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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-{Crossposted on NaPP}-

I don’t know if it was a league-wide thing or just the team that I followed, but I know it used to be that some major league baseball franchises had a ban on beards. I know that it was true at least of my favorite franchise, because I remember when they did away with it. Maybe it was a league rule and then it was passed to the teams, or whether it was just team-by-team and something that most teams did. I struggle to think of anyone from the 80’s or before who had a beard.

It sounds pretty ridiculous when you think about it. A beard? How offensive is a beard? Aren’t they taking it a little too far? That was kind of my thinking at the time. At east in part because I never like mustache’s and there were a lot of them around.

Flash forward a decade or two, though, and I think that either MLB or the teams had a point. I was watching the World Series. It happened to be on TV when the football game I was watching ended and it was a close game. Not having watched baseball in a while, I was really struck by how… ragged… the players look these days. They used to look like professionals or at least adults. Now they look like college drop-outs on weed. At least some of them look like the sort of person you would avoid while walking through the park. Few of them look like people you would necessarily trust to babysit your kid.

Some of this is, no doubt, a function of age. When you’re young, all old people look like adults. When you become an adult, well some look more adult than others, except you think of it in terms of “respectability” and whatnot, if you differentiate.

How did we get from here to there? I suppose there is an argument to be made that the rules were too strict for too long so that when they were finally allowed to “let loose” they did so in a conspicuous faction. Maybe it was gradual and for some reason nobody said “Look, a goatee is fine, but you do have to cut it every now and again.”

Or maybe it’s just a sign of the times. Things that were once rebel have become rather common - especially among athletes. Back in the day, rebels were often clean cut by today’s standards except for their hair and their clothes (clothes are, of course, the team uniforms and 80’s hair doesn’t work so well under a baseball cap, so they were clean-cut by default). And so athletes are a mirror of society in general. There are also ethnic considerations, though it’s worth pointing out that baseball has been integrated for a long time.

Whatever the case, it makes me feel old in a “get off my lawn” sort of way. Not that it’s the first time, since I look around at what constitutes “business attire” and roll my eyes.

I love how FamousMormons.net feels the need to identify Wilford Brimley as “that guy in Brigham City” (an LDS film) for those Mormons who don’t watch non-LDS films. The lead actress in The Killing is (or was, at one point) a Mormon. I wouldn’t recommend the series, but she was quite good. Good enough that I looked up who she was, and so on, and discovered that she went to BYU.

When we talk about people (the 47%) or corporations that “pay no taxes,” we’re taking an unfairly narrow view.

This Onion article reminded me of a former (Episcopal) pastor of mine who was caught poking a perishoner and was relieved of his duties. He immediately (and I mean immediately) became a fill-in priest for the Catholic Church. To be fair, I think he was a Catholic priest before converting to Episcopalianism, but I found it kind of funny that my church wouldn’t have him anymore but the stricter church welcomed him back with open arms.

A gorgeous time-lapsed video of Arizona and Utah, if you’re into nature and all that crap. Actually, I’m not a big nature person, and even I found it neat.

Where California went wrong, from that “Moneyball guy” who is married to that hot former MTV chick.

Bakadesuyo: Secret relationships generate more attraction and obsession than legitimate ones. This makes a good deal of sense. People in secret relationships often had more of a fantasy relationship than a real one. By which I mean, they can dream about what “might have been” if they had been able to go all-in. In real relationship, you either find out they aren’t perfect or that the other side wasn’t into you (the bastard).

When it comes to peer pressure, less is more. Too much pressure, and people start becoming stubborn.

It’s common knowledge that Ronald Reagan tried to get ketchup classified as a vegetable. The actually story is a little more complicated than that.

An interesting article on doctors experimenting with health care and payment models.

In response to Web’s post on the 53%, wherein Web points out that even the 43% who “pay no taxes” contribute in the form of payroll taxes, Brandon Berg asks:

Are we agreed, then, that Social Security and Medicare are welfare? Because if they’re insurance programs, then the contributions aren’t really taxes.

It’s an interesting question. Social Security and Medicare are both sold as (mandatory) “insurance programs” instead of tax and welfare*. For the sake of this post, I am going to focus on social security, though most of the arguments carry over.

There are two basic possible answers to this question:

• No, it’s insurance. The payouts aren’t “unearned” because you have to put in in order to take out. And what you get in return will correspond roughly with what you put in. If you have a low-wage job or an uneven job history, your social security checks will be smaller than if you work regularly at higher wages. These payments are made without regard to need (there is no “means-testing”) and high-earners do not pay into the system above a certain amount (roughly $107k) because their payout checks will not correspondingly go up upon retirement.
• Actually, it’s welfare. It’s a wealth transfer from the young, who are paying out, to the old, who are receiving. The original recipients did not put any money in. The correspondence between pay-in and take-out is rough at best. The revenues generated from the payroll taxes are not treated especially differently than other revenues.

People tend to make arguments on either side of this as it suits them. I am, in fact, no different. I tend to get aggravated when people talk about the hypocrisy of folks who decry “hand outs” but cash the social security checks. My reasoning is, basically, that they put money in their entire working lives and therefore what they are receiving is not a “hand out” as much as a social insurance payout. At the same time, I take a view similar to Web’s with regard to the 53%/47% question: If you pay FICA, you pay taxes.**

Is this contradictory? In a way, yes. If someone pays FICA and only FICA to the federal government, and social security is an insurance program, then they are paying insurance and not taxes. And if someone is collecting a social security check that they are not presently working for, they are in fact accepting hand outs not much different than the person on food stamps that they are criticizing because the money they put in actually already went out to someone else or into some other program and certainly wasn’t earmarked for them. So I guess I am having it both ways.

But that’s because it is a complicated question. And I guess, to some extent, I can’t entire view it as an either/or proposition. The income is a tax, but the outgo is an obligation of sorts. And the full name of FICA is the “Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax”, containing both the words “tax” and “insurance.” So it was intended to be both, at least to some extent.

This is an unsatisfactory answer because it lets people (like me!) make arguments on whichever side of the hybrid is more convenient. While I tend to believe my parsing is justified, I get annoyed with people on the other side of various issues, defending social security as an insurance program but then at the same time suggesting that means-test it or criticizing people for accepting the payouts. Or alternately, arguing that FICA taxes “don’t count” because they’re not real taxes but then arguing that the things they pay for are “entitlements” (and therefore, tax-based). I’m not sure that there is any way around this, though.

Some have suggested that we dispense with the “insurance” aspect of it, collect it the same way that we collect other taxes (ie less regressively). But, except when it’s not, the illusion that it is its own thing is too convenient to get rid of, ultimately. I suspect that, as we look for ways to tighten the budget, we will start doing more and more things that make it seem like tax-and-welfare (lift FICA caps, means-test). But I don’t think we will ever stop calling it insurance.

* - Web questioned how we define “welfare.” For the sake of this post, coinciding with what I believe to be Brandon’s intent, we will define welfare as “Money from the government, either to the recipient or directly to somebody else specifically on the recipient’s behalf, spent on something other than basic infrastructure, which the recipient did not earn nor do anything positive to entitle themselves to it.” It’s not a perfect definition and subject to interpretation on the meanings of “basic infrastructure” and “positive,” but it will have to do for now. Perhaps at a later point we will explore the subject more thoroughly.

** - And arguably, even if we didn’t actually call it a tax, it is psychologically indistinguishable from a tax. My wages from substitute teaching are so low that almost no money is taken out by the federal government in the form of direct income tax. But when I look at the difference between my gross pay and how much I take home, I think “tax.” The same was true when I was a teenager working at minimum wage.

So I’m working my way through the Book of Mormon at the moment. I don’t know how far along I will make it until I need a break. I find the style of it to be a little aggravating (it uses the phrase “and so it came to pass” the same way a hyperstereotypical valley girl says the word “like”). The story itself is slow-going, interrupted frequently with religious lectures. Which is good, because that’s partly why I am listening and have already discovered something pretty big that I did not know, but a fair amount of repetition. I am finishing up the second book of Nephi, the closing of which mostly seems to be a rehash of Isaiah. I might should have gone with the comic book, but I decided to go with the source material.

By way of bizarre coincidence, some missionaries stopped by today. I said, with a voice serious enough that they didn’t see an opening, “I am not interested.” They gave me a card and went their merry way.

For those of you that weren’t HC readers, I had to deal with missionaries when I was living in Deseret. I made the mistake of being a little too nice on the upfront, at which point they were hard to get rid of. Nice guys, to be sure, but I wasn’t really interested in being sold. I still have the Book of Mormon they gave me, though, with the underlined portions they told me to read.

I actually wouldn’t have minded talking to them about what I’d read, but I didn’t want to run into the same problem I had last time. Though I don’t doubt that they might be interested in telling me about this or that, I would be wasting their time since I am not a convert and I felt that by merely talking to them about it I might be giving them the wrong impression (even if I say, as I did last time, that I am not interested in conversion). It’s sort of like continuing to hang out with that girl that you’ve told you’re not looking for a relationship that she says she understands but quite frankly you know you should not believe her.

I happened to catch the tail end of the game between UAB and Central Florida last week, wherein the former got their first win of the season upsetting the latter. It was a great game that came down to the final minute of play. Though the network (something called “CSS”) was loathe to show wide-angle shots of the stadium, I would guess that maybe 500 people were there to see it. This was an intraconference game with a big opponent (UCF is likely headed to the Big East soon).

At least they aren’t Eastern Michigan. UAB claimed that there were 8,000 people there, but I doubt it. At least they have the excuse that it was a weeknight game in somewhat crummy weather. EMU has to hit up their sponsor to buy tickets. Tickets cap out at $9 and they still can’t get people to show up.

I am loathe to say that a school should give up its football program because people aren’t showing up, but… geeze.

Meanwhile, an SMU player called his team’s atmosphere a”pee-wee league experience.” SMU, like UCF, may be headed to the Big East. Their attendance isn’t as dreadful as UAB’s, but it would likely stand out in the BE (which itself is no SEC, attendance-wise).

Southern Tech pushes hard to get people to show up, though is not in the position of EMU, UAB, or SMU. Though University of Delosa people look at any empty seats as a sign of abject failure.

It’s all relative, I suppose. But when you’re being beaten out by high school football and college basketball in attendance, you have something to answer for in a way that West Virginia (whose coach complained about fewer than 40k showing up for a game) doesn’t.

A deaf group is suing Netflix over the lack of subtitles. This sounds ridiculous on the face of it. We shouldn’t but a barrier on every developing business to be able to serve everybody in exactly the right manner. Are movie theaters expected to make accommodations? If I put up a video on the Internet, can I be sued for not having a subtitling mechanism?

The FCC has strong-armed carriers into “bill shock” warnings. Basically, when you’re allotted whatever has run out and the meter is running, they have to actually tell you about it. Only the most ardent libertarian could really oppose this.

A woman is suing IMDB for revealing her age and refusing to un-reveal it.

The state senator minority leader in Oklahoma is resigning his post to support a career opportunity for his wife out of the state.

A disturbing story about the NYPD fabricating drug charges to meet arrest quotas. Remember when I said that I have a real problem with checkpoints and trusting the cops at checkpoints? I suspect a group of cops manning a hut out in southern Arizona have a lot less oversight than these NYPD cops.

To follow up on a discussion I recently had with Knight, is cooking cheaper than fast food? Only if you don’t factor in the labor costs. On top of that, when you cook, your ingredients can go bad if you really don’t have your act together. The article is from Mother Jones, though, and so it takes more of “only if you’re willing to assist McWendyKing’s exploitation of low-wage workers.” Because if they weren’t working at McDonald’s, they’d have union jobs somewhere else…

More mid-level providers are getting doctorates and want to be called Doctor. I have mixed feelings about it. Russell Saunders has no problem with the honorific, though questions how much value the extra education actually confers.

An update to a story I have been following: Retiring the Fighting Sioux nickname will cost the University of North Dakota $750,000.

An interesting new service for those who self-publish. I need to find out a lot more about how the ebook side of things works. Amazon is, itself, looking to sidestep publishers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got retweeted by a national sports writer named Greg Swaim. He wrote:

Love the hate mail from #BoiseState fans. Keep it coming, as it proves my point on your quality academics…#3 in the great state of Idaho!!

To which I responded:

@GSwaim #4 in Idaho. Lewis-Clark State College is a fine school.

To which he responded:

{my tweet} // Tweet-O-the-Day. Quality work!!

A little backstory. Boise State University is allegedly being considered for the Big 12. Though I seriously doubt it is. For all of the talk about how “it’s all about the money,” there is a degree of pride involved as well. Namely, you want to be in a conference with universities of at least some stature. It’s difficult to under-state where Boise State University stands, academically. Saying that they are #4 is actually being generous. They are fourth in a race between only four state universities. If you throw in BYU-Idaho, they’re #5. There’s also the College of Idaho, a private school, that is in a different category and so hard to compare. The top two universities in the state are the University of Idaho and Idaho State University.

Of course, when you ask people to name a university in Idaho, the first name that will typically come to mind is Boise State. BSU is the largest school in the state, but that’s not why. They are known for their football program. People may be vaguely aware of the University of Idaho (Sarah Palin went there), but almost nobody has heard of the others. This may be sad commentary on how we look at higher education, but for Boise State it actually represents an opportunity. They have the sort of publicity that $6m a year (roughly the deficit BSU’s athletic department runs) would actually have difficulty buying. Due to the publicity, and the fact that it’s a large school in the state’s largest city, they’re well-positioned to capitalize on this a way that few other schools can. If you want to go to a school with a football program worth seeing, it’s the only choice.

One of the big stumbling blocks, though, is the school’s name. Why they haven’t dropped the “State” from their name (as the former Troy State, North Texas State, and Memphis State did) I do not know. I have been told that the University of Idaho would never allow it because they want to keep BSU “in their place,” but BSU is the more popular school. On the other hand, U of I cranks out lawyers and BSU does not.

I also wonder if Boise State simply has too much invested in its name to change. The huge victories against Oklahoma and TCU in BCS bowls were under the BSU name. Do you walk away from that? If you’re a serious academic institution, yes you do. Boise State University reeks of the “State Universities” in California, second-rate institutions for the most part. The University of Boise, or even just Boise University, at least sound more similar to schools of better repute. As odd as it sounds, university names do matter.

The whole Idaho university system has actually become problematic in their desire to start up a medical school. Namely, because Idaho, Idaho State, and Boise State all could have a claim to it. Idaho is the state’s flagship university. Idaho State is the university with a focus on health care vocation training. Boise State University is in Boise, which is the only city in Idaho large enough to hold a medical school. So everybody think that they are entitled to it. And more to the point, everybody wants to make sure nobody else gets it. So the would-be medical students have to go to Utah or Washington. Or alternately, it’s all an elaborate ruse so that the state doesn’t have to foot the rather hefty bill that medical schools incur. At the very least, I doubt the state treasurer’s office is shedding any tears.

Last season, I went to go see most of the Callie Cougars home games, all of which but one they won by 40 points or more (the other they won by 27 or so). They went on to lose in the first round of the playoffs. Since the decision was more-or-less made that we were not going to be staying in Callie very long, I decided to divest my interest in the Cougars. I decided instead that I would see the Redstone Copperheads, being that I work for the district in all. Also, last year I got to see the construction on the “new” stadium and look forward to actually sitting in the stands of it. So I’d just wait for a Friday teaching job and stick around, but that never quite came. So I made a trip up today.

I didn’t do due diligence, however. Otherwise, I would have waited until next week. The Copperheads are playing Alexandria High, the #1 school in the state sitting at 8-0. The chances of winning are not very high (Redstone is 4-4). Meanwhile, the Cougars are playing St Matthew, Redstone’s hoity-toity private school that I vaguely root against. St Matthew, usually a powerhouse because they can pluck the local football talent from Redstone High with football scholarships, is having a down year. Callie is 8-0 and the #1 team in its divisions (St Matthew and Redstone are both from a division above).

So instead of seeing Callie pound the school I don’t like, I’ll be watching Redstone get pounded.

But the stadium should be cool. It’ll also hopefully give me a chance to get a Redstone Copperheads t-shirt, which they stopped selling at Walmart right about the time I decided to get one (they still carry St Matthew shirts).

Addendum: No shirt. They sold posters, but no shirts. Frustrating. Callie be St Matthew by over 50 points. Redstone lost by 12, though it was actually a close game that came down to the final minutes of the game. A minute and a half to go, Redstone had the ball in the red zone, but couldn’t convert a fourth down. Alexandria’s beefy running back then made an 85-yard run.

Fingers are pointing everywhere with Bank of America’s decision to institute a Debit Card fee. Conservatives are gleefully pointing at Walmart. Presumably, this is an effort to give pause to the (presumably liberal) supports of the law that BoA was responding to. You can make this look “all about Walmart” all you want, but Walmart’s deal with the banks was almost certainly more favorable than that of smaller vendors because Walmart commands that sort of leverage. While the bill was not flawless (more on that in a future post), it’s easier for me to avoid Big Bad Walmart (if I am so inclined) than for Walmart and Mom & Pop to avoid Visa and Mastercard.

Credit where credit is due: Apple is shifting text-messaging over to data rather than voice lines. A previous Linkluster criticized AT&T for their ridiculous new text-messaging rates and later commented “[T]he savvier users will simply transfer texting from voice to data. […] I expect Android will at some point make it all automatic.” Loathe as I am to admit it, Apple got there first.

Chicago Traders put up a sign saying “We are the 1%” Except, of course, they are not. But they identify with the 1% (which isn’t what it used to be) because they work for the 1%. Which is part of the problem with the whole 99% thing in the first place. Most of them have little in common and a lot of them hate each other.

Here’s a neat calculator where you can find out what percent (of household incomes) you are in. It turns out that last year, Clancy and I fell outside the top 10%. So I am the 90%. Time to go after the other 10%!

This is one of the things I find really irritating about NCAA realignment: According to a report, Connecticut was originally supposed to join the ACC but were blocked by neighboring Boston College, who didn’t want another New England team. I don’t really care about either school (Connecticut had apparently tried to keep BC out of the Big East for similar reasons some time before), but hate this sort of thing (looking at Florida and Florida State). The Southwest Conference demonstrated the failure of being too regional, but viewing every nearby college as a threat is simply making things less interesting for everybody else. Regional rivalries are one of the great things about college sports! The NFL and Major League Baseball take great pains to keep neighboring teams apart. That might be good for the franchises in particular (no conflict between rooting for the Angels and Dodgers, so fans can root for both and the cross-town threat is minimized) it would be much cooler if these teams were competing with one another for the division championship.

The “iPhone thieves” have pleaded no-contest.

Did Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan come from SimCity? That would be hilarious. I always used to use that hack that gave you a bunch of money to work with at the expense of a major earthquake. Back at the beginning of the game, you let off a bunch of earthquakes and get things started. Use that money to finance a *lot* of fire departments, and you come out way ahead. I don’t think that we can do something like that in the real world.

Better buy your peanut butter now, because prices are about to skyrocket.

I had a guest-post on Mindless Diversions about GraphicAudio, for those of you who might like your comic books in audio form. Here was the follow-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the household things I don’t do very much is cook. Part of it is because my repertoire is limited and mostly involves foods that Clancy does not like. Not that she is a finicky eater, just that there is a culinary mismatch. She likes all of these spices and herbs that I often can’t even taste. I like plain things and don’t really no how to do complicated things. She’s going to teach me when she has time, but she doesn’t have the time.

Did you know Spam goes bad? I thought it was like Velveeta. I had a velveeta block for a year and a half and ne’er a problem with it. Spam doesn’t even last a month even when refrigerated. The odd thing about Spam is that you have to taste several bites before you realize that it has gone bad.

I drink a lot of soft drinks and switch around from one to the next. Soft drinks in bottles go flat (even when unopened) way before cans do. Another thing I have learned. Now I have two dozen bottles of Mountain Dew that doesn’t taste particular good.

I’ve re-acquainted myself with the joys of fake crab. It’s prepared and thoroughly processed food made up to taste like crab, but my diminished tastebuds can’t really taste the difference. Since it’s already prepared, I can eat it straight out of the bag out of the fridge. It makes a great little snack.

I’ve also taken to eating large-curd cottage cheese. I’m trying to cut back on my cream cheese intake and I can go further with the cottage than the cream. Clancy has been eating a lot of cottage cheese mixed with yogurt over the past year, but she gets the fat free stuff which barely has any curd at all. It feels like unnecessary duplication to have both, but I’m looking at it like diet coke (which she drinks) compared to regular coke (which I do). Different product, in its own way.

They’ve stopped carrying my favorite processed roast beef at the local Safeway. I’ve grown spoiled on the stuff. The alternatives just taste too salty.

Things have been really hectic lately, which is why I haven’t been as regularly writing and commenting. I’m hoping that it will all be smoothed out by the end of the week.

Speaking of smooth, am I the only one who thinks those Keith Stone commercials are a hoot?

There are only a few fast food places in Callie. One of them is a KFC that is not really a KFC but was close enough. It was a KFC inside a convenience store. So I could get what I wanted and eat it. For drinks I’d have to go a counter over and pay for something from the convenience store. But it worked. Until this week. Inexplicably, they took out the dining table. This is a subject that we have talked about before on HC. I understand some places taking out places where people will just hang out. Bookstores being the frequent example. But seriously, why would a place that offers KFC not allow anyone to sit down and eat it? I’m not a former customer out of any sort of protest. I’m a former customer because I don’t always want my food to-go. I’d prefer to eat at Safeway, where at least they have a place for me to consume the food I just bought.

My wife is fond of a particular hand-soap I have purchased. I guess it smells good or something. The problem is, it’s very green. And if I am not very thorough with washing it off, it leaves my hands green. A weird sort of radioactive green. I’ll try to get a picture the next time it happens.

The weather has started turning cold. It was welcome for a day or two, then it sunk in that at some point it will stop being warm for many, many months.

My favorite jacket lost its zipper due to one too many rounds in the drier. This happened a year or so ago. Most annoyingly, I cannot for the life of me find a jacket as good as that one. I’ve bought two, but neither feel exactly right. One is too long and poofy. The other is not long enough and is too big. I’d get a smaller one of the latter, but it is really expensive. I got a good deal on it this spring because it was spring. I’d rather not wait until spring again.

Today is tax day for the procrastinators for us. Unfortunately, the Department of Education is being a big dork and our ability to get a 1098 or even find out how much was paid last year on interest on student loans is hindered. They chose october of all times to go through some sort of data integration transition, so it was unavailable. Then it came back up and said we spent nothing on student loans last year. While I’d love to believe that everything we paid last year was towards the principal, I don’t think that’s the case (we can’t check… data integration transition). So we’re left with the choice of either turning in our taxes and leaving roughly $800 on the table, or waiting for them to get their act together. Since we are due a rather substantial refund, we’re going to wait. It turns out that so long as you are due a refund, you have years to get your taxes turned in.

While loitering at the supply store, I was asked by a transient if I was a fan of the Colosse Cougars, the local professional football team. I distractedly said “sure” as I was fiddling with my phone, even though I am not a real NFL guy. Turned out he was a fan of the Colosse Cougars and started trying to start a conversation. I didn’t know much of anything, so now a transient in Arapaho thinks I am a loser. When I mentioned that I was more of a college football fan, he said “Oooh, college. Fancy you.”

I was fiddling with my phone on the ESPN website. They changed up their mobile website, and not for the better. To my disappointment, the other networks sports sites also suck.

How doctors’ pay was established. It’s notable that it was not done through market forces. This means that the normal rules of the market (ie more doctors will dilute doctor pay) do not necessarily apply. The article points out on how few people are behind the decision-making process. Some people want to make it fewer.

Kevin Smith’s quest to ruin his own career.

I know this will come as a shock, but the American Lung Association might be exaggerating the claims of what pollution does to our lungs. That being said, even if pollution doesn’t cause childhood athsma, the fact that it inflames it is not insignificant.

The case against Julian Assange.

I am skeptical, but the future of cloud computing is often discussed as the future of computing itself. Less often discussed are the implications of this. Everything we do relies on the good graces of someone else. Often free services that can go away.

If I worked in the airline industry, this would be on my wall.

The Oxford Comma Cartoon. I use the Oxford Comma, though it has been brought to my attention that it sometimes makes things more misleading than leaving it off. This is why language should have been designed by engineers. Our sentences would have all sorts of parentheses and blocks and pipes, but you would know exactly what a sentence means whenever you read it.

According to Farhad Manjoo, it’s the highest-paid doctors that are the most vulnerable to automation. It actually makes some sense, though I don’t expect to see it happen any time soon. At least as far as the Truman-Himmelreich house is concerned, she is not among the most high-paid doctors and her job is not as vulnerable to outsourcing.

For David Alexander: Pornography leads to warped standards of attractiveness.

Cold Case is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. As far as cop shows, it’s a rather ludicrous one. It exists in a world where almost nobody ever actually lies to the cops. Almost nobody asks for an attorney, and if they do, the detectives ignore the request despite the fact that they are typically interviewing middle-to-upper class people (another thing… which we will ignore at the moment) whose lawyers would be able to make hay out of it. I guess that takes care of itself, because it also exists in a world where everyone eventually confesses, though that’s hardly unusual in TVLand.

What I enjoy about the show is less the police work, though, and more the following of the victim’s life and the life of those around them. It’s a character drama with a badge, mostly (several badges, actually).

The basic premise, as the title suggests, is that it’s about a bunch of cops picking up old and dormant unsolved cases, ranging everywhere from the 1920’s to a few years ago. One of the tells that a character didn’t do it is if they have some sort of criminal record. By and large, the one who did it is the loving husband who lost his temper, the boss, or something else like that.

Almost almost never did they actually commit much of a crime after the original crime that the team is investigating. This makes the case-closing actually depressing in some respect. Half of the time, the murder was a mistake. Technically murder, but a physical struggle where the victim fell backwards or something. In the case where the guilty one was indeed a criminal, it’s typically the case that they turned themselves around after the incident in question. So, as a matter of justice, maybe it’s a good thing that they’re being put away. But it’s still a little sad for an upstanding National Guardsman or working joe to be taken away long after it might have done society itself any good.

One time they took away a guy who killed his uppity housewife fifty years after the crime occurred. The guy had Alzheimers and barely remembered any of it anyway. Another case - one of those of a physical tussle gone awry - the guy lived his entire life mourning his dead wife until the police take him away.

It’s hard to take a whole lot of satisfaction in that.

A couple of things to file away next time someone talks about how the banks are foreclosing people out of sheer cruelty when they could actually lose less money with refinancing. If that were true, in all likelihood banks would be doing it. The problem is that refinancing simply kicks the can down the curb, as often as not, and arguably ends up worse for the borrower. At the end of the day, the problem is that somebody is sitting on a house that they cannot afford. Maybe because they bought too much house (maybe they were encouraged to by the lender), maybe because they lost their job. But you can’t make that problem just go away.

Save a life, chip a tooth, end up in court.

I wish I’d seen this video when I was in grade school. The delineation of continents drove me crazy even then.

Americans love chain stores.

The franchise novelists. How James Patterson is making a fortune simply attaching his name to novels. Tom Clancy is known for it as well. It’s a good gig, if you can get it! Generally speaking, if you see an apostrophe-s after the name, they didn’t didn’t write it. If it’s Red October, it’ll say Tom Clancy. If it’s Netforce, it’ll say Tom Clancy’s.

Most teachers would exchange job security for salary increases.

Critics of education reform hate standardized tests (though frequently cite them when they can as proof that charter schools don’t do any good). But even if you look at the metrics we’re “supposed to be” looking at, charter schools do well, according to one report.

Sweden has the most progressive tax system and some of the worst wealth inequality. This is one of the reason I am unimpressed when some wealthy dude talks about how we need to raise taxes on the wealthy. They’ve already made their money. That doesn’t mean that progressive taxation isn’t a good idea. Merely that the spokesman’s moral authority can be lost.

Is the college admissions process as we know it about to end? I’m rather skeptical. There are too many intangibles involve and reality has a tendency to sometimes intrude. A college selection program I played in the 90’s suggested a bunch of expensive private schools for me. I would have been miserable. My parents wouldn’t have sent me there to begin with. And, of course, for some the problem is and remains that “not enough people are going to college.” Lastly, colleges are punishing families for being financially responsible.

I got an assignment at Rushmore elementary yesterday. Rushmore is far and away the best school in Redstone. The test scores say as much, but even before I saw them I singled out that school as having an absurdly positively atmosphere. I was glad to get the assignment because I had feared that I had been blackballed there after this whole incident (which, by the way, actually worked out in my favor: I got paid for one 1.5 days because of a mistake on their part).

It was my third straight assignment for the third grade, oddly enough.

One of the girls was 4′8″. In the third grade. I wonder if the high school girl’s basketball coach already knows her name. Speaking of which, last year I had a middle school student whose gender I was uncomfortably unsure of until I saw that she was on the girl’s basketball team. She was approaching 6′0″. As for Miss 54″, she commented that her father and brothers were “very tall” so I doubt that it’s just an odd growth spurt. She also didn’t seem like the kind of kid to be held back unless she was close to the borderline.

With the exception of a couple, every time I teach below the 5th grade, I am informed that I am a very tall individual and/or I have very large feet. This time I was informed that I was a very tall individual. One of the boys was bragging to another of the boys that at least they came up to my beltline.

I finally met Mrs. Truman. For those of you who do not recall, my actual last name is less common than “Truman” and so it’s odd to have someone with my same last name. And any time I teach at the middle school, I am asked if there is any relation. This time I made a point of stopping by to introduce myself. I know that she knew of my existence because she accidentally got my Valentine’s Day bag when I left it behind. I was… kind of disappointed in her, actually. She had very dyed and very dried hair. She was very friendly to me and we had a laugh about the event of the previous year, but given all of the raves I’d heard about her, I figured she would remind me of a third grade teacher I liked rather than the one that I hated.

I commented that any time I am asked about her among middle school kids I am told that she is/was “totally awesome” and that I might have benefited from the association. She appreciated the compliment and said that it would probably be different in high school, though, because her husband is a parole officer and “a lot of kids at Redstone High School have to deal with him.”

With the exception of the last name and the Valentine’s Day incident, I wouldn’t have expected her to know anything about me, but she actually knew that I am that guy that drives out all the way from Callie. The principal stopped by and said hello and asked if I was still making that drive. That seems to be my role. The guy who makes that really long drive. It also makes me wonder if, while I haven’t been blacklisted, they still think of me as iffy because of the whole incident over six months ago. He was nice, though.

The principal is very popular. Which is not surprising, since he either has the plum job or is actually so good that Rushmore’s impressiveness is attributable to him. I guess I have been watching too many crime shows, because when I think of a popular male principal, a part of my mind thinks that we’re going to discover that he’s kept a 15 year old girl chained up in his basement for five years or something equally harrowing.

The day was largely uneventful. Getting third graders to be quiet is a challenge. At the bad schools, it’s to get them to stop talking to one another. The only blow-up we had today was actually over academics. They all swore that the answer key was wrong about something and just blew up about it, requiring the other third grade teacher to come over.

The thing I’ve learned about elementary school kids is that they love routine - at least in school. They are very good at pointing out if you are doing anything that is not according to the routine and The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. No matter how minor.

Teachers have cooler gadgets than I was in school. We had blackboards and later overhead projectors. They have “smartboards.”

Rushmore used to be an “open classroom” environment. This was a hippie venture where they didn’t have separate rooms for everybody but instead taught everything in a wide open area with different sections. This adventure did not last long. But you can see the layout is not that of a typical school. The big open area in the middle still exists and the classrooms shuffled off to the side. They added new classrooms over the summer, though, so it almost looks traditional, though the layout still looks odd. It feels like somebody emptied out a department store and put in a school.

For all of the praises I sing to the school, it’s actually most known for a student-on-student shooting that happened there a long time back.

I really, really meant to take some pictures of the anti-bullying and positive mental attitude posters in the classroom. One of them had a picture of Alice (from the Brady Bunch) and ALF, saying that you want to be like the former but not like the latter. Putting aside that these kids probably don’t know who Alice and ALF are, who wouldn’t rather be ALF? Almost all of the anti-bullying stuff puts the onus on the bullied to extricate himself from the situation or “talk it out.” No surprise there, but one of the posters involving frogs managed to sum up the attitude very neatly.

Kay Steiger sounds off the warning bells with regard to online college:

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, a new study confirms some earlier findings about the efficacy of online learning in two-year colleges. The study, conduced by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, looked at more than 50,000 students in Washington state’s community or technical college system. What they found was that students who load up on online classes, especially early in their higher education careers, are less likely to finish their degrees. This is worrisome, especially because, as CCRC notes in its report, the number of students taking online courses is only increasing.

Other commentary has pointed out that online learning requires a basic degree of computer know-how that a lot of people don’t have and that online learning requires a level of discipline that traditional learning doesn’t. These are both very valid points and two of the three main reasons why online education will never become a norm (even as computer know-how increases). But there is something else at work, which Steiger points out: online students are not the same as physical students in terms of student profiles.

The Atlantic has been raising the banner of the non-traditional student. This is part of the “problem,” if you view it as such. Non-traditional students returning to school may be a good thing, but they’re often going to be the most marginal students. Not because they’re lazy or dumb, but because they have a lot of other things going on. That’s precisely what attracts them to the flexibility of online learning in the first place. This is also one of the reasons that for-profit universities have such abysmal graduation rates. They cater to precisely these students.

When we talk about increasing college enrollment, this is one of the things that we have to be looking at. We’d partially be bringing into the fold a lot of people who are not, at present, in a great position to do well in school. It may be worth bringing them into the fold anyway! But we have to accept that one of the costs of this is going to be higher drop-out rates and at least some students potentially hurt along the way with debt but no degree. Unless we’re going to start paying people to go to college, we have to factor this into the equation.

This is something that brick-and-mortar universities themselves often look at. One university near where I live is trying like hell to make the transition away from being a commuter school that provides the opportunity for a great education to people without a lot of options in favor of being a more traditional university. Why? Because a lot of these students are failing out. This hurts the university’s profile by making it look like a school that is failing. But by changing the student body to a more traditional one, the hope is that the numbers will improve and the university will look better. The only sacrifice required is shuffling off the “wrong” people to schools that are less good.

And on a personal level, I grit my teeth when I hear people talking about how they want their kids to “work their way through college.” Presumably so that they won’t take it for granted. There may be something to this, though in my experience working while going to college is more often going to be a recipe for failure. A working student serves two masters. My ex-girlfriend, an honors student in high school, failed miserably in college due in no small part to the fact that she was working at a pet store the whole time. Could she have done both if she were more disciplined? Sure. But that’s the kind of disciplined student you don’t have to worry about in the first place. Meanwhile, my own GPA fell considerably when I started working while attending. It’s a serious distraction. Some people have no choice. But putting kids in that situation for the sake of making a point or thinking it will lead to better outcomes is mistaken.