Not a Potted Plant

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.

David Bergeron, the founder and president of a company that makes solar powered refrigerators, thinks that subsidies for on-grid solar power are a bad idea:

Here is the real problem: Subsidies make solar appear viable today, so where is the motivation for an entrepreneur to risk money, or even focus on developing real energy alternatives when solar is “almost” there? How can an inventor justify striving with the effort it takes to really develop something great when he is competing against a straw man technology which can provide power at almost the same cost of traditional power sources today? But of course it really doesn’t.

The answer is he can’t justify the effort, so the next great thing is not developing, at least not with the sense of urgency it should be. Why enter a contest when you are competing against someone with an unfair advantage? You may be the faster swimmer, but your competitor is using flippers.

Solar subsidies are a placebo which is giving the general public a sense of security about our energy future and is robbing the motivation of those entrepreneurs that could actually address our energy problems. Subsidies are much worse that just wasteful, they’re diabolical. They lull us into thinking we have almost solved the problem and they hinder us from seeking the real solutions.

Bergeron believes that Solar PV systems are hopeless and explains his views here.

I got this link via Dave Schuler, where the commenters come down on the side of a carbon tax, which I have historically been quite amenable to. I say “historically” not because I’ve changed my mind, but because some of the comments have me thinking about some stuff. The goal of a carbon tax of the revenue-neutral variety would be that it would actually take comparatively little money out of the economy while rewarding desirable behavior and condemning undesirable behavior.

Commenter TastyBits points out the potentially deleterious effect this would have on manufacturing. Manufacturing would likely be one of those areas hit the hardest. Previously, I’ve mostly thought of this in the context of “higher prices”… but that would be okay because we’d have more money. Those items that require more energy and result in more pollution would become more expensive, while other prices wouldn’t, and it would all even out to some degree due to the tax rebate or lower taxes.

Except that an obvious solution, from a manufacturing standpoint, would simply be to move more of the manufacturing offshore where they would not have the higher energy costs. The solution to this would be a carbon-based tariff. Which maybe is a good idea! But I don’t know what ramifications that would have on all sorts of trade agreements. Maybe it’s quite worth doing anyway, but a lot of it is out of my depth. A lot of the market sorts that think that a carbon tax (or cap and trade) is the best way to handle this seem to be steadfastly against tariffs of any kind. I don’t know if they make an exception here, and it seems like failing to make an exception would be problematic.

The other issue is how much decreased demand in the US would affect global demand and pricing. Assuming that the oil will be explored anyway, and that it will be refined somewhere, if they get more of it and we get less of it, what difference have we made? Maybe something in terms of air quality, or something else in terms of national security, but we could lose ground if (for instance) refining practices in China actually produce more emissions than refining practices here. If they’re buying, refining, and using more of it, that could be a net loss.

The next area of further thought involves coal. If we ween ourselves off of coal, will we still be mining it for export? If so, have we made any environmental gains? If not, and some relatively people in some relatively hard up places are sitting on a lucrative mineral that they can’t use, how exactly is that going to fly? On the other hand, if we push emission costs up high enough, perhaps clean coal burning would become more economically worthwhile. Or it might be more profitable for the miners to simply sell it abroad and let them burn it where such things aren’t so taxed.

Two of the primary arguments for taxing carbon, or subsidizing non-carbon, remain:

First, the extent to which we subsidize fossil fuels. This is an oft-made claim, though a lot of the things included are subsidizing something else which uses carbon. This is a distinction with a difference when roads, for instance, subsidize a Volt just as much as it subsidizes an Explorer (and the latter pay more in gas taxes). I also don’t consider “We accept money in exchange for them being able to explore on public lands” to be a subsidy, even though it is sometimes cited as one. Others we should consider correcting regardless of what we do elsewise, if I had a clearer idea of what they are (note: I am disinclined to include any tax breaks we give other industries as that becomes a business tax break/subsidy rather than an oil/coal one).

Second, carbon taxes simply internalize the externalities. The problem here is that we have comparatively little idea what the externalities are. It would seem more than fair, for instance, to tax the coal industry in accordance for what we spend cleaning up the environmental damage we do. A lot of it, though, is guesswork. Even if we agree that AGW is happening, man-caused, and a serious threat, we don’t completely know what the end-result will be. We have estimates that range from the optimistic to the pessimistic, and even within those estimates seem to be a variation on the particulars. There are no disinterested parties here. We don’t know how much of the damage can be mitigated with how much of a reduction in fossil fuels.

This isn’t my long way around of suddenly saying that I am against carbon taxes. I have, however, shifted away from my enthusiasm for them as one of the more obvious solutions involved. If subsidies are also problematic, and I have issues with the next round of CAFE standards, I haven’t a clue where that would leave me.

I’ve not had a real television in the house for several years. Mrs. Likko banished television when, way back when we were still living in Tennessee, we had a shameful run-in with Iron Chef on a work night. “No, let’s watch the next one, too, it’s Battle Sea Cucumber.” So it’s now nearly seven years since then, and we finally got DirecTV. With the NFL package built in to the incentive, so the football parties are going to be at Casa Likko this year. (Yes, Ordinary Gentlefolk and spouses/SO’s are invited, but we’re watching the Green Bay game when it’s on, just so you know.)

So last night I entertained myself with the Olympics. Track and field was surprisingly compelling. And there was a lot of talent working that women’s 200-meter race towards the end; every single one of those athletes was walk-into-a-pole attractive. Then I stayed up to see that new Matthew Perry sitcom they were pimping mercilessly all the way through the Olympic broadcasts — it wound up being Arli$$ meets Patch Adams, only not nearly as funny. And it was something like 11:30 before I went to bed.

And now, just like the very last night that I had television in my own house seven years ago, my ass is dragging at work. I must find discipline once more.

Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Democracy. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here.

A few weeks ago, I had to travel by air. At the airport, I noticed that there were posters of art by children on the stanchions for the security line. The art contest had been sponsored by the Transportation Security Administration and the winners, from the various age groupings, all illustrated some aspect of airport security. The charming crayoned pictures were mostly of crudely-drawn smiling TSA agents administering full-body scans on crudely-drawn smiling passengers was really creepy.

So I have the Bob Hope Airport TSA to thank for the reminder that in a world where fear trumps personal dignity, it is not so difficult to put a benevolent face on the demands of security, and thus a major tension in our political reality is between security and democracy. Continue Reading →

[This was posted last week on Hit Coffee. I meant to cross-post it here, but forgot to.]

So I was listening to this John Grisham audiobook. It was very much unlike any other Grisham book I have ever read/heard before. It was like a series of random vignettes. One minute, it’s talking about the old owner of the local paper. The next, it’s from the point of view of its new owner. He’s having dinner with someone and the food is being described. He’s on the witness stand explaining how he bought the paper. Someone else is on the witness stand being asked if he knew his wife was cheating on it. I have no idea what the hell the trial is about, but whatever. The narrator is flashing back to having just arrived in the town and being pulled over by a haberdasher. Then a sniper is killing people.

WHAT THE HELL?!

The player was on Random Track Play. That’s what.

In this post, liberal does not mean “of the contemporary American left” and conservative does not mean “of the contemporary American right” though there is at least some overlap (in other cases, they are in opposition).

I was born, I think, with something of a liberal soul. I was unusually creative even as a little sprite. I was the kid who looked at all the rules and asked “why?” even more than most other kids. This continued into adolescence. There’s nothing remarkably unusual about this. Young people questioning authority is hardly an unusual concept. I was ahead of some of my peers, and behind others.

The “behind others” may, as much of anything, have had little to do with my soul, however. Rather, I was raised in a rather conservative environment. Not religious-fundamentalist. Not even Republican – though I assumed my parents were Republicans for the longest time. Rather, a household of anti-entitlement, a little skepticism towards charity, and where rules we couldn’t understand were still rules (not just parental authority rules). My parents weren’t actually all that strict, compared to a lot of people I knew, but there was an atmosphere. They used soft influence more than threats when it came to my hair getting too long, for instance, or friends of which they disapproved.

In high school, I started making friends with a fair number of counter-culture types. They were people I bonded with, even though they had pink hair and nose-rings while I had a traditional haircut and wore button shirts. They did things it would never have occurred to me to do. I had parents that would push back when my hair started coming over my ears. They never lectured me against drugs, but rather raised me in an atmosphere where they were unthinkable.

What turned me away from liberalism, to at least some degree, is the realization that their system was right far more than it was wrong. I couldn’t live within the parameters of their world. It was never in my liberal soul to do so. But their system pulled me back from so many mistakes it was ridiculous. When my soul’s ideology ran up against theirs, they usually won. Sometimes in the form of preventing from doing something that was a mistake. Often in the form of having made a mistake by not letting their voice in my head prevent me from doing them.

Myself at seventeen and myself at nearly twice that age would not recognize one another. They would not get along remarkably well.

“What do you mean I should cut my hair? You sound just like my parents.”

“Listen, kid. You’re a freak. Don’t try to deny it. We both know you are. There are some ways that you will never be able to conform to society. But your hair? That’s one way where you can. Cut your damn hair.”

The conservatism was an anchor. Since I could never walk the straight line, it always prevented me from straying too far from it. It prevented me from being too much a victim of what I have come to see as my own poor internal judgment. My own tendency to want to knock down boundaries simply because I do not immediately see why they are there. To accept the wisdom of my surroundings, even if the actual wisdom of it all eluded me. Not forcing me to follow all rules without question, but nonetheless forcing me to come up with a strong affirmative argument any time I wanted to break them.

My parents, as it turned out, were never as conservative as I thought. My father was a district delegate for Barack Obama. My mother, another liberal soul who was mugged by reality, would tell me not to do what she would have wanted to do and, in some cases, what she did. She told me I had to go to college, though half-expected me to flunk out and was fully prepared to love and embrace me anyway. She had some strong ideas on who I would marry, and it wasn’t who she thought I would marry (Clancy is somewhere in between – she’s thrilled) and she was fully prepared to love and embrace me anyway. The ways in which they made clear they would never support me, they would have supported me in the end (within reason).

They presented me with an illusory world of conformity that, the older I have gotten, the more I realized never fully existed in the Truman household. They bucked the system in more ways than I ever realized. Like me, they had their own tendencies that were at odds with their environment. Like me, they conformed where they could, but did not where it wasn’t in them to do so (though, with them, it was more a matter of socioeconomic class than internal ideology).

Sometimes I think it is the conflict between my nature and my nurture that leaves me so… conflicted… about so many things. In politics it gets more complicated still (my conservative nurture leading me to Democratic sympathies, and vice-versa), but the squishiness you see before you stretches to many things beyond who I should vote for and which political positions I support. They go to which job I should take, who I dated, and my feelings about where I went to school and what I majored in. The natural inclination that the system should never stand in the way of who you are and the life you want to lead, and the nurtural inclination that the system exists for a reason.

So yesterday I’m playing Skyrim — a reward after having pull an all-nighter at work and completing a huge task, and a sedative before catching up on sleep — and I’m on one of the ice-covered islands north of Winterhold looking for a barrow to raid. And I see a shadow on the snowy ground of what looks like a funny humanoid monster, just walking along ignoring me. But on the island I encountered nothing particularly unusual, just some skeletons guarding what turned out to be a rather uninteresting site. Is this an Easter Egg or what?

Sometimes, I have a bit of Ostrich Syndrome. Especially when it comes to my teeth and general health. A problem isn’t real until I know about it. It’s irrational. It’s counterproductive. But it’s there.

The last time I went to the dentist, I was living in Estacado. For those of you who haven’t been following me that long, that was from 2006-08, wherebouts. When I was in Estacado, I got them cleaned every three months like clockwork. I never established care in Cascadia, nor in Arapaho until now. I brush and floss almost every day, but sometimes more diligently than others. My teeth have been vaguely hurting over the past year or so. I finally got around to making the appointment.

For the first time in my life, I got an attaboy from the dentist. Not because of a lack of cavities (I have one) or other problems (I’ve got those, too), but because my entire dental history was declared splendid.

Excuse me? I’ve never been good at taking care of my teeth. I’ve always had the problems that come with not taking care of my teeth. I drive 3-5 soft drinks a day. What?!

I have come to the conclusion that Arapahoans must, as a people, have very lousy teeth. If mine look good, theirs must be pretty bad.

Perhaps not incoincidentally, I have discovered that portions of Arapaho, including where I live, do not add fluoride to water. This has been the subject of debates around the state lately. Two towns have been contemplating fluoride policy and both opted for the status quo: the town doing it elected to keep doing it, the town that hasn’t been doing it as opted to encourage people to eat less sugar. Perhaps not incoincidentally, both towns have been battling pertussis outbreaks.

It turned out that I went to the dentist at exactly the right time. They were showing the Olympics on the TV on the ceiling while they were cleaning my teeth. I don’t care much about the Olympics, but it was basketball, which I am less indifferent to than most sports. We were playing Argentina neck-and-neck when I started watching. We beat their arses by the end.

Update: I forgot to mention that I have a slight chip on one of my front teeth. So slight that no one has ever commented on it before. Both the hygienist and dentist made note of it and asked me about it (whether it was causing any problems, etc.). At least I knew they were looking close! Also, with regard to the area’s fluoride situation, they got me on prescription-strength toothpaste, which is apparently something of a norm among the dental community (and something I had never even heard of), to compensate.