We bought a new Subaru Forester in late 2010. It had been a long time coming. My Ford Escort was increasingly showing its age, among other things failing to start in really cold weather. For a couple months, we had three cars. I kept the Escort parked out front and used it for relatively short trips. It was handy. It also saved gas because it got roughly 27-33 miles to the gallon instead of the Forester’s 20-25.

It was a nice arrangement and I would have kept driving it until it stopped running. I still see it being driven around town by its new owner, so approaching two years later, it’s still going.

I sold it for a very small sum. The main reason I did was that I didn’t want the expense of insurance and registration. My father-in-law is about to sell one of his cars for the same reason.

The thought occurs to me that one minor thing we might be able to do to encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient vehicles is to change the way that we do auto insurance (and maybe registration). There isn’t much good reason, in my mind, that we’re charged per-car when we have more cars than drivers. The amount of road time with two people and one car is bound to make a difference than two people and two cars, but with more cars than drivers, one car is typically going to be on the sidelines at any given time. You might have to worry about them loaning the car out, but that’s really about it.

A lot of auto insurance is guesswork. There are factors we let them use and don’t let them use, but one of the biggest (how many miles we drive) is on the honor system and almost nobody I knows is particularly honorable. Maybe my insurance company is unique, but they could police this sort of thing more than they do. For whatever reason, it isn’t that big of a priority. There are estimates of who is driving which car more frequently, but these are just estimates and that doesn’t change by focusing more on the driver than the car.

Anyhow, there are reasons why going per-driver rather than per-car would be a good idea, environmentally speaking: it would encourage people to have lighter vehicles. The main reason we went with a crossover this time around was that sometimes we need to cargo/family space. Our next vehicle may be even larger. Most of the time, we don’t need this. But when we do, it’s good to have around. There would be real advantages to having an Escort sitting out front for trips that don’t matter much. Paying the extra insurance, however, complicates that. For no really good reason.

I consider Smart cars to be neat. I don’t think I’ll ever do the motorcycle thing, but I am just as happy in a tiny little car as a big one. But I can’t do the tiny little car, really, even for short trips by myself, because I need a family vehicle, I need cargo space, and I’m not going to pay the extra insurance on the same amount of driving. If you want me to drive a small car, you ought not penalize me for also having a larger one when I need it.

The CW has a new Green Arrow series coming out. I was planning on watching it anyway, but the trailer makes it a priority.

To add to this, they’ve apparently slated Huntress to be a guest star, which could be really good or really bad.

My only complaint is that they are apparently dropping the “Green” from Green Arrow’s name, going with just Arrow. I knew the name of the show, but was hoping it will still be the full name in the series. Maybe it will develop into that. The reason that this matters is that it is indicative of a long-standing problem with DC and their failure to cross-promote their properties. At a time when Batman movies are lighting up to top grossing films charts, the comics are (temporarily) killing off Bruce Wayne. They release a Birds of Prey series, only to give it virtually nothing in common with the comic books.

This isn’t about geek adherence. This is about the fact that they have comic books to sell and they are having a lot of trouble doing it. Advertising is usually quite expensive, but Warner Bros is particularly well positioned to remind people, for one second before every movie, that “Hey, if you like Batman, check out the comic book available at comic stores and bookstores today.” Of course, for this to work, someone has to be able to pick up the comic and not have Bruce Wayne being dead in the middle of some elongated, tortuous storyline. While it would be a mistake to reboot Green Arrow in light of the TV show, it would still be helpful if they had the same name.

Maybe they will do a better job of communicating all of this than I think. History indicates otherwise.

Dominic Tierney has an awesome look at the UK’s relationship with its flag. It’s also an issue over here, though not with the flag itself, how to reconcile the more unsavory aspects of our past with a sense of national unity and purpose. Some attempts are comically bad. DC Comics had a two-part series of their Uncle Sam character which essentially said “America is putrid and terrible and it exists on blood and treachery” and its attempt at reconciliation and patriotism is “but it doesn’t have to be this terrible going forward.” Here’s another Atlantic piece on the decline of the Confederate Flag.

Michael Moynihan asks why so many tour guides make excuses for dictators. My mother reads travel magazines and it’s interesting to read the same guy who called George W. Bush a tyrant explain that Hugo Chavez is misunderstood. There is some serious psychology at work here.

How call can buildings get? There is apparently a council looking at such things.

Arguably, the question is not whether God exists, but whether society is better for it believing He does.

Who is to blame for student debt? The upper middle class.

Lynn Beisner wishes her mother had aborted her. Michael Brendand Dougherty wishes his mother had had a man in her life.

Our fertility has apparently dropped below that of France. Not to get too deep into That Subject, but I wonder if this is related to the dramatic decline in illegal immigrations,among our more procreative demographics?

Freedom requires norms.

Japan’s idol singers are not allowed to date. I actually remember Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas complaining about this. He had a serious girlfriend (now his wife) when he rose to stardom and everyone kept trying to get him to keep it under wraps (have her make entrances ten feet behind him, etc.).

More surprising to me than the rise of Android is the fall of Symbian. From market-leader to non-entity in three years. That takes effort.

Cats, apparently, are mean.

Someone who went to my high school has gotten a bit of notoriety on the Internet yet. It’s probably not big enough that you’ve heard of him - I’m not sure I would have if it weren’t making the rounds with alums. The dude basically ran a somewhat coordinated scam or a practical joke (probably the former) of sorts and got caught. He basically gamed social media and celebrity gossip into the illusion of celebrity. He’s not commenting, so I’m not sure if it was all to get laid (”Yeah, I’m kind of a big deal. Google me, baby.”) or to actually become the actor he wants to be. (If you know who I am talking about, congratulations on knowing where I am from, please don’t spill.)

One of the downsides to going to a school of 4,000 is that as far as I know, I don’t know him. This happens whenever someone from my school makes it big. Sometimes I will randomly run into someone who went to my school and we will have existed in such different orbits that they might as well have gone to school half a country away. The picture actually does look a big familiar, but in a pretty generic sort of way. So I’m pretty sure our paths never crossed.

One guy I went to school with, but didn’t meet until significantly later, went on to become a conservative activist for prison reform (the idea being that the fiscally prudent thing to do is not to house and feed people in prison we don’t have to). I knew some jocks, but not the one who had the NFL career who graduated with my class. My brothers knew his brother, who also played in the NFL.

There is also Congressman Murali, whose campaign is the only one I have donated to up to now. I didn’t support him because he went to my school (well before I did), though his being a product in the community played a bit of a role because a lot of people smoke very highly of him. Mostly, though, I wanted to see his opponent go down.

In roughly one in five property seizures, the IRS does not follow the law.

Kaid Benfield argues that high-density sprawl is still sprawl. Here is where I think the problem with his argument lies: The wide open spaces surrounding the dense communities may not stay wide open very long. The pattern back home is: first the houses, then the businesses, then the employers.

Also, since I have been known to talk up businesses moving to the suburbs rather than people moving back to the city, intellectual integrity requires I link to counterexamples. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this about Chicago. To be honest, I don’t actually like a lot of these suburban business parks. Employers in the suburbs can make a lot of sense, but it shouldn’t take 10 minutes to drive through the campus to your parking spot. Alan Ehrenhalt has a book about reurbanization wherein he talks about Chicago, but apparently lacks much data support for his “great inversion” theory.

This has always been a bigger deal for Web than for me, but since he has sort of moved on, a new study suggests that HFCS is actually no worse than sugar.

China’s cities are awesome, yet awful. While I mention China, here’s more stuff on their ghost cities.

Brazil’s cell infrastructure may be collapsing under its own weight.

A look at where the rich and super-rich get their income. Nothing surprising, though I would like more detail on the “other” category.

Our odd college funding system has some Cal State students refusing to accept in-state students.

London Mayor Boris Johnson wants to know how many paedophiles can there be? More about men, kids, and airplanes.

I am looking at getting some more Bluetooth earpieces. I am looking for ones that fit very specific criteria. The model I have is one of the few affordable ones that can do it, but it’s hard to find because it was a free magazine give-away for Car and Driver a while back. Anyway, I found some! Only $19.95! But $12 for shipping. So, add three more, still $12 for shipping. Add one more to round it out to five, and shipping is… $600. I kid you not. Try it.

Add one more, shipping is $16.95.

Well, having shipping for five cost $600 is one way of making $17 shipping seem awfully cheap.

On Friday, a hammer fell:

The nine-member jury sided almost entirely with Apple Inc. in its patent dispute case with Samsung Electronics Co., awarding Apple nearly $1.05 billion in a “sweeping victory” over claims that the Korean electronics maker copied the designs of its iPhone smartphone and iPad tablet. {…}

The damages total was at first $1.051 billion, but that became a tentative number after Judge Koh asked the jury to review two “inconsistencies” in the award, totaling about $2.4 million. After deliberating, the jury came back and gave a new total of $1,049, 393,540 — or nearly $1.05 billion. {…}

Apple and Samsung will return to Judge Koh’s courtroom next month to argue over Apple’s request for an injunction to stop the infringing products from being sold. Mitby said it’s likely Samsung will appeal to the Federal Circuit, the Washington, D.C.-based appeals court that hears patent-related appeals. “The Federal Circuit has a history of scaling back big damages awards, which may spell trouble for Apple’s $1 billion in past damages,” he said. “However, on the core issues of infringement and validity, the Federal Circuit is less likely to reverse. So even if Samsung is able to reduce the monetary award, the jury’s decision spells trouble for the future of Samsung’s product line – which is an even bigger financial issue for Samsung.”

Forbes is all over this, coming down mostly but not entirely against the verdict.

I myself am pretty irritated with, in ascending order, Samsung, Apple, and patent law more generally. I am rather horrified by the verdict and what it will mean for those of us that simply don’t want Apple products but also don’t want products that can’t do anything around a minefield of patents.

I am irritated with Samsung because they were the most egregious of the copycats. I own a Samsung phone, though it’s a notably different design and I almost immediately went to work making its interface less like the iPhone’s and more like the SPB interface I am more accustomed to. I don’t want these companies just trying to do their best Apple impersonation. I also don’t want the patent minefield. I mean, looking over at the patent list, most of their inclusions strike me as unnecessary. However, the substitute gestures I can think of may all be patented by somebody else. We shouldn’t have a lack of future competitors on the basis of a scarcity of not-yet-patented features.

I am irritated with Apple because I fear that their plan is to go “thermonuclear” with the patents. Samsung uses some Microsoft patents, but they quietly signed a deal with comparatively little fanfare. It’s not clear to me that, on reasonable terms, Apple couldn’t have cajoled them into the same. I don’t think they want to. Mostly, though, my disdain for Apple is that this ruling makes it harder to “live and let live.” I don’t want an iPhone. The things that drive me to Android are the things that differentiate it from the iPhone. But for others, the iPhone is perfect. So they get the iPhone, I get what I want, and it all works out. That becomes harder when Apple is trying to prevent me from getting the phone that I want.

And, of course, patent law. Though I consider the lifted patents to be unnecessary for the function of a good device, I also don’t see anything that should be patentable. Patents and intellectual property occur for the promotion of progress in science and the useful arts. It quite simply isn’t possible to look at Apple and say that they were not reasonably rewarded for their innovations. What if it had been a little company? Well, Dropbox comes up with a neat model before Google swoops in and uses its standing to offer a better deal with Google Drive. That’s unfortunate for Dropbox, but Dropbox having come up with the idea should not mean that Dropbox is the only one that should be able to have a competent product. That’s not in the best interest of the general public.

So what next? Groklaw thinks that it could be reversed and has some serious issues with the jury (though Groklaw is not a neutral observer). What has me particularly concerned is speculation along these lines:

What happens now to Android as a whole is going to be very interesting. While the appeals process for this case may go on for some time, there will be a chilling effect on other manufacturers, who will be watching the cost of licensing the patents on the ‘free’ Android OS with trepidation. Expect Apple to be drafting invoices in the very near future. But will the manufacturers who just want a modern smartphone OS turn away from the uncertainty in Android? Will they want a solution that is fully licensed, covers all the patents, and will let them stand out in the marketplace? If so, Microsoft are going to welcome them with open arms.

I used Windows Mobile for several years. The thing is that Windows Mobile’s natural successor is Android while, interface to the contrary, WinPho is primarily ripping off the iPhone model. It’s also significantly behind Android in development. If I wanted an iPhone, I’d get an iPhone. Even despite it’s numerous improvements, I would still prefer an updated WinMo over Android. Now there is concern that I will end up with neither and end up going right back to Microsoft pretending to be Apple.

Microsoft and Mayor Bloomberg are teaming up to create the surveillance network in Person of Interest.

A look at Newark’s attempts to help ex-cons get back on their feet. Texas (of all states) is taking a second look at incarceration.

Apparently, The Champ is the saddest movie in the world. Or, at least, it’s used in experiments on sadness to get people all teary (or not).

Blatant partisanship, but I can’t resist: The Retina MacBook Pro is apparently a nightmare to try to repair. Truth be told, though, don’t we more or less replace laptops when they die? Related: David Carnoy regrets buying an iMac because, even though it’s great, it ceases being great when something goes wrong.

According to Charles Lane of the Washington Post, the money we’re spending on clean energy is being wasted.

London is working on better handicap-accessible cabs that we can’t have over here… because of the ADA.

Apparently, while you’re reading your ebook, it’s also reading you. My inability to get upset at things like this separates me from a lot of people I know. I’m mostly interested in how they can use this information for our mutual benefit (ie sell me stuff I might want). I think stuff like this is great.

Bakadesuyo: Having committed murder, what do you do next?

Advertisers apparently had to convince us that we smell bad.

A little bit back I commented on teacher sex with students and suggested that, in the case of inverse genders the man would not get off as lightly as many of the women. Well, here is a counterexample:

A former North Texas high school teacher was convicted Friday and sentenced to five years in prison for having sex with five 18-year-old students at her home.

The Tarrant County jury decided on the sentence for Brittni Nicole Colleps, 28, of Arlington after nearly three hours of deliberation. It took jurors less than an hour to find her guilty earlier in the day of 16 counts of having an inappropriate relationship between a student and teacher. The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison per count.

The former Kennedale High School English teacher had sex with the students at her home over two months in 2011, authorities said.

Colleps is married and has three children. She turned herself in after a cellphone video of one encounter that involved multiple students emerged. That video was shown a trial.

Which I guess just goes to show, we might take women having sex more lightly than men, or maybe not, but definitely not freaky sex. Probably best not to have five partners, but if you do, not all at once. Eighteen or no.

Google’s self-driving cars have logged in 300,000 miles without a single accident (that we can blame on the computers).

Obama has actually been better on energy policy than I would have guessed. The two exceptions are the off-shore drilling moratorium and coal.

I don’t know what’s more encouraging, getting closer to effective male birth control, or a conversation that follows that doesn’t involve a bunch of people sneering about how men have no interest in such things.

“Fully 98.3 percent of job gains among those with at least a bachelor’s were realized by those with advanced degrees – again, a small fraction of the overall population.”

Another link on a familiar Hit Coffee subject: Cohabitation does not improve likelihood of marital success.

I find an article about how the academy discriminates against conservative would-be professors to be uninteresting because it falls in “no, duh” territory (especially in social psychology, delved into here), but I found the counterpoint interesting: “Just because they say they would discriminate doesn’t mean they actually would.”

The thing about these “cut the cord” (cancel cable) articles is they all act like they are righteously retaliating against greedy providers. With the obvious exception of illegal downloading, who exactly do they think is giving them the means to do so? One way or another, they’re going to get their money. Or we’re going to stop getting content.

Smithsonian.com has an interesting look on the history of pink and blue and their association with masculinity and femininity.

I’ve frequently used Portland as an example of a self-styled “creative class” city that didn’t pan out. I may have to take that back.

Ugh, in addition to the missing posts from Friday and Tuesday, this was supposed to go up on both sites at the same time and for some reason didn’t go up on this one. So, written yesterday…:

A few months ago, Clancy gave 1-year (or so) notice at work (I may write more on this at some point). We will be leaving next summer. We don’t know what comes next. We will also be dealing with a little one at around this time. Uncertainty abounds.

Today another wrench was thrown into everything. As a good faith gesture, we’d let our landlords know that we would be leaving next summer. Today they informed us that they want us out in April, three or four months before we plan to leave Callie.

So now we have to figure out what to do. Most likely, we put our stuff in storage and live thin for that period. Well, as thin as you can with a little one. I can’t imagine that we will want to actually pack/unpack twice. Fortunately, there is a storage place two blocks away. But it’s a suboptimal arrangement in so many ways. Among other things, the rental market around here is terrible.

The other option is that Clancy leaves sooner than announced. She will be going on maternity leave when the peanut is born and that will last twelve weeks. Coming back for a couple months after and then leaving again isn’t optimal (if her employer goes for it), and I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of us that wanted her out of that job as soon as possible, but nine months of unemployment is a lot to shoulder.

We have some money saved up, but per Paragraph #1 we are looking at some real financial uncertainty in the days that lay ahead. Unpaid maternity leave followed by a couple months in between jobs and what may be a rigid employment schedule if everything goes right.

Basically, she is looking at going through another fellowship, which eliminates the possibility of just finding a new job and moving there. The fellowship may or may not happen, but we can’t plan over it. So taking this opportunity to just leave means a financial strain or a foregone opportunity.

The other vague possibility is a return to the southwest and the Indian reservation she worked on before. She loved it there and they loved her. We’d considered moving down there for the indefinite future, but they’re changing the job description away from what she wants to do (which is, in essence, exactly what happened in Arapaho). It could serve as a holdover, with our stuff in storage back in Callie.

I haven’t seen Clancy in about four days due to her call schedule and a constant influx of patients, though she is due home tonight. So it’ll be great that our first conversation is going to be “What the crap are we going to do?!” And, of course, the more we talk about it, the less we’re spending on more pleasant topics and the less time she has to work on the notes and charts that have been accumulating during her work rally.

Also, the in-laws arrive late tomorrow.

Sorry for the lack of posting today and Friday. I need to stop trying to post from my phone. It never seems to go right.

Longtime readers of mine know that I am not particular concerned with the representation inequalities of the US Senate. One of the weak spots with it, though, are the great plains. The confluence of interests creates a degree of solidarity among its representatives that does not exist as much among the lowpop states that are separated by mountains, national parks, and culture. The population centers of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and (to a lesser extent) Kansas are all along a single freeway. There are some exceptions, like Wichita and Rapid City, but it’s really quite notable. They are also farming states with a lot of travel between them. To a much greater extent than Idaho and Montana (or even Eastern Idaho vs Northern Idaho), what’s good for South Dakota is good for North Dakota, and vice-versa.

There are a lot of oddities in how the states were drawn. There was a lot of chance involved (the border between Montana and Idaho was the product of a disgruntled judge). In some of them, there’s the question of what exactly they were supposed to do. Like Idaho, Nevada probably shouldn’t be a state because you have two cities more economically tied to their California brethren than one another, and a lot of open space. There’s no easy answer there. Combining Wyoming with Colorado or Montana would have been problematic, so what the heck are you going to do with Wyoming? Montana is kind of a mishmash of places, a confederation of small cities and country that create their own balance (assisted by the fact that the largest city is sort of removed from all of the others).

The Dakotas, however, were an unforced error. Combining them would have left a state that would have remained reasonably governable, and the separation of them left four senate seats where two might have been more appropriate. It would be large, but not too large. North Dakota and South Dakota each are population-centric in Fargo and Sioux Falls respectively, which is often problematic (having the capital removed helps, though, and SD does have Rapid City) and having the two of them live under the same tent, the same way that Montana balances its larger (small) cities with others, strikes me as beneficial.

We also might be looking at Kansas and Nebraska for potential consolidation, though the population imbalance might be a problem. I consider this less of a problem for the Dakotas. Though South Dakota is more populated by 140k or so, it is also the more geographically diverse and therefore might be less likely to vote as a single unit in the same way that Kansas might.

Note: I could be way off on this one. I sort of feel the same way about some of those northeastern statelets and have been told, by more than one person, that they couldn’t possibly live together under a single tent. They’ve got a lot of history under their belt. So, too, do the Dakotas, which would make a merger rather difficult.

Aurora killer James Holmes’ psychiatrist did what she was supposed to in informing the university of his problems. Someone who seems to know what she is talking about explains what’s involved in that decision.

As the US kicks derriere in the Olympics on the women’s side, a lot of people are quick to credit Title IX. Not so fast, says Rachael Larimore. While I think that some are inclined to give Title IX too much credit, she doesn’t give it enough. Title IX was a key component in a whole change of attitude in women and athletics.

State and local governments were hit hard by the recession. Never fear, they’re coming back.

Why the facts should kill High-Speed Rail in California, and why engineers are turning against it.

Spirit Airlines apparently screwed up big-time, and Motley Fool explains why this is a problem with their very business model. I’m not sure. I think there might be a place for an airline if money is more important than time and the risk of great inconvenience. United accidentally killed a dog, which is a pretty big problem for a premier airline.

Though global carbon-dioxide emissions increased around the world, they are down in the US. Not just that, but they fell here more than anywhere else. It also appears that the planet may be absorbing more of the carbon than expected.

Evidently, energy company Anadarko thinks that Barack Obama is God. (h/t Mr. Blue)

Twenty pictures of scientists celebrating the landing of Curiosity.

Some looks at foreign leaders: India’s anti-graft tsar and Japan’s hawkish governor.

The government first told the makers of Buckyballs that they needed to put a warning on their product that they are only for children 14 and over. Upon realizing that nobody pays attention to the warnings, they want them banned outright?

Maryland passed a law finding owners of pitbulls liable for the first bite. This was declared problematic by singling out pitbulls. So now, maybe all dogs.

As long-time readers of Hit Coffee know, one of my three crackpot beliefs is that Peak Oil is, if not a myth, not likely to occur in our lifetime. So I have to link to things that support this belief.

Could the strengthening Canadian dollar improve our leverage in auto manufacturing negotiations?

Republican VP pick Paul Ryan is apparently catching some flack for his attire. Namely, that it doesn’t fit. Jennifer Rubin defends him. I think this is a pretty silly thing to be talking about it, btu since we are, while on the campaign trail there’s nothing wrong with ordinary clothes (and I sympathize as someone who has trouble finding good-fitting clothes), though as Vice President we’ll need to get a tailor involved.

A woman in Virginia was fined thousands of dollars for throwing a birthday party for the 10 year old of a neighbor (among other things). A woman in Pennsylvania was fined for feeding poor kids.

My last year in Colosse, my car was broken into at a very inopportune time where there was much of value inside of it. It was enough that I would actually call the police (much to their dismay at being bothered with $3000 worth of stolen property). The only problem was that I couldn’t find the police department’s phone number on their website. I mean, I looked and looked and it wasn’t there. I didn’t want to call 911 since it wasn’t an emergency, but I was getting really frustrated (and irritated at myself for having thrown away my old fashioned phone directory. While they couldn’t be bothered to list their regular phone line, they did have, on every single page, a hotline to call in the event of a hate crime. Even “Call 911 for emergencies” wasn’t on every single page.

I was reminded of this when I came to a realization about Law & Order. For those of you that don’t know, there are currently three variations of the show. The flagship program follows a murder investigation, Criminal Intent follows a high-profile murder investigation, and Special Victims Unit follows typically anti-woman crimes or anti-kid. The realization I came to is that for the first two shows, which investigate murders, there are two detectives on each case. Whether it’s some fellow that was in the wrong place at the wrong time or the Mayor’s kid, you got two detectives. Meanwhile, the attempted abduction of a child on SVU gets four detectives.

Lesson: If you’re going to attempt to abduct a kid, you’re better off killing them. That way you’ll only have two detectives on your trail.

Physician: End The ‘War On Pubic Hair’

Family physician Emily Gibson made headlines recently for her public assertion that modern women should shy away from the practice of bikini waxing – which she referred to as the “war on pubic hair” – as the practice increases risk of various infections.

“The amount of time, energy, money and emotion both genders spend on abolishing hair from their genitals is astronomical,” said Gibson in an article on KevinMD.com. “The genital hair removal industry, including medical professionals who advertise their specialty services to those seeking the ‘clean and bare’ look, is exponentially growing.”

For reasons that are rather dumb (though less dumb than lighting up poison and breathing in the smoke), I don’t like generic cigarette lighters. I don’t get those uber-nice refillable ones, but I like some sort of design. Even goofy designs are okay, as long as they are goofy in the right way. I have one that says “FREEDOM” with the letters displaying a flaggish design. Back home, I got one with the local NFL team’s logo. They cost about $1.79, a regular lighter is about a $1.19, and having something is worth sixty cents to me. (Forgetting that I can get seven or so for $1.99 at Walmart, which I do for backup purposes).

I guess fewer are going the route that I do, because the selection of lighters has dwindled. It used to be I could find something at virtually any convenience store I shopped in. The designs have gotten less worthwhile (the mainstay are astrology signs, which don’t capture my attention). A whole lot of them are… well, feminine. I’ll go ahead and use my Walmart ones first.

Now, at Walmart, in addition to the 7-for-$2, they also have sets of two with designs on them. Here is the odd thing, though: they’re combinations with one masculine design (say, an eagle over the flag) and one feminine one (a flower). Always. Why would they do that? Except for households with two smokers, it’s guaranteed that one is going to be a less interesting design. Very curious marketing-packaging-whatever.

Now, the most basic design of a lighter, the one you probably think of when you think of a basic lighter with the colored translucent body and steel head… those are actually utterly junk, if you’ve never purchased one. I guess they’re okay for non-smoker purposes, but with any sort of wind they go bad. And they typically die before you’ve used all the fluid. Some of the upper-enders aren’t good, either. The more mechanical one of those things is, the more likely something is to go wrong. You really just want a wheel and a lever and that’s it. Except you want it to work more consistently than it does on the default lighter.

The latest trend is that the lighters look like guns. Not unlike the lighters used for some candles in design, but in cosmetics they look even more like guns. They also have monster-size ones that would take up an entire pocket. I don’t need it to be that interesting looking. Just give me an eagle and a flag and I am good to go.

Last week, they picked up the house next door and moved it a block over. The next step is to run a street through it. While they’re at it, they tore up the street behind us to repave it. Also, eighteen months or so they started a construction project on the school across the way and they still haven’t finished it. The result? Dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. Everywhere. Since we have to keep our windows open for circulation, we have dirt in the sink. There’s dirt all over the computer room. Dirt, dirt, dirt.

To add to this, Arapaho has been plagued with fires lately. Nothing around where we live, but it’s enough that our fire department has been mobilized for the last month or so, driving all over the state to lend a hand. It’s also enough that there are all sorts of fire bans, including an outdoor smoking ban. I tried to honor it, until I saw cops ignoring it. When smoking is banned indoors, people smoke outdoors.

Today was a smoky day. I have no idea where the fire is, but there were firefighters all around the supply store where I went to watch the sky go from blue-silver, to silver, to gray, to orange. The firepeeps were also ignoring the smoking ban.

The sky has shifted to a very light orange, which is having a rather surreal affect on our view. The construction crews are gone for the night, which is nice not only for the dirt but also the noise. At least, unlike when they were gutting the basement last week, it hasn’t caused the house to shake (our dog’s reaction to the shaking house to the right).

Anyhow! For your listening enjoyment, Steve Earle’s “Ashes to Ashes.” A great song, if you’ve never heard it. Not remarkably country, if you are averse to country.

Yahoo recently hired a pregnant woman to be their new CEO. This is generating a fair amount of discussion on the subject. The best so far is from Forbes.

[Marissa Mayer]’s a CEO and can give herself work-from-home days if she needs to. She can hire a nanny, a nurse, a courier, a cook. She can set her company policy so that infants are allowed in the workplace (which has benefits like higher morale in the office!). Her hot-ass husband is a venture capitalist with a flexible schedule who can take the kid to doctor appointments and whatnot.

You know who’s not a CEO? Almost everyone else. Marissa Mayer is an outlier, and while her actions may make splashy headlines, her situation doesn’t apply to the rest of us. […]

Things have improved immensely since the early ‘70s for college-educated women like me: In 1971, 27% of working women with B.A.s were able to take paid maternity leave; by 2006, that figure was 66%.

For women whose education topped out at high school, though, 16% had paid maternity leave in 1971. And these days? Why, would you look at that: The number hasn’t improved at all.

The vast majority of women going back to work after two weeks have nothing in common with Marissa Mayer. They’re dragging their weary butts back to work, and wrapping up their boobs because there’s no place to pump at work. They’re getting paid by the hour.

Clancy has quite a bit of vacation and sick leave saved up, so we’re not going to be taking as much of a financial hit as a lot of people do when it comes to maternity leave. Even so, it’d be nice if Clancy had been able to take her vacation days and get some time to take care of the baby after it is born. A lot of other countries apparently manage this, but not ours.

Having said that, there are some real concerns that would come along with it. The Forbes author gives an anecdote about how she declined to take advantage of something she was legally entitled to. Similarly, I know a pregnant woman who is under a degree of pressure not to take advantage of her due maternity leave. She talked of taking eight weeks of leave, and the response was along the lines of “We’ll see.” She was legally entitled to it, but an uncooperative employer can make life difficult for you if you take advantage of it. And if you force, force, force it upon them and go after them for anything that merely sniffs like a punitive response, you have essentially added a asymmetrical cost to hiring women.

Another female acquaintance, in response to Mayer’s hiring at Yahoo, mentioned on Facebook that she got her current job while pregnant. She said during the interview “I don’t know if you realize I’m pregnant or think I’m just a porker, but I’m only somewhat porker and very pregnant.” (You’d have to know her to believe as I do that yes, she would actually say this in a job interview.) She got the job. Would she have gotten the job if it meant that she would be gone for 12 weeks and that they’d have to pay her and a replacement? I don’t see employers as being that far-sighted.

So where does that leave us? The government could take care of paying the parents. A social evolution where men were just as likely to take the time off as women could negate any discriminatory effect. Alternately, if you had generous leave that was so limited that men would almost have to take the time off, you could relieve the discriminatory effect. Of course, then you would be discriminating against one-parent households. Unless you said that a single parent gets twice the leave, which then penalizes women who married their child’s father.

One other possibility, I suppose, would be tax credits to corporations with family-friendly policies. That would encourage more companies to offer paid maternity leave, but would let those that are worried about it off the hook. That would, of course, be yet another line in the tax code. There would also likely be some employers that would take the credits and then apply pressure on employees not to use them. Intuitively, it seems like the abuse would be less than simply by demanding maternity leave for everyone. Of course, you’d have to strike the right balance between “enough of a tax credit to encourage employers to do it” and “not too much of a tax credit to where they have to do it whether they intend to comply or not.”

For those of you who have never heard of it, IGA is the Independent Grocers Alliance, a sort of franchising model among grocery stores and supermarkets in contrast to a chain of them. They’re independently owned but also work together. As with fast food franchises and the like, though, someone with a successful IGA store here may also start an IGA store over there.

The IGA in Summit closed earlier this year, after being in business for some 20+ years. Nearly everyone is attributing this to something that they already opposed. One faction blames Walmart, which opened up right down the street. Another faction is blaming unions, as IGA ran a union shop. The people who owned the IGA are actually busy working on getting a new location opened up in Callie.

Here in Callie, we have two supermarkets, a dinky little IGA downtown, and a large Safeway on the side of town. I uniformly shop at the latter. Partly because it’s closer. We live on the same side of town. Also, it’s less expensive. Also, it keeps better hours. Also, it’s more convenient. This is rather a common theme. Don’t like big box stores? Try living in a place without them. It’s uncertain to me how IGA stays in business, aside from community loyalty and being slightly on the west of down. I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough to keep Chain IGA from driving Dinky Little IGA out of business. Two large and convenient locations on each side of down, and LDIGA sandwiched in between.

I believe the ultimate answer to why IGA is leaving Summit has little to do with Walmart, per se, or unions. To the extent that CIGA’s leadership has commented, they said that Summit’s supermarket market is oversaturated. There are six large supermarkets and that appears to be one too many. It was profitable, but not profitable enough. And not as profitable as the new location in Callie should be.

I don’t fully understand why this community needs a second store. Then again, we also something on the order of five auto part places, several garages, and broadly more choices than I would expect to exist in a community of a few thousand. That’s been one of the surprises of ruralia, to be honest. When debating whether or not a pharmacist should be able to refuse to fill a prescription for birth control, the spectre of “the town where there is only one pharmacy” comes to mind. But if towns of only a few thousand have three pharmacies, how many towns of a single pharmacy exist? How many are in places that people aren’t used to regular trips to a larger town.

It’s been an interesting experience, living in a place smaller than I had ever intended. The commercial options are certainly more limited, but a lot less limited than I would have guessed. I guess I had sort of envisioned a Mayberry, where there was the grocier, the pharmacist, the mechanic, and so on. The number of things that come in ones are quite few. Even large supermarkets, apparently.