An article from Fox Business - so take it for what it’s worth - talks about how the Obama Administration wants to help people consolidate their accounts. In theory, it sounds really neat. Instant verification of who you are! No more remembering 100,000 passwords. Of course, nothing that easy comes without costs and risks. It’s supposed to be entirely voluntary, which is supposed to alleviate concerns. But there is a question of how voluntary it becomes when vendors stop accepting anything else. It’s not enough for it to be voluntary. We have to be guaranteed the ability to use other options. The article focuses on costs, which is really a secondary concern if it would make the economy more efficient on the whole (and I think it would).

Does Dr. Laura really respond to common blog entries?

Earlier this month, the government announced (preliminarily) that much of the acceleration problems with Toyota were caused by driver error. But by god, Toyota must have messed up somewhere and our government will turn every stone until they can find some way to justify bringing them before congress earlier this year. So maybe the steering rods.

Joel Kotkin takes up his familiar banner that the notion that everyone is moving back to the city is a myth. One of the problems I keep running into when discussing these issues is that urbanists simply don’t understand that the suburbs genuinely have something to offer even if it’s something the urbanists themselves don’t want. This isn’t their fault. The suburbanists, for the most part, don’t really care about the discussion. They just want to make sure the roads keep getting built.

If possible, Megan McArdle would use science to make her daughters shorter.

DC Comics is kind of cursed with instantly recognizable characters with backstories that are either dull or make it difficult to tell compelling stories. So you end up with Hawkman’s history becoming so convoluted that the character becomes sporadically unseable, an icon in Aquaman who can’t even carry his own series, and yet another reinvention of Wonder Woman. I collected Wonder Woman for a little while many years ago. It was John Byrne’s stint in the series when Diana herself was not actually in the series. On the other hand, the Graphic Audio was a surprisingly good story despite Diana being front-and-center.

The statistics presented in articles like this are pretty damning. They are certainly more convincing (or at least less unconvincing) than they were years ago. At the same time, I look around me and we live in a country of such immense wealth in terms of things. How can so many people be so poorly off in a country where so many people have so much? Misallocation of resources? Debt (and lack of saving), more like. One of the distorting effects of debt is that it becomes impossible to know what we do and do not have.

A look at The Beauty Bias and what can be done about it.

A look at Facebook and anonymity.

How to improve murder investigations.

Phi points to an article on mail-order brides and a scam therein:

To understand this incident you have to know about the Violence Against Women Act of 1996,” said Oldenkamp.“There is a little piece in it that states if an immigrant is abused by her husband or other family member, and can prove the abuse, then they become admitted for permanent residence.Elana was going to get her green card with or without me.

I find myself instinctually unsympathetic to those that marry a foreign girl they never met and get screwed in the process. Part of me thinks, “Well what they hell did they expect?!” Part of me finds the notion distasteful and I have to fight off the urge to say that they got what they deserved. I fight off that urge because while those that do or would beat their MOBs (a suitable acronym, considering…) do deserve what they get, nobody deserves trumped-up charges (as Oldenkamp alleges). Further, while some portion of these men may have ordered these brides because they wanted someone “docile, soft, and calm” (these are not characteristics I would generally associate with Russians) in a lot of cases it’s men without a lot in the way of other options. Men that have trouble relating to women on a square level. Hey, I can relate.

This is all further complicated by the fact that the participants from each side are going to be drawn from subsets of the population. The women are more likely to be desperate and/or ambitious, which makes them dangerous. The men are likely to be bitter and/or controlling, which makes them dangerous.

But even when I get past my biases, I am still uncomfortable with the business as a whole and can’t get too excited when I hear horror stories. I definitely do not support trumped up charges of spousal abuse. Nor do I support women using a sham marriage to get into the country and then cutting off the rope to the anchor at the first opportunity. These exploitations on the women’s part range from distasteful to abhorrent.

At the same time, though, I don’t entirely know what the alternatives are. If you don’t offer these women a degree of protection, you leave an extraordinary opening for exploitation the other way. A man can marry a woman and exploit the residency issues to turn her into a virtual slave. Or a punching bag. I mean, if she raises a fuss he can just divorce her and she’ll be sent home. That threat alone provides extreme leverage and marriage is not an institution at its best when one party has that kind of leverage over another. Giving a MOB (or a MOG, if such a thing were to exist and if domestic violence were a concern) recourse on the whole strikes me as better off than the alternative. We can quibble over what sort of standard of proof is required, but somewhere in a line beyond which his actions are demonstrably illegal and she should be able to report it without facing deportation.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how much it helps. The men with the most leverage are going to be those married to women that they manage to keep socially isolated. They’re less likely to speak English and it’s also less likely that she’s going to have the funds to hire a lawyer or the slightest clue where to go. The VAWA requires proof of hardship in the event of deportation, but those for whom the greatest hardship exists are those that would be deported before they knew what their rights were. Or maybe not, if she is appointed a lawyer by default or she at least knows to ask for one (if court-appointed lawyers exist for deportation?). In any event, it’s precisely those that would suffer the least hardship (comparatively speaking, anyway) that would have the strongest idea of what their rights were. Elana, the woman from the story above, notably had good command of English.

Incentivising accusations of spousal abuse is certainly troubling and if I were to isolate a concern, that would be it. If I were a man considering a MOB, it would matter far less if she got her own independent visa than if I have to defend myself against charges of spousal abuse. On the one hand, Elana’s accusations and the scratches that she had her son inflict would be pretty flimsy while applying for a green card. On the other hand, even if that is the case and Elana gets deported, Oldenkamp is still having to defend himself against felony assault charges. Back on the first hand, if Oldenkamp is a reliable narrator it’s pretty ridiculous that they pursued the charges. We can posit a situation wherein Oldenkamp would not have had the evidence that he did suggesting his innocence, but we can also posit a situation where a woman actually is being beaten mercilessly and has no recourse beyond deportation. Having to only be better than sent back to Russia provides a man a whole lot of leverage. Of course, being able to threaten trumped up abuse charges does the same for the woman. Regardless of the position that the government takes, somebody’s got lots of leverage.

One thing I find notable, though, is that absent charges of abuse a foreigner appears to lose the “conditional” on their conditional visa in two short years. If I were a man looking for a MOB, I think that would be my primary concern. That she just waits it out. She puts up with me for two years, being just enough of a wife that I don’t divorce her and deportation is kept at bay, and then leaves at the earliest opportunity. In that case, I am out several thousand dollars and two years of my life. Of course, at least then I am not out several thousand dollars, a little over a year of my life, and facing felony charges like Oldenkamp.

So I guess if you’re a guy looking for a woman to dominate, you can probably find someone less likely to be able to leave. If you’re a guy looking for an actual partner and are looking for intelligence and competence (and the ability to speak your language), you’ve got just two years to win her over for real. Or you look for potential Elana’s like a hawk and insulate yourself against charges of spousal abuse, which is wonderfully fertile ground from which love should grow.

Seems that the best way to win the game is simply not to play. It’s extremely risky from both ends. Or, if you do play, know your rights and what their rights are. Then again, how smart is it to engage in a marriage where you’re in such a defensive posture. For women from the poor side of a poor town in a poor country, it may be worth it with or without VAWA. Men, however, should really think twice. They are, in a sense, trying to game the system by taking advantage of her poverty. That is not the formula for a successful marriage even in a world where VAWA does not exist.

I found this site a pretty good primer on the subject. On the whole, it actually made me more sympathetic to both parties of the marriages while making me even more sour on the concept. But what are you going to do? The VAWA has the advantage of discouraging men from doing it (which is where the bottleneck is), though sort of at gunpoint. At the end, there’s no law that can be written that either (a) can’t be worked around or (b) doesn’t provide a serious imposition to those that are seriously in love with and want to marry someone that they met abroad. The closest think I can think of is the requirement for more face-to-face meetings over a long period of time. But that’s (a) harder to prove/disprove and (b) simply makes it more expensive, not impossible.

An aside: One of the commenters at Phi’s place points out that the MOB business has been infiltrated by the Russian… well… mob. This was actually the topic of the episode of the late, great TV show Life, that introduced us to the main villain of the entire show. Sort of. Roman Nevikov’s operation would sell wives to desperate men. The husbands would then be extorted to keep their wives. They’d lose their wives anyway and she would then be remarried to another mark.

I happened to catch wind of the Khan Academy a while back and found the lectures on the housing crisis and French Revolution to be quite interesting. Here’s an article about it. It seems to me that there could really be room for something like this to provide downward pressure on the cost of an education. They’ll never compete with Harvard or even Southern Tech, but if you can have free lectures and a cheap test-taking apparatus with rigorous standards, you could probably put a real dent in North By Northeastern State U.

Since the Trumanverse map right now tops 51 states (including Alaska and Hawaii), you better believe I’m going to use this neat tool from Slate.

RangelMD has a really good post about how current incentives are encouraging expensive medicine. But getting rid of incentives hurts medical care. So what do we do? Note that this is a question whether you think that health care should be paid for by the government or private sector.

I agree with this: Everyone should have a retail job once. Or at least a basement customer service position.

A humorous video with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett pitching Orbit gum.

Is there a cat parasite profoundly affecting human behavior? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s amazing all we don’t know about… everything, really.

An interview with Flo, that quirky pitchwoman from the Progressive Insurance ads. Last time we all had dinner together, my brothers and father and I all had a staunch debate about the merits of Flo versus the merits of the AT&T Mom. Mitch and Dad came down heavily in favor of AT&T Mom while Oliver and I argued that she couldn’t hold a candle to Flo. I’m a sucker for extremely extroverted quirk. Don’t know why.

An application that helps tell you where your CPU usage is going could be very useful. I found an app a while back that did the same for my hard drive in a very intuitive and helpful manner.

Charles Murray recently complained that the New York Times paid him only $75 for an op-ed piece. For most people, writing opinion pieces for the NYT is something that is its own reward. Even among people that that are good writers and knowledgeable in their field. The Southern Tech University’s student paper, the Daily Packer, paid me between $6-8 per opinion column. With a distribution of over 10k, being published and recognized across campus was really its own reward.

Others have pointed that out, but what is less discussed is the distinction between writing opinion pieces and writing other things. A case study are two attempts at content-monetizing. One by the Wall Street Journal and one by the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal kept its opinion section free as OpinionJournal.com while the Times put all of its opinioneers behind the paywall of Times Select. The former’s succeeded while the latter’s failed. It seems to me that the reason for this is pretty obvious. One was putting behind a paywall what people don’t want to do for free while the other was putting behind a paywall what people were paying webhosts for the privilege of doing.

I was never once tempted to sign up for Times Select, but I have been meaning to sign up for Wall Street Journal’s online offering for years. If I read the first paragraph of an opinion piece and then find out that the rest is behind a paywall, I kind of shrug “Oh, well, I am sure someone else will be offering as good an opinion for free.” Meanwhile, I have been frustrated time and time again by WSJ articles that I could only read the first couple paragraphs of.

Actual reporting is hard work. Or maybe just unpleasant work for anybody but a certain kind of person. You have to make sure to get the facts right. You have to go talk to people. You have to talk to people on both sides of whatever you’re talking about or at least seek multiple voices. You’re supposed to tell people things that they don’t already know. Opinioneering is less of a challenge. Though you need an arsenal of facts to make your case, it’s mostly about the arrangement of facts to serve particular ends. But even when it’s not easier, it’s often going to be more rewarding. Everybody wants their opinion heard from the nerd behind the keyboard to the drunk guy at the bar. Everybody wants to tell everybody else the what’s what.

What the Wall Street Journal has been banking on, though, is that their news articles offer something that a lot of people won’t do for free. A lot of people have been talking about the future death of newspapers and they’re rather passive about it because of “new media” and all that. The problem with all of this is that a lot of these “new media” outfits are relying on free or underpaid writers often picking at the lowest fruit. Doing the fun stuff. Maybe it is the case that there are enough people chomping at the bit to do actual journalism that something won’t be lost. I’m skeptical, though. I think we run the risk of losing the people doing the grunt work. Providing the basis for people to do the opinioneering on.

I think about this with a lot of artistic endeavors. I’m never all that worried about their being no more painters. Painting requires talent, skill, and practice, but it’s mostly a solo venture. Someone will always want to do it. I feel similarly about novels and music, though less strongly because there is gruntwork there in the form of editing or sound editing. But even then, there will be product. So while we might get poorer-sounding recording and novels with past-perfect tense errors, we will at least get something. Compare this with journalism where the “something” we may be left with is simply someone spouting off the latest thing they heard on Hannity or Olbermann or the short, glitzy “news items” on television news.

A fascinating story about how MetaFilter helped combat human trafficking. Well, helped out some of the trafficked, anyway.

Richard Florida and Nate Silver think that we’re coming down from the peak of our car-centric culture. Their evidence is pretty thing, though. People under 18 are driving less because there are more restrictions put on their licenses and parents are getting more and more paranoid. The big about declining mileage between 1995 and 2009 is interesting, though.

Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty. Am I the only one that finds myself in a position of really wishing I could like a product but being unable to climb aboard? I want to use Linux, but can’t really. I want to switch to Android, but can’t, really.

If a casino machine malfunctions, why doesn’t the winner get to keep the proceeds? If the machine breaks in the other direction, the casino keeps the proceeds because nobody knows there is a problem (or they don’t until it’s too late). Fair is fair, I say. The McMahons should be millionaires.

Then again, who needs to be a millionaire? Apparently all it takes is $60k a year.

A blog about a guy watching Lost backwards. I wonder if it makes more or less sense that way? Not sure I’m going to find out as he is not being very snappy about it.

Will vanity press mark the end of the publishing industry? I doubt it. Publishers are too valuable as filters. It does have the potential to shake things up, though.

China’s road to economic world dominance promises to be a rocky one.

If America doesn’t like soccer, it’s cause of racism. But if they take enough interest to route for their team? Jingoism. {Via}

Cartoon Network is apparently prepping a Green Lantern series to accompany the coming movie. Looking forward to the movie, looking forward to the cartoon. The folks at DC Comics will probably use this opportunity to do something drastic to Green Lantern so that anybody that enjoys the movie will find the comic unrecognizable. Yeah, I’m still more than a little agitated that they decided that the successful Batman movies were a great time to dislodge Bruce Wayne as Batman.

The problem with the government going after cell phone carriers for nickel and dime charges for Internet access is that it provides them the perfect excuse to demand that everybody be on a data plan to avoid any confusion. Nevermind that they could simply turn the Internet off.

After killing Mercury, Ford wants Lincoln to go green. But is there that much overlap between luxury car buyers and eco-conscious ones?

Peter Serafinowicz pirates movies. Even ones he is in. There really is some avoidable tension between paying for something inferior compared to getting something superior. I think the long-term trick is to make what they’re paying for good enough that it won’t be worth stealing. I think streaming video is ultimately the solution. I know that for music, a few tweaks from Rhapsody could make music ownership obsolete for all but my most passionate music interests. For videos, casual interests would mean Hulu or Netflix Online but intense interest would mean Blu-Ray or what-have-you. It’s the most sustainable model that comes to mind.

An interesting look{PDF} at cigarettes, black markets, gray markets, and prison.

No great surprise, but in an economy where nobody is hiring, nobody is quitting, either. My father worked for a Defense Department contractor during the Vietnam War, which gave him an out. They completely took advantage of the situation, knowing that none of their employees could quit without losing their draft exemption. The result was that when the war ended, nobody stuck around. I can only hope that some employers taking advantage today will meet the same fate.

San Fransisco is trying to get innovating with parking meter pricing. Some have suggested that this needs to be done with traffic congestion as well. I am a little unsure. The thing about parking is that you can stop and decide if the new price is worth it. For congestion, you can’t really respond to increases or decreases in pricing quite so easily.

All of the universities have playgrounds, but not BYU.

Germany’s president announced his resignation not long ago. Germany, like Israel (and almost Australia) have a distinction between their elected head of state and elected head of government. The Head of State is supposed to sort of be above the fray and thus a less partisan figure. The republican equivalent of monarchy. I have to admit, the idea has a certain appeal… but does it get lost when most foreigners (even those that keep up with current events) don’t know who your Head of State is?

I meant to write a full-on post about this New York Times article about a young woman drowning in student loan debt, but others did the job better than I could. My main contribution is this: At 26, the girl showcase in the article as a precautionary tale, is left with more after rent and student loan repayment than I was left with after rent when I was 26.

I have in the past defended little leagues and youth sport organizations placing sportsmanship above competition, but no way to I defend a team forfeiting by scoring too many goals. Mercy rules accomplish the same thing without the perverse incentives (scoring on your own goal to win a game!).

Time-Warner is defending the privacy rights of its customers… if only because they can’t be bothered to track them down and give them up.

Subway allegedly fires an employee for giving his courtesy sandwich to a fire victim.

Starbucks is finally offering free WiFi. This was really put them at a disadvantage compared to other coffee places up to and including Seattle’s Best, which Starbucks owns but which has always had free WiFi. Payfor WiFi could work, but you can’t ask people to sign up for a subscription or a significant daily charge.

My ex-roommate Hubert used to have a computer fantasy baseball league where we would draft up press releases for our team. Mine were generally humor-based and regularly featured the local politicians. One had them trying to justify calling a day off work to celebrate my team winning the pennant. That’s not nearly as bad as changing the name of your county.

More than half of identity theft cases are committed by parents. Credit card companies don’t check ages. Now, technically I am sure Mom thefted my identity at some point or another for simple expedience, but I doubt that’s what is being talked about here. Via Costa, who has a good take on it.

Are best friends bad for development? I don’t even think this is a case of development theory gone awry. Once again, I agree with Costa. I think this is about control.

The State of New Jersey has a lot of work to do balancing its budget. As far as I know New Jersey is not quite in the same league as California but it’s not far from it. Republican or Democrat, it’s good for states to get their houses in financial order. I’m not sure about the way that NJ Governor Chris Christie is going about it, though:

In February, the Republican governor ordered the freeze of $475 million in school aid payments in 2010 by requiring districts to use their excess surplus instead of state aid. The cuts were made at the time to help plug a deficit in this year’s budget. Christie has had to cut more than $2 billion from this year’s budget to keep it balanced. {…}

A large part of this year’s cuts involved withholding money from schools that have budget surpluses. All but 17 of the state’s 581 districts have surplus money.

Lest anyone think this is a partisan swipe, consider that I celebrated the man’s victory (sort of) and besideswhich his predecessor had a rather similar plan (withholding 75% rather than 100% of surplus funds).

I mean, on the one hand this sort of thing makes so much sense that it’s bleeding obvious. On the other hand, doesn’t this kind of discourage responsible spending? I mean, these districts had money that they could have spent and chose not to. Is that the sort of thing that you want to punish?

It’s a natural tension, I suppose, between wanting to reallocate what isn’t being used and encouraging people to use everything they have. My father’s work in the Defense Department was full of those things (an accountant, of sorts, my father was particularly familiar with the phenomenon). I suppose the counterargument in this case is that these are drastic times that call for drastic measures. But I hear that in California, too, where they are withholding tax refunds (temporarily, they say). While it’s got to be tempting to hold on to money you have, you’re also making sure that people do not overestimate on their withholding in the future and thus the government will lose an interest-free loan.

In the interest of equal time, I did kinda sorta get a kick out of this:

A little tidbit about the freshly minted Prime Minister of Japan:

Just five years later, Kan was forced to resign from his leadership of the DPJ over another failure to pay [into the national pension fund]. This time, Kan made formal penance: He shaved his head, put on a Buddhist monk’s robes, and traveled to the traditional pilgrimage destination of Shikoku island and its 88 temples. It worked. Japan’s comeback kid, he remained a senior figure inside the DPJ and served as deputy prime minister and finance minister in the Hatoyama cabinet.

Kan will be the fifth prime minister since Junichiro Koizumi resigned in September of 2006. That’s a turnover more rapid than usual, but Japan tends to run through prime ministerships pretty quickly. It’s pretty rare for one to last more than a couple years. Especially when they’re not members of the traditionally leading party, the LDP, as Kan and his predecessor are not.

Over at MSNBC, a news story regarding what might seem a small kerfluffle that happens quite often: a woman in a small town who wants a local art gallery to take down and destroy one of its paintings.

The trick? The painting is a portrait of Adolf Hitler. It’s hanging in a young artist’s gallery, and apparently it’s part of a gallery of “icons”, portraying various figures both good and evil. And the local paper seems to just about sum up my position on the subject.

What sharpens me on the point, however, is the fact that the woman’s comments (though she’s free to make them, as I’ll get to in a second) offer a glimpse into a problem I see too often: people seem to assume they have a “right” to not be offended. Her quote: “Freedom of speech? What happened to taste and sensitivity in our country?” Unfortunately, it’s precisely this form of argument that is so odious. It’s obvious that this woman has every right to be upset; she has a very close family reason to despise Hitler and all he stood for, and if she thinks the painting doesn’t get the portrayal right, then she’s going to be offended. On the other hand, if speech is to be censored for reasons of “taste” or “sensitivity”, then certain subjects will never be debated.

Working at Southern Tech University, I’ve seen plenty of examples of odious, disgusting speech. Anti-abortion displays like this one, bizarre displays of raw anti-semitism masquerading as “palestinian solidarity”, and so on. I worry about the violence potential of the second (especially after having been stalked on-campus by members of said racist group), but as long as they stay peaceful, I subscribe to the notion that the proper response to their hate speech is not censorship, but counter-speech exposing them and whatever factual misrepresentations (hell with it: outright lies) for what they are.

A follow-up to this post. There is a certain amount of gray area in a case where there are two possible causes of death. If they’re intertwined, murder can still be charged. However, if the assault was incidental or was not deemed to be a felony then the prosecutors will have a much harder time doing so.

Right now, between Katie Allison Granju and the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, things are not adding up. The KCSO has all but declared that they are not going to be moving forward. Ms. Granju does not believe that this is close to being finished. Beyond disagreements over what can or cannot be charged, there are a number of inconsistencies that are not a matter of opinion.

Katie Allison Granju: Henry was beaten with a tire iron.
Knox County Sheriff’s Department: The evidence not only doesn’t support the claim that a weapon was used, but disputes it.
More Info: If no weapon was used, it’s harder to prove felony assault. Without felony assault, murder is harder to prove. Actually, according to KCSO, without a victim statement or a police officer witnessing the assault, it is impossible to prove a felony.

KCSO: The injuries from the assault may not have been substantial. The friend who picked Henry up from the incident reported only an injury near the eye. No trauma was reported at the time of the autopsy.
KAG: “Were there such injuries? Well, his medical records CLEARLY and CONSISTENTLY refer to the assault and its compounding physical impact on the other causative factor – the drug overdose.” The medical records include “Trauma. Right skull base fracture.” These records were shown to the WASO TV station. She has also stated that her doctors are willing to talk to the authorities about the assault’s contribution on Henry’s fate.
Info: According to some medical personnel in the comment section of the KNS article, even a healed fracture should show up on an autopsy. Others are saying that the Medical Examiner should have access to said medical records.

KAG: There is no mystery as to the responsible party and she has provided the names of numerous witnesses and individuals with an account of what happened.
KCSO: There was no witness to the beating itself. The witnesses she provided are all hearsay.
Info: These two claims are not mutually exclusive. Sadly.

KCSO: The Sheriff’s Office was denied access to interview Henry.
KAG: Henry was never able to give a statement of more than 2-3 words. Even so, she offered the KCSO the opportunity to try to interview him anyway (including an offer for a speech therapist to be present). They stopped by once when Henry was having an MRI done and never tried again.
Info: This falls under the category of If Ms. Granju is not outright lying, the Sheriff’s Office is being pretty dishonest.

KCSO: Alleged assault.
KAG: Not alleged! Assault!
Info: I guess it’s theoretically possible that Henry fell, hit his head, broke his jaw, etc. Or Granju is being very misleading about the extent of her son’s injuries.

KCSO: They’re being classy by not answering the question of whether Henry Granju was dealing, instead noting that the burial services are going to be commencing later in the day.
KAG: Perhaps it would have been better not to release any of this at midnight the night before slash morning of Henry’s burial. And perhaps she should have been informed first instead of having to read about all of this in the paper.

Other Thoughts: Complication matters somewhat is the fact that Henry had really started to heal from the physical injuries sustained during the attack. It makes it easier for a defense attorney down the line to argue that it was all about the drugs. This doesn’t actually demonstrate that it was the overdose all along because the nature of Henry’s injuries can have long tentacles, but it makes a prosecutor’s job harder.

The KCSO’s actions here seem to go beyond mere skepticism and “we’ll wait and see”. It seems to me they’re making it much harder for any arrest and trial to eventually occur. They’re doing a future defense team’s job for them. It seems possible that they have simply determined that it doesn’t matter what role the assault played in things they are just not going to be able to prove what they would need to prove to make their case and so they are overstating their case and making it sound like it was just an OD. It reflects better on their crime stats that way. Another disturbing possibility is that they simply dropped the ball early on and at this point they would prefer see the matter just get dropped rather than acknowledge that their failure to take it seriously early on made it more difficult to pursue more serious charges later on. And of course, I have to say another possibility is that Ms. Granju is herself in the wrong, having come to a conclusion early on and very reluctant to admit that it may have been more about the drugs and less about the assault. That’s not the direction I am leaning right now, but I’m not an unbiased observer.

The subject of Internet universities has come up on Hit Coffee recently and I plan to more completely explore the subject later. In the meantime, here’s an interesting article on how brick-and-mortar universities may evolve. My main point of contention is that, as things stand, universities don’t have a whole lot of incentives to stop the spiralling costs.

Cellular Coverage and Service Areas. It is what you think it is, which is really helpful if you’re considering carriers. It’s really surprising how much of the country AT&T does not offer any service to. More surprising how distant a fourth T-Mobile is in terms of coverage.

A worthwhile column on a smoking ban that takes up an underemphasized point: a smoking band that is unrealistic is actively counterproductive.

Guys often complain about being footed with the bill on dates. It’s worth remembering that it ain’t necessarily cheap for women, either. I suspect that readers may be more interested in parsing not the $3,000 number but rather parsing the number “24″.

A look at a dispute on red light cameras in Tampa Bay. On one hand, you have a study pointing out that the safety improvements are marginal. On the other hand, you have someone else saying “Nuh-uh!” Meanwhile, in Italy, there are prosecutions for red-light camera fraud.

Speaking of traffic lights, an interesting look at using traffic lights to cut fuel consumption.

An interesting interview with 24’s Gregory Itzin. President Charles Logan is one of the more interesting characters produced by the show. If they had added just a little more moral ambiguity, he could have been one of the best characters in television.

It’s not enough what Powerpoint has ruined business, now it has ruined the military, too.

Incontrovertible proof that Batman would always defeat Superman in a fight.

This is an old story about the school that sent laptops home with kids with the webcams turned on, but one that recently came back to my attention. I am not easily surprised, but it surprises me that this was actually considered a good idea.

I find it utterly bizarre how dressing a guy in a penguin suit can actually make me want to try your beer.

We need to be moving in the opposite direction of this, liberalizing the sale of cars across state lines. Not applying the stupid car model to wines.

Doctors pursuing politics in record numbers. No big surprise, but most are Republicans. The political distribution of the docs that I know through Clancy is actually a relatively even alignment and may even veer slightly leftward. I suspect that the higher up the specialist chain you get, the more Republican you get.

We’ve talked off and on about Pre-existing Conditions here at Hit Coffee, so I thought I would pass along an editorial by the (rock-ribbed conservative, it should be noted) Investor’s Business Daily that contains some pretty uncomfortable tidbits about what happens when you force PEC coverage.

I am an anti-fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, but a couple of interesting and positive stories coming out of Lincoln. First, defensive superstar Ndamukong Suh pledged a boatload of money from his first contract back to the University. Former Husker Cal Nicks, known throughout his collegiate career as a troublemaker, actually went back to the university to apologize for being an arse.

A look at the shortage in rural health care providers. It really almost doesn’t matter what system we operate under. This is not a problem that’s going to go away. Even if we flood the market with new docs, rural America will be among the last places that they’ll go.

The anatomy of a bogus degree mill (mills, actually) and how an irate professor put a stop to it.

I find various mentions of how insolvent the suburbs are and how all the suburbanites are going to have to move into cities perplexing. Not because I am confident that the suburban model will work out in the long run (well, I guess I am a little bit, but I recognize that I could be wrong), but that the same government that wouldn’t let General Motors fail will let the entirety of suburbia fail.

The latest Toyota malfunction. The part in question is much more prominent on some badges such as Scion and Lexus than others, though. I don’t know. I think this is something else we might be able to pin on the drivers.

Five myths about green energy. Least surprising? The jobs part. Most surprising? Our relative progress in “going green.”

The Iron Man movie, which exceeded everyone’s expectations both in terms of quality and revenue, was apparently created without a script. What does that say about all of the movies that are so much worse that actually had a script? Should we just remove scriptwriters from the process altogether?

All of this is interesting, I guess. But the part of attraction and desire that I find interesting is not the universality but rather the particularism. Why do I find some actresses in Hollywood with perfect waist-hip ratios and symmetrical faces extremely attractive while finding others with perfect waist-hip ratios and symmetrical faces considerably less so?

The notion that exercise is the way to weight loss has taken a lot of hits lately. And no, saying “it doesn’t count if you eat it all back” isn’t a sufficient counterargument because exercising makes you want to eat more. For all of the talk of the role of what our sedentary lifestyles have played in our obesity problem, it seems to me that much more of the problem comes back to our intake.

I collect pictures of people in superhero costumes for my screensaver slideshow. It became pretty obvious early on that a good portion of the pics I was collecting were from homosexual quarters.

In a shocking development, it turns out that not all marriages are equally good for your health and that stressful marriages are bad for it. In other news, most or all of the “happiness deficit” among those with kids can be attributed to those that were ambivalent or conflicted (one wanting kids, the other not) about having kids. Oh wait, that part doesn’t tend to make it into the news…

Loneliness can be as bad for us as smoking and obesity. That’s why we need to stigmatize the obese. It will make them thinner, which in turn will make them more popular. Which in turn will make them healthier.

Is there no such thing as a hot streak in sports? Even though I’m not particularly superstitious, I find that surprising. Not because I believe that the gods watch over us when we’re hot, but because there is so much psychological in athletics that being hot tends to produce more confidence which produces better results. Huh.

I am of the school of thought that almost all of our political, moral, and theological views come from our innate personalities and our experiences rather than any genuine evaluation of the issues involved. So what do I make of the evolution of morals? Good question.

That we have far too many humanities majors for the job market to bear is no surprise. What is a surprise is that people were raising fears that the opposite may be true as recently as 1989.

When I was a kid they used to say “you are what you eat.” Some people never outgrew that, apparently.

No charges filed.

A few more tidbits

Roethlisberger maintains his innocence, but apologizes to his family and fans for the negative attention.

Alleged victim requested that the DA did not pursue the taste.

The rape kit proved to be “inconclusive.”

No indication of a civil suit. It really appears that money was not the motive here.

Indication of a civil suit. Or an intended settlement, at least.

Another accusation.

What happens if your a preacher or pastor of priest who has lost the faith?

Deadspin is doing some interesting write-ups on wrestlers that have passed away, including two long-time favorites of mine, Andre the Giant and The Big Boss Man.

I’ve expressed in the past a belief that while I am not all that supportive of player/athlete unions that I have an exception for NFL players who really are used and discarded, often in broken bodies. The NFL is taking some action to help those with neurological damage. Good.

Will the new calorie-discloser requirements make consumers less price-conscious?

Does anyone really care about Jesse James? Or is the media trying to find another Tiger Woods? But Jesse was never Tiger. Shortly after the OJ Simpson thing, there was a celebrity murder in Colosse. The local media tried like hell to make it into an OJ Simpson affair, but everybody knew who did it, doubt was not within reason, and the victim was never as big a deal as OJ Simpson.

Guilt>Science

Lori Gottlieb, the author of The Case For Settling, writes about five deal-breakers that shouldn’t be.

Are good dads making the mothers feel bad? Or are good dads stepping up to cover for bad moms? Or are moms who erroneously feel that they’re bad moms requesting help they don’t actually need?

The Case Against The Case Against MSG.

Is the range factor of electric cars overestimated? Much of the time it probably is. The problem is that even if you have a car that can do what you need it to do the vast majority of the time, it’s the exceptions that you notice. I may not use the four seats in my car often, but you can bet I’m awfully glad to have them when I do need them.

Europe is moving to prevent customers from getting a shock with their mobile bill. People do a moderate amount of surfing and suddenly find themselves with whopping bills. As some of you may recall, AT&T did me a solid by waving a hefty data charge if I signed up for the data plan. It’s better when things can be solved this way rather than through legislation, though I don’t find this law objectionable in spirit. I particularly like that people are allowed to set their own limits.

File this away under “things that should have been thought about at some point before or immediately following getting on this road.”

A fascinating article from The New Scientist about the “Women and children first” ethos. Apparently, whether these cultural norms are honored can depend on whether the ship sinks fast or slow. Of course, this looks at older cases. No telling how that would work out today.

Could the cure to peanut allergies be to feed them peanuts earlier?

I read things like this and come away amazed that the early innovators didn’t patent the mouse and other obvious things.

A list of ideas on what we can do about the airline seat problem, discussed here on HC previously. Numbers 6 and 7 sound familiar. Meanwhile, Continental Airlines is joining many others in charging more for front and exit-row seats. On the one hand, getting those seats has been a godsend and thanks to Clancy’s diligence we’ve been able to do so without paying more and that’s coming to an end. So… boo. On the other hand, I said during that previous conversation that I would be willing to pay more for more space.

Another Slate article on the precarious anonymity of sperm donors. If the idea is “the best interest of the child” and children not conceived and not born do not count, it’s difficult to argue that anonymity should remain in tact for the convenience of the father and so that sperm would be widely available for women that want to conceive solo (or have infertile husbands). Even so, this falls under limitations on the best interest of the child in my view.

One of my pet peeves is the utter demonization of television. Not that I believe that TV is a great thing or that I don’t believe that a lot of people spend way too much time watching it, but I do believe that it is often held to a different standard due to the (erroneous) belief that it is inherently worthless as anything but a time-killer.

One of the areas I have long been skeptical of is the correlation between TV-watching and obesity. It’s not that I don’t believe that such a correlation exists. Rather, I believe that the correlation is greatly exaggerated by confounding factors. Namely, I think that parents that fail to monitor their kids’ TV intake are also likely to fail to monitor their calorie intake. Conscientious parents that reduce or eliminate television watching are also likely to reduce or eliminate junk food. You get the idea. Again, that’s not to say that such is responsible for all of the difference, but I do (or did) think that gets lost in the fervor to prove one’s cultural and intellectual superiority by demonizing television.

According to a new study, though, there may be more to the story than that. It seems that the watching of television in itself may not be the issue. It may be the commercials. For those parents that let their kids watch a lot of TV without commercials - either public programming or videos - there is no predictive value when it comes to obesity. But when you throw commercials in there, you start to see it. This remained true even after they worked to control for the other contributing factors that immediately come to mind.

The biggest thing I’m not sure about in the article is that the culprit is that I think they are overestimating the effectiveness of the advertising. Don’t get me wrong, advertising is important. Particularly when it comes to brand identification. But when it comes to kids’ time horizons and their inability to shop for themselves, I think that there is something else at work here. I mean, I don’t envision kids saying “Ooooh, an ad for Doritos! I will ask Mom for Doritos right now and she will get some next time she is out and then I will love it!”

Rather, what I think happens is that kids see an ad for Doritos and say “Mmmh. Hungry. What’s in the pantry?” and if it happens to be Doritos then they have Doritos but otherwise they have whatever is on hand. We very rarely had any name brand stuff that advertised on TV when I was growing up, but I doubt that made me immune from the commercials. Add on to this the fact that the times in which the commercials are showing are perfect times to get food and it helps generate bad habits. Doritos commercial. Hunger. Rustling through cabinet. Eating store-brand Lays knock-offs in time for the show to come back on. That sort of thing.

The government solution to this, if we are looking for one, is to ban food ads during childhood programming. I don’t see that having a whole lot of effect, though, because (a) kids spend time watching more general programming, too, and you still have the bite-size interruptions that just invite people of all ages to go up and grab a bite to eat. To be fair, though, they seemed to at least attempt to control for (b).

From a parenting standpoint, this could be more helpful. It could, if more widely understood, lead to false distinctions about which kinds of sedentary activities are superior to which other sedentary activities. A week ago, I would have said that it doesn’t do a whole lot of good to limit their intake if they just make a beeline to the computer room. But if the study isn’t missing something significant it looks like some of the alternatives to commercial television, including commercial-free television, may actually not be nearly so bad as previously supposed.

It could, of course, be missing something significant. Some of my same concerns about studies that link television watching with obesity could also skew the results of this one. Namely, there’s more than one breed of parent and even though it does trend along SES lines, it’s difficult to impossible to really control for parenting styles. So the subset of parents that let their kids watch television but are conscientious enough about it that the kids don’t end up watching commercials could be curbing the potential obesity with diet-monitoring. So it could demonstrate that it’s less about whether the children watch commercials or not and more about whether the parents are conscientious about what they’re watching (ie PBS and selected videos) can allow their children to watch more television without negative results. That in and of itself is an interesting thought.

Whether it’s commercials or some other factor, though, I much prefer deeper thought than “Kids are fat because they watch too much TV!” as if spending hours on the computer or even reading a book would be better. There are all manner of confounding factors that can be contributing to it. Something as complicated as obesity tends to have numerous causes and what might be the cause for one person left another entirely unscathed. That being said, I am also very wary of people that say “CORRELATION DOES NOT MAKE CAUSATION!” and act as though that ends the discussion. Correlation may not be causation, but it’s still significant. I may be suspicious of the studies that link two hours of television a day to obesity, but it’s still significant and ought to make parents more conscientious about the viewing habits of their youngsters.

Pittsburgh Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger is in talks with Georgia police about a sexual assault allegation. This is hardly the first time that a professional athlete is accused of such a thing. People tend to line up according to their loyalties and ideologies whenever it happens. Fans of the athlete in question, those that believe that fake accusations of rape are commonplace, and often men more generally assume that until proven otherwise any sex that occurred was probably consensual and the woman is looking for cash or publicity. Women’s groups, rape victims, and often women more generally assume a degree of validity to the charges.

What’s interesting about Roethlisberger is that this is actually the second allegation against him. Part of me thinks that if you’re accused once, it’s possible that you just slept with the wrong person. If you’re accused twice? That represents a much greater likelihood of a control problem or a sense of sexual entitlement or, more simply put, a rapist. On the other hand, there’s a reason that the prosecution is prevented from bringing forth prior accusations and convictions to trial. It can create an unfair prejudice. Further, a woman that is aware of Roethlisberger’s first accusation knows that she will have a lot more credibility than if she goes and accuses Eli Manning. Back on the first hand, if you’re the type of person that sleeps with a professional athlete then makes accusations, you don’t really get to choose the athlete. If she’s that type of person, it is possible but strains credibility a bit that the pieces would fall into place for such a move.

Also noteworthy is that Roethlisberger has a reputation for control issues outside the bedroom. He is known for tempting fate by engaging in risky and possibly injury-inducing behavior. Besides the allegations and his performances as a QB, he’s known for a motorcycle incident wherein he wasn’t wearing a helmet and a bowling accident shortly before a playoff game.

None of this is to say that he’s necessarily a rapist (or sexual assaulter). But he’s going to have a hard time finding a jury that is unaware of at least the previous sexual harassment accusation. He’s only 28 and should have a long career ahead of him. At the rate he’s going, by misdeeds or misfortune, it’s at pretty substantial risk.

According to the ISPs and other folks, Net Neutrality is a threat to future Internet service because as the networks get bogged down there won’t be any way to distinguish between valuable and non-valuable transmissions. According to Silicon Alley, we’re going to hit major bandwidth shortages sooner rather than later on cell phone networks. If true, will this provide an opening for service differentiation on cell phones that can then be ported to regular Internet?

Nobody cleans their fridge anymore and the fridge-makers are trying to compensate.

There are concerns that recidivism rates will climb as ex-cons are unable to find work in the current economy. It’s better if they can find work on getting out, though I have to admit that they are a lower priority than the others. There is an argument, I suppose, that they should be made a higher priority because they’re more likely to misbehave if unemployed, but on a visceral level alone getting people to the front of the line because they committed crimes is just a no-go.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, less women (or men, for that matter) majoring in stupid studies is a good thing. On the other hand, before we get too carried away trying to get women into geek careers, how about we find jobs for the men already there?

It’s not easy to make a whole lot of sense of this. Of the various things I had to offer in a relationship, knowing my way around technology was not among them. Nor did it seem was my reluctance to shave as often as my facial hair declares I should. Nor my extra poundage.