thought out. I am inclined to say that heads should roll over this, but the announcers are doing a pretty good job of talking it up so maybe I am overreacting. On the other hand, I was wrong about fans not getting stiffed on tickets. Some folks bought tickets at the endzone and will likely never see any scores there. And unlike the Delosa incident, they won’t get their money back. A story to tell their kids about, I suppose.

Robin Hanson on Pink Politics:

Yes there’s the implicit sex angle in talking about breasts, but you could have a “have sex to get exercise” campaign, or make sexual innuendo about beds in a sleep campaign. And a campaign about testicular cancer wouldn’t be nearly as popular. So this isn’t mainly about sexual innuendo.

One obvious difference is that being anti-breast-cancer is framed as being pro-women. Thus one can insinuate that folks who resist social pressures to support the campaign are anti-women. Since folks fear seeming anti-women much more than seeming anti-health, a breast-cancer campaign can tap into far more social pressure than can an exercise or sleep campaign.

I remember when I was younger, a lot of women would say that Breast Cancer was being ignored because it (primarily) effects women. And that if it affected men, the government would automatically pay for everything involved in it and the only reason they don’t is cause the victims are women. This idea was first posited by a feminist sociology teacher in high school, which I think made me notice whenever I heard it later on. I was skeptical as I was of a lot of things the teacher said, but it was one of those frustrating things that couldn’t really be tested either way.

Then I found out about prostate cancer. Prostate cancer primarily affects men, kills men at a similar rate as breast cancer does women, and does not get remotely the same amount of attention as breast cancer does in the public eye. Oh, and does not involve the government paying for everything because it only affects men. As far as I know, both are treated pretty similarly by the insurance establishment. Maybe this wasn’t the case before “awareness campaigns”. I don’t know, but I would want to see proof of it considering prostate cancer doesn’t get a fraction of the attention.

Why not? I think it’s partially as Hanson says that women were able to make it a women’s issue in addition to being a health issue. I also think that it’s harder to mobilize men both as a collective and around health issues. On the former, we don’t have a history of mobilizing around specific issues because we’ve been the ones in positions of power and influence. On the latter, men are less inclined to believe that the government should pay for health care initiatives. And generally speaking, I think we’re more private about our health problems. I mean, given that prostate and breast cancer occur in equivalent numbers, you would think that I would know or know of men with prostate cancer in about equal numbers of women with breast cancer, but I don’t. I think that some of this is that men are less likely to communicate their malady so precisely. Some of it, though, is probably attributable to breast cancer having such a high profile. Finding out that people you know have a particular illness probably does increase the likelihood of it being something you will concern yourself about. So in that sense, maybe it is doing good? Maybe we do need a campaign for prostate cancer. Especially considering that men are less likely to take care of themselves in this regard.

Or maybe, as Hanson points out, a lot of the screening is unnecessary and it’s a good thing that prostate cancer doesn’t have the same profile and we would be better served if breast cancer didn’t, either. Maybe our resources are best devoted elsewhere. Of course, not all things are equally provocative and if people didn’t donate money to breast cancer research or awareness or whatever, they’d spend it on something stupid rather than on research and awareness of something that might do more good.

With regard to the peer pressure of pink ribbons, it reminds me a bit of the bumper stickers on cars and whatnot about supporting the troops. They have ribbons of their own. Back when our wars were more in our consciousness, there did seem to be a bit of sanctimony about it. Especially as those in favor of the war accused those against the war of not supporting the troops. Until the left responded with “Support The Troops - Bring Them Home”, the whole thing was a seemingly innocuous proxy for a larger public opinion battle over the righteousness of the wars themselves.

I’ve heard some people say the same general thing about the American flags*. Some Canadians I know consider it unseemly when they visit the States how we put our flag everywhere and have them in lawns and all that. I can’t say that it bothers me any. I don’t feel the need to say “I support my country” as I did to say “I support our troops!” back before support for the war soured. Arapaho probably has more flags flying than anywhere I’ve ever lived before. I suppose that could be considered patriotic peer pressure, but I consider it a positive sign of solidarity around our country as a whole.

I do wish breast cancer would go away. I do support our troops and hope they succeed even in wars I am not sure we should have entered. I have a gooey white-boy’s appreciation for my country. But I guess I am not hugely worried about people thinking that I am pro-cancer, anti-woman, anti-American, or anti-troops by virtue of the lack of a flag or ribbon on my lapel. One of the positive developments in my life is to be (increasingly, though quite imperfectly) able to take accusations hurled my way in stride when I know them to be false.

* - There was a recent to-do on this subject in California. My omission of that incident is not accidental. This portion was inspired by my trip to Canada many years back and various conversations with my (generally liberalish white) friends.

ED Kain defends the notion that, if a municipality wants it, they should be allowed to have multiple trash collectors:

It may be a small issue – so long as your trash is collected, it doesn’t really matter that much who picks it up – but the Tea Partiers are right this time: having choice is a good thing, even for trash collection. If the government came in and said “You can only buy Dell computers from now on” people would be unhappy. We want to be able to choose what kind of computer we buy – and not just because maybe we prefer Apple, but because we know that competition keeps innovation up and prices down.

Now, in trash collection you probably won’t see too much innovation, but competition will keep prices down and quality of service high. If you don’t like the people picking up your trash, or the containers they provide, or the driver is rude, or whatever – you can switch.

I agree on all counts. I would imagine it’s the case as often as not that it makes more sense to have a single collector. But while monopolies can have their virtues for some things, they can also create drawbacks.

In addition to the scenarios that ED describes, I can also pretty easily imagine scenarios where you might simply want things done a different way than a monopolistic trash-collecting agency would prefer to do them. For instance, you may want a larger bin collected once every other week rather than a smaller one collected weekly. You may prefer an on-call collection if you only need trash picked up periodically.

Some of these options may be difficult to pull off with everybody making the profit they need, or it could lead to price escalation if the local monopoly is able to keep prices low because of the monopoly. These are issues for local areas to fight out amongst themselves. To be fair, this was a local issue decided locally. But it’s natural and not-crazy for the people to object to policies that they dislike. Calling it “socialism” extends the word beyond any useful meaning, but it’s not hard to be sympathetic to people that want things a certain way and the powers at be decide they should be another.

In Callie, where I live, I doubt it makes any sort of sense to have anything but the standard one-collector model. But when I was living in Soundview, a much more urban area, there may have been more room to maneuver. In Soundview, we had small bins collected weekly, which was kind of a pain in the rear because if you ever had anything of any size, you had to go to the dump. In Callie, we have large bins collected weekly and I find that I only put the trash out every other week or so… but the large bin means that if I have something large I can stick it out there, which is nice.

And a thing about trash collection is that, unlike fire service, there is room for experimentation without houses burning down and pets dying. If competition leads to higher prices, you can reverse yourself. If a monopoly become exceedingly indifferent to customer needs, you can privatize.

To me, this doesn’t really need to be an ideological issue at all. The notion that municipal trash collection equals socialism makes socialists out of a lot of us. Questioning the notion that municipal trash collection (either by city workers or a sole city contract) does not mean that you HATE GOVERNMENT. Different models work in different places. Of course, I am more than willing to condemn Obion County for their fire department arrangements that caused that house to burn down, but it’s because quite apparently the system they chose (a) wasn’t working and (b) lead to tragic events that were entirely foreseeable.

-{Note: Yeah, this post is kind of dated. It slipped through the cracks.}-

I was at Newegg wishlisting a stereo cable for later purchase. The cable costs under $10, but for another $130 they will come to my house and install it for me.

Twitter needs a ninja-stalking option. I want to follow someone that I know in real life, but I don’t want them to get wind of my Trumwill identity.

We had to put a whopping $3000 deposit for the dog due to the “new carpeting”. The longer I look at this carpeting, the less apparent it is where the new carpeting is. It all looks like of old.

While we were waiting in line at Safeway, the guy in front of me (an employee on his time off) spent his time tracking down everything I was purchasing and finding a coupon for it. The dude saved me $10! That’s a really cool employee.

A USA Today insert has a cover with Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford with a teaser about how things get better with age. It might be more convincing if Ford himself hadn’t married a significantly younger woman.

I had a dream last night that I worked for a software company that put out a product like Grand Theft Auto. However, once the company found out that on my own time that I played our GTA-knockoff, they fired me because they don’t want hyperviolent freaks working for their company.

I saw a commercial on TV that at first glance appeared to be an anti-doofus dad commercials. A father was eating something he wasn’t supposed to and something fell on the tablecloth. The father, though, knew what to do! He knew how to use Tide detergent and clean it so that she would be none-the-wiser. I was so proud of him! But, of course, when she got home she saw a stain on his shirt. Can’t get one over on Mom. Ever, ever, ever. {groan}

Aside from the fact that Arapaho had no competitive races to name, part of me hoped that I was in California simply so I could vote for Proposition 19. The Pot-Prop. Different people have different views on decriminalization in general, and to each their own, but while I do not favor decriminalization of all drugs I do favor it for marijuana. Not out of any desire to smoke pot myself (I tried it; it wasn’t for me) nor any love of pot smokers. Mostly because in the cost-benefit analysis of the comparative virtues and vices of the increased pot usage that would come with legalization and its share of the War on Drugs, I come down on the side of decriminalization. For some it’s a matter of freedom, but not so much for me. I don’t favor the decriminalization of all other narcotics, though I can be convinced on a case-by-case basis using the same criteria for cocaine as for pot.

In addition to the War on Drugs angle, Sheila Tone made a good point about the repercussions the illegality has on reuniting families where one parent or the other breaks that particular law.

Unfortunately, the legalization movement is saddled with, among other things, The Barry Cooper Problem. It’s my view that the legalization movement needs to be spearheaded by reasonable and humble individuals who recognize that rightly or wrongly people have reservations about legalizing pot and it does no good to call them ugly names, insult them, or treat their concerns as utterly invalid. Instead we have Barry Cooper’s antics and apparently people who believe that it’s not just a question of whether pot should be legal or not but a question of respecting the decisions of those who choose to partake. For me, one of the stronger arguments in the pro-freedom side of most issues is “just because something is a bad idea doesn’t mean it should be illegal” and its cousin “just because something is legal does not mean you have to approve.” For a free society to work and to keep Big Brother out of it, I believe we have to condemn behavior we consider inappropriate. Otherwise, given the choice between something being illegal and something being condoned by society at large, a lot more people are going to choose “illegal.”

If Mickey Kaus is right, the people behind Proposition 19 forgot this or simply didn’t care:

The measure seems to have been hurt by a wacky, overreaching provision that would effectively have made stoners a protected class when it comes to hirings and firings. Even the Greenberg poll found a 50-44 majority think employers should be able to fire those who test positive on drug tests even if “they come to work sober and ready to work.” I voted against 19 because of this provision (and wouldn’t trust an initiative that was written by anyone who’d write that provision, even if it were excised). After all, once a new protected class has been created, is it ever un-created? Stoners would have special legal protections against firing, probably forever (with employers having to prove their pot use “actually impairs job performance”). I might have to become one myself

This is… highly problematic. Now, as it happens, I believe that hiring people you know smoke pot but that perform well regardless is good business practice. Those old school Hit Coffee readers will remember Falstaff, my former Mormon-dominated employer that sought to weed out all the weedheads even as we tried to explain that we could be weeding out some of our best performers. If it doesn’t affect job performance, I believe it should be a non-issue. However, it not-infrequently is going to cause problems in the workplace the same way that alcohol consumption does. Adding a layer making it more difficult to fire people that smoke pot compared to people that don’t is highly concerning.

This is a level of protection that cigarette smokers do not get. Nor, I should add, should they/we. I resented the former employer of mine that refused to hire smokers, but I believe that while their policy was unwise, intrusive, and indicative of an employer I did not want to work for… it was also, like a number of their other policies, within their purview*. The same goes for alcohol consumption, though no employer I am familiar with tests for that sort of thing. The only reason that up until recently it seemed bizarre to discriminate against smokers is that they were so large in number and it was such an accepted activity. Ultimately, we don’t want pot to become as socially accepted as cigarettes were. We don’t want cigarettes that accepted, either! Those things I say above about societal disapproval applies to my own vices as well. Easier to keep the cat in the bag, though, when it comes to things currently on the periphery of society the same way that we should wish smoking were.

That the pushers of Proposition 19 felt the need to put this in there shows a pretty significant disconnect with the rest of society. I see it on a number of blogs where “all reasonable people” agree that pot should be legal. The problem is that “all reasonable people” is a minority of the population. It does the movement no good to ignore that. And even among those “all reasonable people” a lot of people feel the same way I do about employment law. Some may hold their nose and vote for it anyway, but a lot won’t. And a lot of people who recognize on some vague level that the War on Drugs (as it pertains to marijuana) is not a fight worth fighting will use that as an excuse to vote against decriminalizing a behavior that they only marginally object to (or, in some cases, indulged in when they were younger).

The point of this exercise should not be to vindicate pot-smokers. Nor should it be, as Barry Cooper is inclined to do, to stick it to the buzzkills that want to stand between you and your weed. The point is to take this minimally-harmful substance and separate it from the substantially-harmful war against it. Because if you’re asking people to line up behind pot-smokers, you’re going to lose just as surely as smokers are losing one battle after another to stigmatize their/our habit.

* - And not just because of the “it saves them money on health insurance” rationale. Bregna, the former employer in question, didn’t care about that. The president of the company just didn’t like smokers. He wanted a certain kind of employee working for him and viewed the overlap of people that fit that profile and smoke were small. There are also issues of smokers having, in general, lower levels of productivity.

An old acquaintance, Byron, sent me and nine other individuals a message on Facebook. Why me? I don’t know. Since friending one another this is the first real communication we’ve had. We were never really close. I mostly added him because he has an outstanding wit and I enjoyed reading his blog back when he had one. This tidbit will matter later: the guy owns a bar.

Anyway, the message was basically asking me to “like” some quiz or something. It was for a friend of his. Now, ordinarily, I approach this sort of thing like a chain letter and ignore it. Giving in to one request like this usually results in more requests in the future. But Byron simply isn’t the sort of guy to do this sort thing. So if he is doing it, this friend of his must be pretty important to him.

So I did it. In addition to requestion that I “like” this particular thing, he requested a message saying that I/we complied. Not wanting everyone else to be in on the message, I sent a separate one letting him know. Unfortunately, not everyone else took this extra step. So my inbox has been deluged with back-and-forth “Did it!”/”Stop by the bar sometime, next drink is on me!”/”Awesome! Do you know if Jack is gonna make it?”/”Jack is in the hospital.”/”No spit? What happened?!”

I don’t know Jack. This was one thread of which there were five in all and most of them spanned several catching-up messages. As near as I can tell, at least a couple of folks didn’t know that he got a divorce as they were asking after his ex-wife. He apparently chose mostly people like me that he hadn’t talked to in a while.

Every time I get a Facebook message I get a text message to my phone. So it’s really been quite annoying.

On the upshot, I may be able to parlay the message thread about Jack into a free beer of my own if I stop by Byron’s bar. I’m not sure if that’s worth the non-stop beep-beep-beep message notifications on my phone, though.

Makeup is one of those things that girls do that guys often fail to appreciate. In fact, we’re often inclined to say “I prefer girls without makeup” when what we mean is “I prefer girls who apply their makeup with more restraint.” Cause few guys really like pimples. Most guys like smooth-looking skin. These are things that makeup provide. Granted, I myself fall into the category of guys that “prefer girls without makeup.” Indeed, my wife rarely wears it and I easily consider the low-maintenance aspect of it to outweigh the visual benefits when she does wear it. A step further, a surprising number of romantic interests in my past and present (Clancy, Evangeline, Tracey, Dharla, Carla, Libby) never pierced their ears (though Tracey pierced her nose some years later).

So a part of me is quite sympathetic to Redefining Beautiful, a club at a Texas high school that go bare-faced on Tuesdays. Well, not just a club of girls, but a club of pretty conventionally attractive girls. Comments Phi:

On the one hand, I’m encouraged that that someone wants to call a truce in the clothes and cosmetics arms race among high school girls. But on the other, it’s not clear that these girls are redefining much of anything. On the contrary, most of the girls in this picture are in the very flower of their natural beauty by its existing definition. What’s changed is that they are not dressing in ways that signal sexual availability, but that isn’t the same thing, and every high school boy knows it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of thing caught on. I’ve commented in the past about how female fashion seems to be geared towards exclusion. You have tops that look good only on the slimmest of slim girls. You have uncomfortable shoes that only the most dedicated will suffer to wear. If a medium-size girl with an unimpressive chest (and/or a modest pocketbook) looks okay in it, female fashion has no use for it. This is sort of a reversal of that in that any girl can go without makeup, but it’s also an extension of it in that not any girl can look good while doing it. Sort of like how the popular and/or good-looking guys in high school could get away dressing down in a way that the rest of us can’t. Except that in girlworld, this is of greater import.

It gets me thinking about all of the steps that girls must take to define their attractiveness that guys don’t. I mean, like girls, guys have to watch their weight and it’s helpful to put some thought in how you dress. But outside of certain circles it’s really pretty easy for guys to get to that middle of the personal-appearance bell-curve as far as dress and hygiene are concerned. Shower regularly, comb your hair, moderately groom yourself, and you’re right there in the middle. And there aren’t a whole lot of guys out there trying to one-up you by dressing a little bit better. Indeed, we’ve made lemon out of lemonaid. Losing your hair? Just shave it off. Don’t want to shave? Well, we’ve made that okay. And guys that try to separate themselves from the pack by trying to look too impressive? Well, we have words for those people. If we could get the ladies to go along, we’d all just sport large beards and brag about how smelly our armpits are. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one.

Of course, there is another side to this as the RD girls inadvertently demonstrate. These girls can go without makeup and still look good. What about the girls who can’t? In that sense, makeup has a certain egalitarianism about it. With enough effort, it allows so-so looking girls to look a heck of a lot better. The wide array of fashion may make things remarkably more complicated than it is for men, but it provides the underdog girl with options that men don’t have. If a guy is so-so looking, he can’t wear a stunning outfit (because again, we have words for guys that do that). If he has pimples, he can’t use makeup without significant risk. There are industries around helping heavier women find outfits suitable to their figure. Guys are stuck in the same outfit as their peers. And one of the biggest basis of discrimination against men - height - simply can’t be accounted for. The biggest tool in our chest that women don’t have is facial hair to make the chin more distinct, but we’ve already got men calling men out for that, too.

The makeup thing in particular is problematic for the young and pimpled. Makeup will only take things so far, but they do at least make these things less noticeable. Acne was never a huge problem with me, but I did envy girls their makeup when the pimples came. And on a couple of instances I tried to do something about it. But the stigma is enough that even if you use makeup, you have to apply so little that nobody could possibly notice. The closest I came to something working was peach-colored anti-acne cream. At least then I had an excuse because anti-acne stuff wasn’t verboten… but if someone with more social influence than you said it was makeup you were doomed.

It’s sort of the inverse of the yin-yang involving who-asks-out-whom. On the one hand, ladies are more likely to have guys coming to them. On the other hand, if the guys aren’t coming, they are much more limited in what they can do in response. A guy, on the other hand, has the ability to muster up the courage to ask out a thousand girls, learn from his mistakes, get better at it (both the approach and the marks), and overcome it. It’s our responsibility, but also our power.

Back on the makeup thing, on the whole I think that guys have the better end of the deal. Of course, I think we do on the who-asks-out-whom deal, too. So maybe I am just the guy from the Chinese proverb picking my problems right back out of the pile. But I do like the fact that there is much less expectation that I am going to spend a whole lot of time and effort on my looks. I additionally benefit from being a nerd wherein by dressing up to the top of the curve gave me a significant advantage in a group that is notoriously cool for hanging out on the left end of it. And it takes a lot of decisions out of my hands, which given my indecisiveness and the fashion errors I make (consciously and unconsciously) is likely to my benefit.

Half Sigma was able to pick up on the fact that Anna Torv (the star of “Fringe”) is faking an American accent. I had actually picked up on the fact that her inflections were… odd… but I think I discovered that she was Australian the way that I uncover a lot of foreign actors. Namely I wonder what part of the country they are from because I can’t regionalize the accent and sounds something other than generic.

Some in the comment section have suggested that American accents are easy to fake because they grow up watching a fair number of American TV shows that are sold abroad. I think this is true, but I also think it’s true that there’s more flexibility in the American English idiom than in others. Britain has 60 million on an island. Australia has twenty million or so on an island continent. That’s not to say that there aren’t some regional and class distinctions, but I don’t think they compare to the multitude that come from the 300 million people in the United States accompanied by 30 million in neighboring Canada covering huge swaths of land with large spaces in between.

So for instance, I went my entire life until I moved to Arapaho without hearing (or noticing that I am hearing) the words bag and flag rhyme with “vague” despite knowing vaguely (no pun intended) that some people pronounce it that way. There are a lot of ways you can sound a little off-normal and people still kind of shrug it off as not-odd because we’re used to significant degrees of variation. Compare this variation to the relative lack of variation in the south, and it’s much, much easier to point out a bad southern accent (to those that are familiar with it) compared to a bad American one. That’s not because southern accents are monolithic (says the guy who gets frustrated with accents and says to the TV “people from Georgia do not sound like they are from Texas!”), but because the range is more limited and therefore it’s easier to spot (or hear) an actor who hasn’t nailed it.

I played each of the major kid-sports as I was growing up: baseball, basketball, and soccer. I was terrible and terribly uninterested in soccer. I was decent at basketball, though I never made proper use of my size. Baseball was my sport. Until about the third grade or so, my father was the assistant coach of our little league team. Then, when Mr Rockford left, he became the headcoach. Dad was a very egalitarian coach. He determined the lineup based solely on batting average with two exceptions. He toyed around with the first three hitters because the best batting average belonged to a powerish hitter and there were two kids it was better to lead off with due to their relative speed. Second, if you missed practice without a good excuse, you were pulled to the end of the lineup no matter how good you were (in our league, everyone batted and you rotated in the field, unlike at most levels).

When Mr Rockford left, that opened up a pitching slot because his son was one of our pitchers. So Dad had try-outs. Unlike my brother Oliver, I was never a really good pitcher, but I could get it over the plate as often as not, which at that level isn’t terrible. This was helped by the fact that balls vs strikes was the meritocratic way Dad determined whether you would pitch. During tryouts, I tied for third place. Since we had four pitchers, I figured that wasn’t bad. However, when the lineups were posted, I didn’t make the cut. The fifth place person got in instead of me. Granted, I didn’t beat the fifth placer by much, but even so the fifth placer also had an attendance problem. The fourth slot should have gone to me. The only reason it didn’t, and why Dad changed the formula, as best as I can determine, was so that he wouldn’t be accused of playing favorites. And so pitching was one of the two positions I never played during my little league career (SS was the other) unless you count the outfield positions individually.

I thought of Dad this past week or two when three college football coaches got fired: North Texas’s Todd Dodge, Colorado’s Dan Hawkins, and Minnesota’s Tim Brewster. Dodge and Hawkins were both undone in part by the same thing: their sons. Both came to college with their quarterbacking sons. Both started their quarterbacking sons. Neither of their quarterbacking sons did very well at all. Both coaches were unsuccessful in the larger context (Dodge went 6-37 compared to his predecessor’s 42-64 and Hawkins 19-39 compared to his predecessor’s 49-38), but the alleged favoritism towards their sons became a flashpoint of the criticism. Every now and again I would run across a North Texas game and the announcers would explain the number of ways they were limited by Riley Dodge’s inability to throw the ball downfield (making it easy to defend against by keeping defenders up front). Hawkins eventually benched his kid, Cody, but it didn’t prove to do a whole lot of good. Had he benched Cody sooner, the assumption that there was a better QB that was not the coach’s kid at the team’s disposal would have been nipped in the bud. Son or not, it’s a common thought among college football fan that nobody is better than the backup quarterback on a team that’s not winning like it should.

This is an ever-present issue at the college level and below because a whole lot of quarterbacks out there are the kids of coaches. Some of it a matter of talent running in families, but when it comes to something like quarterbacking there’s also a lot of learned skill involved and if you want your kid to be an allstar quarterback you have to get them started really early, which coaches do. Even so, it’s pretty rare that having your kid on the team is going to be a good idea. North Texas is a hard school to coach for and Todd Dodge would probably have failed anyway (never having before coached above the high school level). Hawkins was a good coach at Boise State, but he inherited a good program and his successor took the program to the next level. Would he have succeeded without his son? Probably not, but at least it would have proven to be less of a distraction.

Of course, at the little league level, you don’t have to worry about boosters. You do have to worry somewhat about little league parents, though. So in that sense, Dad probably made the right call even if I couldn’t prove it at the time. I may have done a better job than Jesse Thurman did, but every ball I pitched would have made Mr and Mrs Thurman and the parents who whomever was #6 pretty irate.

AA Destroying The Social Lives Of Thousands Of Once-Fun Americans

A couple of Wall Street Journal articles of interest.

First, an article about consolidation in the health care industry:

Unlike Medicare and Medicaid, private reimbursement rates are determined by negotiations, often highly antagonistic. Insurers always attribute premium increases to the underlying cost of care, while doctors and hospitals always argue that there isn’t enough competition among health plans. Both claims are “true,” some of the time—but it depends on which side has more market power.

Insurers extract lower rates by steering patients and revenue to certain providers through their networks. Providers gain bargaining leverage when health plans can’t credibly threaten to exclude them, whether because their share of the market is too large or due to public demand for “must have” hospitals. Consolidation will increasingly feed off itself as providers and insurers vie to get the whip hand in rate negotiations.

Most neutral experts believe the balance of power has tipped toward providers over the last decade, though this isn’t always anticompetitive. Higher rates generally reflect investments in staffing, technology, specialization and sometimes consumer preferences. There is also the cost-shift to private insurance to offset Medicare’s price controls. However, most economic studies on hospital M&A over the last two decades show that consolidation increases unit prices, though there is significant disagreement over the magnitude.

If most neutral experts believe it, it’s probably true. A few factors are worth noting. If providers have increased leverage, it’s due in part because they’ve had to make sacrifices to get it. As the article copiously notes, consolidation in the health care industry is increasing. The local hospital bought up a number of the local doc practices and Clancy is an employee in the hospital. The job she interviewed in Gemini Falls was also part of a large, multi-practice group. Autonomy used to be one of the big plusses when it came to doctors but it’s no longer worth it. It’s sort of like an invading army forcing a local medieval town into the castle. Yeah, they residents have got the high ground, but only because they left where they want to be.

And I have to take this moment to point out that physician wages have, despite the leverage, been stagnant*. So where is this extra money going? I would guess it’s as the article said: infrastructure improvements. Probably increased administrative staffs, too. Clancy’s employer is building a new hospital, for instance (but they’ve also forced an essential wage-cut amongst at least some of the doctors). Another area of concern is that a lot of these infrastructure improvements can be geared towards things that will ultimately increase the costs of health care in the long run. Buying new machines that will perform expensive tests and the like**. Once you have these machines, you want to use them! So care and testing will probably become more aggressive and, hence, more expensive. There’s not much good to be said about the doctor shortage in this country, but in some ways it probably is keeping health care expenses down. You might pay doctors more than you otherwise would, but there are fewer doctors performing aggressive and ultimately unnecessary treatment***.

Also, did Medicare kill the family doctor?

Eventually, that disconnect (and subsequent program expansions) resulted in significant strain on the federal budget. In 1966, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990 the Medicare budget would quadruple to $12 billion from $3 billion. In fact, by 1990 it was $107 billion.

To fix the cost problem, Medicare in 1992 began using the “resource based relative value system” (RBRVS), a way of evaluating doctors based on factors such as education, effort and specialized training. But the system didn’t consider factors such as outcomes, quality of service, severity or demand.

Today most insurance companies use the Medicare RBRVS because it is perceived as objective. As a result of RBRVS, specialists—especially those who perform a lot of procedures—do extremely well. Primary-care doctors do not.

The primary-care doctor has become a piece-rate worker focused on the volume of patients seen every day. As Medicare and insurers focused on trimming the costs of the most common procedures, the income and job satisfaction of primary-care doctors eroded.

If you wonder why it’s so hard to get much of a doctor’s time, this accounts for a lot of it. As mentioned before, doctorly pay has been stagnant. This is due to the fact that doctors have made up for what would be substantial losses by seeing patients in much more rapid succession. Due to the general nature of their work, there can simultaneously be a shortage in primary care (both in absolute terms and relative to specialists) and primary care physicians can be seen as “a dime a dozen” when it comes to negotiation. The result is fewer and fewer doctors going into primary care and more and more specialists which end up limiting what primary care physicians can do (for instance, Clancy can only perform cesarean sections because there are no obstetricians in town to object) which ends up making it so that primary care physicians get to do less of the things that might provide job satisfaction and pay boosts.

Specialization doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but at the very least you need a more complete “front line” to screen patients and refer them to specialists. This is an area where having mid-level providers may be more of a help. Or importing more doctors. I am skeptical of the notion that having more primary care docs (or docs in general) will lower health care costs without other substantive change, but it could help the front line problem. The only alternative to the supply-side is the demand-side, and it’s difficult to ask patience to triage themselves, determine that they don’t need care after all, or to seek the cheapest available option when their copay is the same no matter what they do.

One idea I have been toying around with is shifting more of the primary care to the government or insurance companies and let them worry about containing costs. I am not sure how much I trust the government to contain costs and I’m not sure how much I trust insurance companies to give patients a fair shake.

* - This isn’t a complaint. Doctors are still very well paid.

** - I don’t have any information on whether any of this is going on at Clancy’s hospital. But it’s an industry-wide issue.

*** - Some of this may be in the form of doctorly profiteering, but that’s not even what I am referring to here. Tests can be unnecessary but still be beneficial. Think of it like taking medicine to get over a cold two days earlier than you otherwise would have. It’s not necessary, but it’s nice. It’s nice, but it ultimately costs the system money. One of the peculiarities of the health care industry is that the two primary decision-makers, doctors and patients, often have little incentive to consider costs of treatment. Those whose job it is to consider costs, insurance companies and the government, face really bad publicity by stepping in and stopping payment on what a doctor thinks would be beneficial and a patient wants on the grounds that the substantial cost outweigh the smaller but potentially very real benefits.