A bizarre and unfortunate story of a Westpoint man that went from being a cornerback for the Black Knights to being demoted and deployed due to a confrontation with Patti LaBelle. The Westpoint kid is suing, LaBelle is suing back.

Macross Plus comes to life. Macross Plus is an anime where the major pop star of the day is an AI robot named Sharon Apple. Perhaps the best take on it came from a Facebook friend: “It’s not so much that they made the computer image look real, it’s that they’re trying to make the real girls look faker, so the Idoru doesn’t stand out.”

How can this surprise anyone? There are a lot of reasons that the south has a bigger obesity problem than the rest of the country. But it’s not entirely related to the heat!

Louisiana almost made littering an impoundable offense. It failed in the state house after clearing the senate by a near-unanimous vote. Astonishing. Even for Louisiana.

News of the Weird from a few weeks ago. Identical twin pastors die within hours of one another on the same day, at the same hospital.

A man in Utah was fined for trying to pay a $140 bill with pennies. It’s reminiscent of a man cuffed and arrested at Best Buy for wanting to pay with $2 bills.

This is a particularly weak argument against legalizing drugs. I’m not even sold on decriminalization (outside of pot), but come on. The end of prohibition didn’t destroy the mafia, but it made the mafia something that could be fought.

There’s apparently a documentary about the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit. It’s called Hot Coffee, which makes me wonder if I will get any typo traffic. The film is coming strictly from the pro-litigation point of view, so there’s some pushback, pointing out that they’re not exactly telling the whole story. I don’t begrudge the lady her money. Or even the industrious lawyer(s). She suffered for her money and the lawyers played the game and they won. What kind of pisses me off, though, is how difficult it is to actually get a hot cup of coffee these days. The lawyers involved in the case say that anything that can quickly burn you is too hot.

Our cultural fascination with Camelot. As I’ve been diving into Game of Thrones, it reminds me of the love I had of the Arthurian legend. Nobody understood why I hated the Sean Connery movie that came out. Because it wasn’t King Arthur! Not in any meaningful sense.

It’s amazing how empty this house feels but for a twenty pound mutt. I dropped her off with the Alvarez’s this evening. I got a text from Jack saying that she and their 70lb rottweiler are getting along swimmingly (which is a bit of a surprise, since when they usually see one another, Lisby growls the other dog into submission).

I will be leaving tomorrow. Clancy is slated to leave on Friday. I’ll be picking her up and we’ll be going to the Corrigan Compound (a group of houses on a private drive owned by her extended family on her mother’s side) for a couple days. I will be staying in Colosse for several days after she gets back. It’ll be a bit of a working vacation, as I have some Commodus stuff on my plate. Or I should, anyway. Also possible: Clancy can’t make it at all and I spend the entire time in Colosse. Also possible: I go on a business trip and spend little time in Colosse at all. Everything is in flux.

I posted just today about airline fees. By coincidence, we had to change out her flight and got dinged with the penalty. My criticism doesn’t really apply, though, since we’re only a couple days out. Charging us $150 is more than fair under these circumstances. Less fair is Delta not being up front about the cost of the new flight, throwing in an additional $250 at the end of the call because the price they gave us didn’t include the return trip (??!!). She will be flying US Airways. We never want to give Delta our business again (this is not the first Delta-related incident), but they have our money. So we’ll have to fly them again at some point. While I don’t begrudge them their $150, it’s annoying that they keep that and the money. On the other hand, Delta is a difficult airline to avoid out here with Deseret’s capital being one of their hubs.

The Atlantic has a list of the worst airline fees. I agree with the commenters, that some of them aren’t bad. In fact, some of them improved. Others, though are quite aggravating.

1. Pet aboard fee - In some cases, it costs more to fly the dog than it is to fly me. That strikes me as a bit excessive. On the other hand, It’s something that they’re very up front about and that you can make arrangements accordingly. Charging a fee for pets is definitely fair. And not something new.

2. Unaccompanied Minor - I am sympathetic to this one. You have liability concerns, for one thing. And kids require more attention and are more likely to make flights unpleasant for others (dealing with complaints costs money). Is $100 fair? Not sure. Like the dogs, though, you know well ahead of time.

3. Carry on Baggage Fee - I’ve commented on this one before. The long and short of it… I have no problem with it. It’s easier to plan around and the financial incentives should be towards checking, and not carrying on, baggage.

4. Pillow/blanket - Rubbish. I have never even taken advantage of this “service”, but still: rubbish.

5. WiFi fee - How quickly the world owes us something.

6. Non-alcoholic beverages - At least, unlike sporting events and the like, you can bring your own. I think that water of some sort should be guaranteed, but not necessarily soft drinks.

7. Headset fees - This is actually an improvement. Does anyone else remember when you used to have to put down a deposit on a rental that was more than the $3 that Continental is charging? I don’t even blame them for that. As with the WiFi, they need to be able to pay for these things and passing it on to the customers seems fair. I do find the “gotcha” aspect to be irritating (you’re paying $3 because you forgot to bring them from last time and not because you want a second pair). But it’s cheap enough not to be a problem. Especially considering that the pricing is probably in line with what it costs them.

8. Meal/snack fee - If you want to pay for the food they’re selling, you deserve what you get.

9. Preferred seat fee - I do find this one somewhat aggravating, and petty. A sort of “we’re going to intentionally make things difficult for you if you don’t pay up” screw-you sort of thing. Paying extra for exit-row seats is completely fair, though.

10. Ticket Hold fee - I’m not sure about this one. I don’t think “buy your ticket or take your chances” is unfair, though it seems to me that if you’re doing so far enough in advance, it should be a courtesy.

11. Phone booking fee - $25? WTF?

12. Priority seating - Perfectly voluntary pricing discrimination at its best. No problems here.

Here’s what I don’t get, though. How can you list some of these penny-ante things without getting into what I believe is the worst:

13. Cancellation fees - If I cancel at the last minute, I should have to pay them something. If I cancel six weeks ahead of time, though, that’s pretty ridiculous. They have plenty of time to sell the ticket again. Whereas a lot of the others mentioned are completely voluntary, this is a case of turning the screws on someone who simply doesn’t have much choice. Even when no harm is done. It’s the sort of back-end pricing that annoys me. I might be more accommodating if the fees were remotely reasonable, but they aren’t. Change of plans? Screw you! Because we can!

Update: Apparently, US Airways charges an extra fee if you want to sit on the front half of the plane. No extra-legroom, or anything. You just sit near the front. We don’t get it. Last on and first off isn’t work $25, in my book. Not when for $40 you can get decent legroom.

I tend to think of some occupation as being “old people jobs,” going back to when I thought people in their forties were old. Trucking is an example. It’s weird to see truckers younger than I am. It’s a transition that had to occur, I suppose, but it still just strikes me as a bit odd.

Things with Commodus are moving very slowly. The way that things went down gave my new boss (with the contracting company) a real opportunity to screw me out of thousands of dollars. I knew I was taking a chance when I made the decisions that put me there. It was the perfect opportunity to, and there wouldn’t have been much of anything I could have done about it. But he didn’t. I was ready to be screwed over at least a little bit. But not at all. This feels like alien territory.

My dog Lisby is not a patriotic dog. They started selling fireworks recently in town and they’ve been going off at a steady slip ever since. The dog will not leave my side and whenever I sit down, she wants to be on my stomach. And whenever I’m at the computer, she lays at my feet on the uncomfortable plastic rug-guard. This is nothing compared to the sheer panic I’ve seen with other dogs, but it’s surprising nonetheless with this one.

There’s a chance I’ll be leaving town for a couple of weeks. I’d been waiting for confirmation before saying anything, but it looks like we won’t know for sure until we are on the plane. The tickets have been bought, but her employer reserves the right to prevent her from going (we’ve had to cancel flight plans twice).

There are two “supply stores” in town. A supply store being a convenience store combined with farming/ranching supplies and pet stuff (since pets are often farm and ranch animals). They seem to compete over who can hire the hottest girls behind the counter. There’s probably an EEOC lawsuit in here somewhere.

I cashed a bunch of checks the other day. Two from the Redstone School District for a few hundred dollars. A couple were refunds for a little over and a little under $3. It feels ridiculous to cash checks for that amount.

Last year (or maybe early this one), I was selected for Arbitron radio ratings. They sent me a “small cash award.” It was three one dollar bills. I found that amusing, but I completely blew it when it came to keeping track of what I was listening to. Actually, I didn’t listen to anything that week. But I’m supposed to return it and didn’t. Now Nielson is talking to me. they sent me $30. On the one hand, that makes me feel more like I need to follow through this time. On the other… well… it’s Nielson.

RIP, Peter Falk. Columbo was an early favorite of mine. Though he’s an Italian-American in Los Angeles, the stealth intelligence hidden under self-deprecation makes me think of southerners. It’s kind of odd that they seem to be remaking everything, but not really Columbo. I guess it goes back to the ad campaign they had when they relaunched in the 90’s, showing various actors of the day (Mark Lynn-Baker, Fred Savage) wearing The Coat, saying “There’s just one… Columbo.” If they relaunched it, I wonder whom they would get to play the role. They’d probably screw it up, mixing some action, gunplay, and martial arts in there.

After France stuck by nuclear power, I decided to declare a moratorium on making fun of them. The moratorium is now lifted.

With USC having vacated the title, there is the natural question of who should get it. Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops says that he isn’t asking for it. Well. Nobody’s offering it. 55-19, the Sooners lost to the Trojans by. Texas Tech’s Tommy Tuberville argues that it should go to Auburn, which he coached at the time. The argument there is much stronger. Vacating titles is lame, but if you’re going to do it, it should go to the next team down the list. Another candidate would be Utah. But Utah’s coach at the time was Urban Meyer, who likely doesn’t give a rip about yet another one of those. Besides, after he left Utah (and spent time complaining there about how his team wasn’t taken seriously), he went on the record as saying that non-BCS teams should not be considered for championships. The BCS has basically said that they’re not going to give the title to anyone else.

I got a kick out of this story. Of course BeautifulPeople.com has the right to exclude whomever they like, and of course the Shrek virus was wrong… but still.

Our postal problems may be more severe, but Canada’s are more immediate.

The new rule is, we pass at the pleasure of security. Even if you’re elderly and presumably wealthy tourists.

The fact that this raid was not about failure to pay student loans makes it a little less odious, but only a little. White collar crimes simply do not warrant the SWAT treatment.

Unexpectedly, we’re driving less. My first thought was that this was economic (fewer jobs to drive to), but that would show up before a recession and after, but so much between 2010 and 2011, both of which were the pits. Meanwhile, autotaxis now legal in Nevada!

A man was charged with a $275 fine for helping clear out tornado damage. Such vigilantism must be punished, of course.

An interesting chart of men of different heights and sizes. Having been some of the heights and weights listed, I can say that some of them are misleading.

My brothers were into rap for a little while, before it went gangsta (though Mitch still does listen). I used to listen to some of their tapes and liked (and like) quite a bit of it. How could you not like this one. It was a can of dog food!!

In writing about the the whole incident a while back regarding Apple’s factory workers in China, Dave Pinson makes the following point:

I can see how it might be tough for a company like Dell to manufacture low-margin laptops in the U.S., but doesn’t Apple have high enough profit margins that in can afford to manufacture some of its gadgets here? If New Balance can make some of its high-end sneakers here, why can’t Apple make some iPads and iPhones here? It can’t be for a lack of workers — Apple’s home state of California has a 12.9%. unemployment rate. Maybe it would mean lower profit margins — or maybe Apple could pass on the higher labor costs to its cult-like customers — but it still seems worth trying.

I’d actually be really curious to know what the markup would be if they made in in California. Or, for that matter, South Carolina. You would think that if anyone could afford to absorb some of the costs, it would be Apple. They remain an American company, though, and presumably do the vast majority of their design and R&D work here. My phone is an HTC, which is full-on Taiwanese, though they also do work in the US and are hiring from Washington to North Carolina. HTC actually used to be an English acronym High Tech Computers.

Incidentally, I got a couple new watches over the last couple of months. One I wrote about here. The other is a brown watch from the US Polo Association (though as near as I can tell, the watch doesn’t have anything to do with polo, and is not exactly the fine watch one might expect from our polo-playing elite, nor is it a sportsish watch). It has a little American flag on it. Want to guess where it wasn’t made? The watch was really cheap, so I wouldn’t expect them to make it here. But it was made in… Japan. That I don’t get. It can’t be that much cheaper to make them in Japan than to make them here, can it? I understand that with Made in China or Made in Thailand, there are tradeoffs. Maybe good tradeoffs, maybe bad ones. But it saves them money and so presumably it saves you at least a little bit. But… Japan?

I’ve gotten a couple of new watches over the last couple months. One of them is kinetically powered, meaning that you wind it and it is supposed to power as you move your arms. Apparently, I don’t move around enough in my sleep because every morning the watch is stopped or running very slowly. That I don’t move around a whole lot in my sleep would be news to my brothers. Clancy reminded me that I jerk my legs a lot in my sleep, so maybe I should put it on my ankle at night. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same site that sold me the watch was selling a watch-shaker a couple weeks later, to keep kinetic watches powered (which kind of defeats the purpose of having a self-powering watch). Coincidence?

What’s particularly frustrating is that I absolutely love the watch. I love watches and clocks in general, and this is one of the coolest looking ones I have ever had. But it’s usefulness is rather limited.

I am thinking I should maybe give it to a sexually frustrated teenager who has to gratify himself constantly. I would guess that’s about the only way to make sure it keeps a charge.

It’s been several years since the NCAA decided to start punishing schools that use tribal mascots and imagery. For the most part, it has shaken itself out and almost everybody has selected a new mascot. They became the Red Wolves, RedHawks, Warhawks, and Mustangs. The Illini are still the Illini, but without the imagery, and the Tribe are still the Tribe, but without the feather. The lone hold-out remains the University of North Dakota, and they’re about to pay a steep price:

When UND was accepted for Big Sky membership in November, the conference’s other colleges believed the issue was settled and UND would retire the nickname, Fullerton said in a letter to Kelley. Should UND keep the Fighting Sioux nickname and Indian head logo, the school could face boycotts from other colleges and cancellations of athletic events, he said.

“Boycotts by individual schools or leagues will certainly have a negative effect on all of your programs, including hockey,” Fullerton wrote. “Couple these issues with postseason restrictions, and we are concerned that this state law has the possibility of destroying Division I athletics at the University of North Dakota.”.

The “individual schools” joining the boycott include the nearby University of Minnesota, an important rival for their hockey program (UND’s primary sport is hockey, their football program being overshadowed by North Dakota State). Losing their spot in the Big Sky Conference is itself quite a big deal, as the Big Sky is one of the better FCS-level conferences and includes some pretty big western schools. The mascot has already cost them a spot in the Summit League and Missouri Valley Football Conference, which the other three Dakota schools, as well as Nebraska-Omaha, will be playing in soon. Their hockey program will also be sidelined from playoffs.

The school had already announced an intent to change mascots, but they were overruled by the state legislature. Also important, some very big UND donors have threatened to stop donating money to the program if they make the change. This puts the university in a really rough place. The legislature and boosters are counting on the NCAA flinching, or else gambling with their entire athletics program to hold on to the tribal connection. Is it worth being the Sioux if nobody will play you?

A lot of this points back to the poor way that the NCAA handled this. The NCAA doesn’t have the authority to make any schools do anything, but they nonetheless played a pretty heavy hand. They allowed waivers that let Florida State, Utah, and others get through if they had the support of one or more tribes that they were representing. But otherwise, they set a pretty high bar for any school representing a tribe with more than one faction. North Dakota actually has the support of one Sioux tribe, and in my mind that ought to be enough. Making their continued use of the name contingent on tribal approval strikes me as a good compromise.

In addition to avoiding this trainwreck, it could have been a truly beneficial exchange. Things worked out very well with Florida State, where the school started changing its iconography and imagery to that of the actual Seminole tribe. Likewise, had UND been required to retain the goodwill of the Sioux, they could have asked for the same. Or money, for that matter. Or admittance and scholarships. This could have been a win-win. The origins of UND’s selection of the Sioux are actually known. They were chosen because the school wanted something that was good at killing Bison, which is the mascot of their in-state rival, and they researched it and determined that the Sioux were great bison-hunters. Putting UND’s specific situation aside, schools with generic names like Indians could conceivably have even be asked to emphasize the name of their sponsoring tribe, which for a lesser-known tribe that would like a higher profile, would be a positive. Especially if it came out that they were good hunters.

There are two district stadia. The second is below the fold, at the bottom. The first is above, neatly nestled in town. Half of the bleachers actually sit atop parts of the school. This picture is from the special ed room, below said bleachers.

This is outside Lewis Elementary. Considering that Lewis is the worst school in the district, it fits. The school was, until somewhat recently, a middle school. Dwindling population lead to the decommissioning of an elementary school and Lewis’s conversion, sending all of the district kids to Clark Middle. (more…)

Colleges apparently getting people’s hopes up in order to dash them:

The 18-year-old high school senior in Thornwood, New York, said she spent about $780 on 12 applications after mailings from top schools like Duke, which sent a wall poster. She was rejected by Duke, Columbia and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and plans to attend the University of Maryland.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, someone is interested in me,’” Ederer said in an interview. “They attract you with an e-mail and a few pamphlets and big envelopes filled with a ton of information and make you want to go to that school, and they don’t accept you.”

The rationale of this behavior being pretty simple: it looks better when you reject a higher percentage of your applicants. There’s actually a sign posted at Redstone High School wherein a few dozen colleges have a “common application process.” Apply to one, apply to all! That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but they basically make it easier to apply to as many as you want to. In part, I suspect, so that these schools can come across as being more selective than they otherwise are.

My alma mater, Southern Tech University, is trying to join the University of Delosa as a state flagship university. The goalposts that the state has set up for Sotech make it pay for the university to become more selective. More admissions typically correlates with lower medians, higher drop-out rates, and higher acceptance rates. All of which allow DU to turn their nose up at us and say “you have more in common with Delosa Polytechnic than you do with us.”

As a proud Pack alum, I wish my university well in its goal. The better it does, the better my degree looks… but a lot of it is tribal pride. Most alums seem to feel the same way. Of course, it becomes paradoxical after a point. A lot of people that got in under previous, more lenient admissions, would be less likely to get in under more recent standards. They’re wanting the university to attract better students than they, often, were. Whether I would get in to Southern Tech or not simply wasn’t a question. And indeed, I would likely get in under the newer proposed admission policies, as well. Though as they attract a better class of student, I would be less likely to get into the Honors College, which was one of the real boons to my time at the U. Beyond that, the fact that the university was less selective made it more attractive to me to begin with. I had deferred acceptance into DU, but I was intimidated by the prospect of going to a school that I “barely got into*.”

* - I didn’t fully appreciate how good my high school was and how much of a “leg up” I would have on a lot of my college classmates.

A while back, in response to responses to the Anthony Weiner scandal, Megan McArdle wrote:

Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages. Strong marriages support a strong society. And society supports the marriage by encouraging people to do the very hard work of keeping their promises. One of the ways in which society ensures strong marriages is by tut-tutting (or worse) at people who don’t keep to their vows: who abandon spouses, treat them badly, or yes, violate their trust by engaging in covert sexual activity. I’m a big fan of sexual privacy. But you cannot have a public institution that rests in part on fidelity, and also complete privacy on those matters.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that social sanction can be very helpful in assisting us in doing important but difficult things. Marriage is stronger if people who find out that their friends are cheating don’t say, “Awesome, is he hot?” but “How could you do that to Jason?” Marriage is stronger if people who cheat are viewed with slight revulsion, and so are the (knowing) people who they cheat with. Marriage is stronger when people who decide not to care for seriously ill spouses are met with an incredulous “What the hell is wrong with you?”, not “Yeah, I couldn’t handle that either.” Of course it would be nicer if we didn’t need this sort of help. But we are a flawed species.

This is, to be sure, a bit trickier in an era when people like me and Andrew accept that there can be healthy non-monagamous marriages. Maybe, folks have suggested, she was totally okay with this! This seems possible, but not really very likely. I know a decent number of people in open marriages, but they are very far from the majority of the people I know. Looking at what polls and research we have on this sort of thing, plus an unscientific survey of my friends and the women who have written me, I’m going to go out on a limb here and speak for heterosexual married women as a class: I’m pretty sure that most of us are not okay with our husbands sending racy photos to strangers, or engaging in phone sex with same within weeks of our wedding day. And if she’s totally okay with this, how come she hasn’t said so?

To some, marriage is a covenant with God. To others, it’s an agreement with the state. And others, it’s merely an arrangement between two people. I fall into the view that it is a covenant with society. As such, I agree with McArdle on the lack of complete unimportance of Weiner’s infidelity. Society is conferring benefits - tangible and intangible - to married couples, and I believe that married couple in turn should meet some rather basic expectations.

I believe this enough that I am uncomfortable with the notion of “non-monogamous marriages.” Not that I don’t think they can ever work. Not even that I disapprove of non-monogamy. But rather, that I think what is being described is something other than marriage. I don’t think that these people should be prevented from being married, but rather that individuals in society, as well as society as a whole, can pass judgment.

Except, of course, that there is not typically a way of getting marital benefits without it being called marriage. This is where I think the concept of Civil Unions can be rather helpful, for straights and gays alike. On the other end, I am actually sympathetic to the notion of “covenant marriages”, the marriage-plus deal that some states have tried to institute. By and large I would have the law look at all three in the same way, except for making it easier to get in and out of some than others, but a clearer outlining of expectations would ultimately be helpful, in my view. Before asking “Will you marry me?” I wish that more couples had a clearer idea of a fundamental pre-requisite question: “What does marriage mean to you?”

I am, to some degree, skeptical of the notion that we should always approach these questions individually. Without common definitions, and common expectations, society lacks a structure that is ultimately beneficial. Legislating morality is tough, and often undesirable. It’s social norms, and social expectations, that remain the best tool to make it largely unnecessary. And so when Anthony Weiner introduces his wife, I should have the reasonable expectation that they are monogamous. Even if his wife is okay with what he did, you still have a situation where Weiner sold us on one persona “Happily married man!” while in fact being another “Someone with looser notions of marriage than you!”

Trumwill was nice enough to lend me a guest-post (I think he’s trying to encourage me to start my own blog). I was wanting some perspective on something.

About a year ago, I was dumped by a girl I’d been dating for about nine months (”Scarlett”). Getting dumped sucks, but what really got to me was the reason she gave. “I’m tired of dating boys. I want to date men.”

This flew me into a silent rage because when I think of man-boys, I think of unemployed or underemployed schmucks who sit around and play World of Warcraft all day in their parents’ basement. But between her and me, there was only one of us that had a well-paying, full-time job and the self-sufficiency that comes with us. It wasn’t her. I’d paid her rent twice when her father started giving her too hard a time about it. I’ve worked at the same company for almost five years while she had quit her last job because her “boss was mean.”

When I told my flatmate (”Miss Blue”) about it, though, she hesitated and said that Scarlett had a point on some things. I keep my room pretty spartan and if it wasn’t for Miss Blue, the common area would be the same. I drive an old car. I dressed like a bum when I wasn’t at work. So Miss Blue helped me out, bought some furniture for my room, and helped me pick out some more presentable clothes. I don’t know if it helped or not, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

My 1996 Geo Prizm is on its last legs. I bought it in 2003 and it’s served me well. But now it randomly dies when driving uphill. In the flatlands where I live, that’s not a problem. Except on entrance ramps. The first repair guy says the transmission needs to be replaced, a second the engine. Either way, it’s more than the car is worth.

The car was another thing that Miss Blue mentioned during our Coming to Jesus talk. As practical as the car was, maybe it was time to upgrade. What good is all the money I make if I don’t spend it? If I act poor, and make the same sort of purchases that a man-boy does, can I really blame the ladies for thinking of me like one of them?

There are things you can and can’t say on a first date. It’s considered in poor taste to mention a six-figure salary. It sounds like bragging to say that I could buy a Lexus tomorrow, if I wanted to. But pulling up in a Lexus? That you can do and almost nobody thinks bad of you for doing it. I gave in on the clothes and the furniture, but it’s more difficult for me to do that with the car. The very reason I have a retirement plan and a 24-month unemployment slush fund is because I don’t do things like going out and buying Lexuses (Lexii?), that I have a flatmate, and all that.

So I end up a rich man leading a poor man’s lifestyle. I’m content with it, for the most part. Part of me wants to say “if she has a problem with that, it’s her problem.” I don’t want a concubine. I don’t want someone who digs me because I’m rich (for a 28 year old). I’d far rather a woman impressed with a 401(k) than a sports car. On top of that, about a third of the time I’m driving a rental car, anyway. And every time I look at the car, I’ll be realizing that I bought it for someone else.

On the other hand, I don’t know how picky I can afford to be. I have some things going against me, too, like a job that takes me out of town for weeks at a time. And there’s a symmetry between what I am doing and the person that goes into debt to buy flashy things they can’t afford. We’re miscommunicating our material value. So some chick that maybe would be cool with my money going into a retirement account might never get the chance to find out that’s my plan.

So as I go car shopping, what do I do? Do I get another cheap-ass car that gets the job done and nothing else? Do I bite the bullet and get a Lexus to potentially please some woman I’ve never met but might want to? Or do I get the car I want? The one I’ll be able to smile about because the total cost of ownership is under $300 (instead of over $600)? Or do I admit that people are what they are, make judgments accordingly, and get something that will accurately represent the fact that I’m a self-sufficient adult?

I make a good living, which was one of the reasons I could pay Scarlett’s rent without blinking. I could buy a Lexus tomorrow, in cash. With Scarlett, this shouldn’t have been an issue because she knew these things.

Meanwhile, Colorado is seeking to rein itself in with the increasing criminalization of behavior. It’s an interesting concept.

Apparently, UHaul won’t rent you a trailer if you drive a Ford Explorer. The same for the Jeep Wrangler. Both are very towing-capable. So why the policy? “Every time we go to hire an attorney to defend a lawsuit, as soon as we say ‘Ford Explorer,’ they charge us more money.”

Some blame for-profit colleges for feeding the “education bubble.” Derek Thompson makes a pretty strong case that they’re going to be its victims.

Some Ob/Gyn’s are turning down obese patients. The reasons? Their equipment can’t handle it and they have malpractice liability if something goes wrong and they are sued (and something is more likely to go wrong with an obese mother). It’s interesting the degree to which fear of lawsuits influences a doctor’s relationship with their patients. Clancy has never dropped a patient who did not physically threaten her or the employees at the hospital, but there are some patients she was glad to lose because she felt that they were “lawsuits waiting to happen” (in other words, a host of medical problems with the sense of entitlement that the medical community will be able to fix it).

On the one hand, I don’t think I would want to live next door to this guy. On the other hand, this sort of thing is as American as apple pie and ten-cent ramen. Along similar lines this is purely un-American. On the other hand, as someone that likes his meat actually cooked and gets frustrated when it’s red-centered, I approve.

Different times call for different measurements.

The US: Where Europe comes to slum.

Urbanity and Density, the Canadian version.

Bakadesuyo: Happy employees make companies rich.

This song has been inexplicably stuck in my head for the last couple of weeks.

It’s enough to make me miss Bon Jovi.

Walter Olson brings back the “Cash For Clunkers is why used cars have become so expensive” argument:

Guess what’s the newest trouble to hit the car business? As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

At least he points out that there are “multiple reasons,” which is something that a lot of C4C critics have glided over in the past. Even so, he acts like C4C is the driving factor when there is comparatively little reason to believe it’s more than just a contributor. I wrote about C4C here and here. My basic view is that Cash For Clunkers was an idiotic proposal, a poor way to go about reducing emissions and destroying a lot of capital along the way, but that it’s hard to blame all - or most - of the increased cost of used cars on the law. I previously pointed out that some of the cars where the price increase is the highest, late-model used cars for instance, were not the ones taken off the road. While it’s possible that there is a cascading effect (people can’t buy a targeted, fuel-inefficient vehicle and instead buys an ineligible care taking that one off the road) you would still see the biggest impact on the cars that were targeted and more impact on cars from that period and not more recent cars. Instead, it’s the other way around, suggesting that the biggest reduction in used car availability (where increased demand is meeting decreased supply) is a result of people buying late-model used rather than new vehicles and - more likely - holding on to the car that they have.

Olson cites this article, among others:

Bill Visnic, analyst and senior editor at Edmunds.com, said the auto industry went from selling 16.5 million new cars annually before the recession, down to 10.5 million in the depths of the crisis. He said the average age of a used vehicle on the road today is in excess of ten years old, as well, meaning that overall more consumers are keeping their older cars.

“About five million people or so dropped out of the market,” Visnic said. “A vast number of those people would have been trading in a used car when they bought a new one. That’s a big whammy when the replacement rate has been lagging so much.”

Consumers looking to buy used cars will find that prices are up markedly, Visnic said. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for used cars are up 5% this year at wholesale auto house Manheim. He said the Car Allowance Rebate System, which was introduced in 2009, also set off the price hike in the used market. The government program dubbed “Cash for Clunkers” offers economic incentives to U.S. consumers for turning in their used cars for a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. In turn, instead of ending up on the used car lots across the country, those vehicles went to junkyard graves.

So there has been a reduction of 6 million car sales per annum. Cash for Clunkers may be responsible for - at maximum - 1/7th of that. That assumes that everyone who totaled their car in 2009 would have sold it in 2010. Given that a frequent (and valid!) criticism of C4C is that it didn’t even increase the sale of new cars because it merely time-shifted purchasing (they bought in 2009 what they might have waited a couple years to get rid of), it seems likely that a lot of them would still have the car.

Be that as it may, it is likely that it is contributing to the problem to at least some extent. The “lost capital” that I lament is going to have some effect. And it is another reason to dislike this bit of free pudding policymaking. But there are a lot of other factors at work (an economy that went to hell, primarily) that swamp the effects of the policy.

Clancy and I took a trip out to Alexandria. This time we took the dog with us. While she was in an Alexandrian coffee shop sipping and doing paperwork, I had to keep the dog entertained. Not the entire time, of course, but something to prevent her from being left in the car for hours on end. As it turned out, I had the entire afternoon planned. Dog park, Petsmart, Walmart, and if time dog park again. So the only time she was really left alone was while I was shopping (though it turned out to be somewhere other than Walmart). Anyhow, there’s not a whole lot of shade at the dog park, so I ended up spending quite a bit of time in the sun. We got back tonight, and I feel washed.

When I told this to Clancy, she had no idea what “washed” meant. And as I thought about it, it is actually a term I’ve never heard anyone else use. Basically, it’s the sense of being “sapped by the sun.” What does this have to do with washing? I have no idea. If anything else, it’s the opposite. Being dried out. But for some reason, the word that comes to mind is washed. Like clothes that have been through the washer and dryer. A little faded (another opposite, since I’m a little redder) and wanting to lay limp on the ground - or the sofa.

So right now I am assessing the skin damage, which appears to be pretty minimal. I’m also catching up on hydration. The good news, I guess, is that I’m not very hungry. My appetite has been on an uptick in recent weeks, so this is actually a welcome development.

As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics

They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.

There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states. {…}

Because so many doctors are no longer in business for themselves, many of the issues that were once priorities for doctors’ groups, like insurance reimbursement, have been displaced by public health and safety concerns, including mandatory seat belt use and chemicals in baby products.

Even the issue of liability, while still important to the A.M.A. and many of its state affiliates, is losing some of its unifying power because malpractice insurance is generally provided when doctors join hospital staffs.

Because doctors are, apparently, completely unaware that the medmal liability insurance that their employer has to pay on their behalf comes at the expense of the value that they add (and therefore the compensation they can demand) to the overall organization. Oh, and the reimbursements they make are completely unrelated to how much of a salary that they can expect. I can buy that these things are not as much on the forefront of their minds as they previously were since they are negotiated or paid by their employer, but there’s something in the air in Maine if doctors up there no longer think medical malpractice doesn’t matter to them. Or more likely, it’s not an issue there because the issue isn’t pressing because Maine has remarkably low malpractice insurance rates despite the lack of traditional tort reform.

It also entirely contradicts my experience. Even in tort-unfriendly states, frivolous lawsuits weigh very heavily on doctors minds. It weighs on my wife’s, despite the fact that her medmal is paid for. It matters above and beyond dollars and cents. It’s partly a matter of pride, wherein a doctor doesn’t want to have to explain to a jury of 12 people who know little of medicine while the baby didn’t have a chance while John Edwards is on the other side talking to the dead baby’s spirit. Maybe this is impossibly arrogant. Maybe this is foolish. But in the years I have been surrounded by doctors - some liberal, some conservative - I have never once heard that it’s not a big deal. If anything, I think that they are too obsessive over it. But then, that’s easy for me to say because it’s not my ass - and career - on the line.

Unfortunately, this “see, they’re coming around!” tone taints my view of the rest of the article. But really, I think that there is something to the article in its totality. Particularly in family medicine, which is disproportionately populated with women and less entrepreneurial men. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s happening more generally. Doctors are, I think, caught between two realities. The first is that they have lived in a very Republican world. They worked hard, they were smart, they got ahead. Others that worked hard and were smart got ahead, too. It’s a very meritocratic atmosphere. Then, when they’re out of their education and residencies and/or fellowships, they are thrust into a world where they have mountains of debt but are getting taxed like they’re rich. Further, they’re taking care of people who have often broken their own bodies through ignorance or gross misjudgment and expect someone else to put them back together (almost always having worked in charity hospitals, where the expectation is that you will do so on someone else’s dime). This all lends itself to a more conservative worldview. Even the liberal docs I know have suspicious attitudes towards those below the working class.

But on the other hand, there’s this: they’re educated, high-earning individuals. This group has been trending Democratic for a while now. Regardless of the merits of conservatism and the Republican Party, the peer pressure is leaning against it. The Republican Party has become increasingly embarrassing, on a social level. The party that went from embracing George H. Bush to embracing his son to embracing Sarah Palin. Yes, yes, conservatives can argue that George W. Bush wasn’t actually conservative or was a RINO, but among the friends and colleagues of educated individuals, that is not the perception. Medicine and engineering seem to be the last two strongholds of educated, white collar (or white coat, anyway) Republicanism. So, especially when considering the demographic shifts (women into medicine, foreign imports into engineering), it’s not surprising to see the movement.

Obama, whether by benign policy or crude politics, is making the transition particularly easy for primary care physicians. Regardless of our resistence to his health care plan, there is at least the sense that Obama “has our back” in a way that previous presidents did not. By “has our back” I mean the backside of primary care docs and their families. He named a primary care doc as surgeon general. His reimbursement restructuring favors primary care over specialists. At least rhetorically, he “gets it”. He also defines “rich” as income above what most primary care physicians will make (and those who do make that much are more likely to have been doing it a while and less anxious about it). If it’s all rhetorical or political posturing, it’s really quite shrewd. Driving a wedge between primary care docs and specialists isn’t particularly hard and primary care docs are more likely to be supportive anyway, for a variety of reasons (more likely to be female, less likely to be money-driven).

I don’t know how this would translate to specialists, though, and the extent to which the Democrats may be making gains there. Obama hasn’t been as kind to them, though he might not need to be. Since they earn a lot more than their primary care counterparts, they might feel less stingy when it comes to taxes as they can pay off their student loans and such a lot faster than primary care docs can.

Or it’s possible that the NYT is drawing a trend from nothing but some weirdness in Maine.

Humor that nobody will get. And those who get it might be offended.

I was reading an article about how the LDS church has its own online bookstore app. I actually chuckled at one of the comments:

They have also announced an app that will automatically transfer the money in your savings account to the most charismatic person in your ward. This will save you the time of listening to his get-rich-quick sale while he slaps you on the back and calls you brother.

They, in turn, will have an app that will text their heartfelt apology to the judge (also in their ward) who will sentence him to 24 months, translating into wages of roughly 1.5 million per year.

I love technology.

Get-rich-quick schemes in Deseret were allegedly so common that wards stopped passing out phone directories for their church because they were being used in various money-making schemes. Indeed, there were three major employers in the town where I worked. A federal government installation, my employer (tangentially involved in a lot of people trying to get rich quick), and an Amway sort of company that sells snake oil. Edgar, a guy who was let go from my employer, got a multilayer marketing job afterwards and hit us all up for a chance to get rich quick, too. That these sorts of things appeal to Mormons speaks to their industriousness, though it certainly has its downsides.

Mitt Earnesty

In a thread over in TLoOG, I realized something noteworthy: I would actually be shocked if it came out that Mitt Romney cheated on his wife. I really would. Some of it has to do with the fact that he’s as stiff as a sitcom starched shirt, but there’s also the Mormon thing. I hadn’t though about it too much, but I really do have a greater expectation on the practice-preach. Particularly the ones, like Romney, who are somewhat understated about it.

I can’t say that I was surprised about Gingrich. I’d be surprised to find out that Huckabee cheated, but not shocked.

It could be related to the fact that, until Huckabee entered the race last time around, the Mormon was the only major candidate to have only married one woman. Giuliani and McCain had five between them. Fred Thompson would later enter with two, though he wasn’t a major candidate.

{In keeping with the policies of Hit Coffee: this post is about judicial impropriety, the appearance of same, and its contributions to public loss of faith in the judiciary. Please keep your comments to those grounds. No license to slag upon republicans, democrats, gay, straight, lgbt, polka-dotted, or anyone else is warranted or implied.}

Over in Slate, an article by Dahlia Lithwick regarding why Vaughn Walker’s late-breaking announcement that he is gay should not be used as a reason to re-try the Prop 8 case on the grounds that Walker should have either (a) recused or (b) revealed his preferences pre-trial so that the question of recusal could at least have been brought up in court.

Meanwhile, the recent revelations that Clarence Thomas’s wife is/was a lobbyist with Tea Party organizations and other right wing groups making sizable sums per year, and that Clarence Thomas himself has direct links to the Citizens United group… who he happily helped rule, in a 5-4 decision, were entitled to spend unlimited money influencing elections in the US.

As a third point impugning both Thomas and Walker: Judicial Code of Conduct, Canon 2, adopted in the Federal courts as well as every State court system: A Judge Should Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in All Activities.

The appearance of impropriety is a strong problem. Politicians are regularly brought down, forced to resign or failing to re-elect, on the strength of an “appearance” of impropriety even if the letter of the law is not broken. Public officials of unelected nature often die on the vine in similar situations, forced to resign lest the elected officials who appointed/hired them face the same fate. When it comes to judicial impropriety, appearances do far worse; they make the citizenry distrust the courts. On a day-to-day basis, this much resembles the Badged Highwaymen conundrum, whereby citizens feel they do not get a “fair shake” without at least spending money on lawyers… who happen to be friends of judges and lawyers and cops… who, in essence, become the “gatekeepers” to actual justice, whether the facts are on the side of the citizens or not. In a larger picture, impropriety usually comes to the fore through stings: the cases of Thomas J Maloney and Mark Ciavarella come easily to mind.

More subtle, however, is the corrupting influence - whether payments to a spouse, or preferential treatment at events, will prejudice a judge. The comings and goings of other governmental employees, or spouses, routinely draw calls of corruption. The habit of lawyers for the almost-universally-despised RIAA to come and go from government positions, where they make often rulings that benefit the RIAA at the expense of common sense, and then leave to go to cushy, overpaid jobs at RIAA firms, certainly violate the appearance of impropriety. So, too, do the comings and goings of Wall Street personnel from Federal financial jobs, whether legal or accounting in nature.

And so we get around to Clarence Thomas and Vaughn Walker. Had Clarence Thomas and Antonio Scalia recused from the Citizens United case, what would the outcome be? We don’t know for certain, but it’s hard to imagine that those who believe CU was wrongly decided don’t have thousands of dollars worth of justification for their suspicion of impropriety. Likewise, despite Ms. Lithwick’s arguments - carefully constructed though they are - about why Vaughn Walker shouldn’t have recused, two things bug me. The first is that this argument should have been able to be brought before the trial even began; instead, the courtroom got its own annoying little sideshow whereby the judge’s supporters shouted an annoying cacophany of “he’s not” and “it doesn’t matter anyways.” Given how “revolutionary” his opinion was, given the accusations even from the beginning of the trial that he was trying to tilt the playing field… the appearance of impropriety, of bias, is a strong thing. Almost any other federal judge could have written the opinion Vaughn Walker wrote, and not had the appearance of impropriety that is fueling the current round of litigation. For the best results, a trial needs to be as evenhanded as possible. In the case of the Prop 8 trial, it seems that one side felt the tables were being tilted going in. Give them a “reason” to believe it was tilted, and you’ll never shake their faith that the game was rigged again. For this reason, I submit that Vaughn Walker was the wrong man to handle the trial.