Not a Potted Plant

Many years ago, I was a party to my first pregnancy scare with then-girlfriend Julianne. It was a life-altering event. It came up negative, but there was a certain “realness” to it all that gave me great pause when it came to my views on, among other things, the status of a fetus. I could write a post on the whole experience, but regardless of my views on the legality of abortion, my views of the stakes were forever change. In part due to a baby that I hoped did not exist, and didn’t.

It’s been different, this time around, since the pregnancy test came up positive back in February. The notion that we would have aborted was, and is, anathema. I view the thing that resides in my wife’s stomach as real… as many things. Maybe human, maybe not. Yet, for whatever reason, there is an abstractness towards it that I would never have guessed would have existed. It’s real, as I think of it, yet not real, as I feel it.

The pregnancy is real, but the baby is not. At first there was the fact that I had to mentally construct it. There was no such ambiguity for my wife. The fact that coffee suddenly tasted disgusting to her was proof enough. There was also the morning sickness. The need for even more sleep than usual. Her body was going through the changes, meanwhile I was hearing about the changes and nothing more. Eventually came the ultrasound, then a while later the heartbeat. This gave me more of a construct to work with. I have seen him JB move and wiggle like a kung-fu artist. I have seen JB cover its face with his arms. And I’ve heard the heart beating.

There is still a layer of abstraction, though, that I did not expect this far along. Even as her stomach starts to swell just a little. One more layer on the reality of the situation is that Clancy is now describing actions. When Clancy rolls over, little Jumping Bean squirms. She’s feeling movement, though nothing that I can feel yet. The notion of JB squirming had an effect. Suddenly it’s not just doing things in moving pictures, it’s doing things that my wife can immediately feel. And so another layer of abstraction is peeled.

I actually wonder to what extent it is that I am or have been afraid of feeling it. Back with Julianne, I had a more black-and-white sense of things and it either was or it wasn’t and I lived a Schrodinger’s Life, in two parallel realities where she was pregnant and she was not pregnant. But both were black and white. Right now? Well, Clancy is pregnant. There’s no question about that. Barring something unforeseen, I will be a father in five months.

Something unforeseen.

With Julianne, it was real or it wasn’t. If it was real, she would have killed it or she wouldn’t have. If she hadn’t, it would have survived to term or it wouldn’t have. Either I would have a life-changing baby in my arms or I would have avoided the baby I didn’t want. It was win-win, in a way. Had it been real and lost, I would have mourned the loss, but in a very different way than now. Now I want the baby. Now, it’s not an either-way situation. I want it. I want it. I want it.

And from the start, I’ve been scared of losing it. Rather than this engaging me more, it has lead to just a little psychological distance. The added abstraction. The parallel world where it is and it isn’t. Without indifference to being a father, the abstraction is the only defense I have. The only way that losing it wouldn’t crush me.

What I haven’t been able to get myself to realize is that it would, regardless. The parallel world where this is not happening doesn’t change that. However much it persists.

A young woman from the PRC named Wu Minxia was one of two teammates to win the gold medal in synchronized diving at the 2012 Olympics yesterday. Her well-earned celebration was spoiled, though… Continue Reading →

James Joyner points to a chart showing the increasing disconnect between employee productivity and employee compensation and asks what happened in 1972, when the different trajectories were set. The leading candidates are automation and trade.

That makes sense, at least to a degree. When a company invests large amounts of money on capital and the result is that employees are more productive, who deserves the dividends? There are arguments that since such things are out of the control of the employee that they shouldn’t suffer for it, but the most obvious candidate would seem to be the employer that took the risk, bought to capital, and proceeded from there. Which leaves workers in a rather uncomfortable place.

Several years ago, when I was working at Falstaff, I looked at the tools we were using for our job (XML programming) and determined that they could be a lot better. A coworker later took control of the project when I got promoted out of the department. The end results were amazing. Our department productivity increased 86% over the course of a year, per-employee productivity increasing 300%. Training times collapsed from roughly 10 weeks to under four. Once they got wind of our new toolset, the company’s internal tools department threw a fit because they were supposed to be making such tools and not us. They complained all the way up to the COO.

The COO had up to that point been only vaguely aware of how well our division had been doing. Just aware enough that, when there were massive layoffs, they determined that our department could take a huge portion of the hit since we were keeping our head well above water. Internal Tools explained to him that it was their job to create tools and we can’t have other departments doing such things willy-nilly. Our director explained that we’d put in four requests for better tools (with specific recommendations), hadn’t heard anything, and had become tired of waiting. Besides, look at the results. Whatever time we “wasted” outside our job description had been made up for and then some.

The COO ended up creating a “Cash Reward for Ingenuity” and immediately gave my coworker and I said reward. An email went out celebrating our contribution and we got a mention at the next corporate meeting. Oh, and he decided that going forward, new XML programmers would get a 10% pay cut, seeing as how their job had just gotten so much easier. No longer could incoming programmers command the lofty wage of $10/hr, as there was even more money to be saved.

The thing that hurt about that last part is that, from a short-sighted perspective, there was actually some logic to it. Incoming programmers didn’t need as thorough a knowledge of the language anymore. We could hire the prototypical drop-out and they could do the job in a satisfactory fashion. The worst programmers in the department were now outperforming what the best performers were doing two years ago (though, of course, the best were still outperforming the worst). Such expertise was simply less necessary than before.

In the end, I still vehemently disagreed with the decision. By my reckoning, they had failed to understand the value of a good employee. Starting people out lower, identifying the talent, and giving those with talent a big raise would have been okay, too. Performance-based raises, however, were anathema. What you made starting out more-or-less determined your pay trajectory for the next decade (most years we didn’t even get a C-O-L increase, and a lot of promotions didn’t actually come with pay increases). Yet when such short-sightedness becomes common enough, it becomes conventional wisdom.

I don’t know how projectable this story is into the economy-at-large, but I do think that there is a tradeoff mentally between how much an employer invests in capital and how valuable they see their human capital as being. The less reliant employers are on an individual’s capacity and the more leverage an employer has over the individual, in real terms but I think more importantly in psychological terms.

This all gives me great concern for the future. I’m not worried about 40% unemployment as everything gets automated (or sent overseas). Morelike, I’m worried about how the desperation for work will give all but those with the most timely and necessary skills absolutely no leverage. I’m mostly worried because there doesn’t seem to be a clean solution to this. I don’t know how we could legislate this away. We can move money around, but that has its limitations. With it simply come down to mass public employment?

Jack Balkin writes about the not-so-happy anniversary of the Debt Ceiling Crisis:

In the past, some politicians (including then-Senator Barack Obama) have voted against debt-ceiling increases for reasons of symbolism or protest, but not in situations where there was any actual danger that the increase would not occur. Now Republicans changed the rules of the game: They used the threat of economic catastrophe to force the president to adopt their preferred policies. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it in an excess of candor, threatening to default on the nation’s debts was “a hostage that’s worth ransoming [because] it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

Obama was caught off guard. He had neglected to include a debt-ceiling increase in the April 2011 budget agreement because he did not believe that the Republicans would dare attempt such a maneuver. Seemingly confounded by the new strategy, he agreed to protracted negotiations with congressional Republicans in the summer of 2011 to resolve the crisis through cuts in federal programs, much to the consternation of his political base. In the meantime the press was filled with insistent warnings that continued intransigence on raising the debt ceiling would send the world economy off a cliff.

I’ve been getting some political calls lately* informing me that I should volunteer and donate money to defeat a local Republican congressman. And what, you may ask, did the robocall tell me was the reason I should oppose my congressman?

His vote to raise the debt ceiling**. The bastard.

* – It would be more neat having three phone numbers (excluding mobile and Googlevoice) if the end-result was not my getting calls like this in threes.

** – Okay, that wasn’t the only reason they gave. It was the first reason given, though.

While Ethan tackles the weightier questions of the trilogy, I’ll look at the geekier ones.

All in all, this comic geek can’t complain all that much. This trilogy turned out to be a departure from the Batman tradition in many respects. I’ll start with the third movie and then move backwards.

The most frustrating thing to me, was John Blake. Namely, that he wasn’t named Tim Drake (the third Robin). Given the similarity of name, I actually wonder if it might have been their intent. If their intent was to make the Robin connection a surprise, they gave their game away with more than the resemblence I saw. As the movie wore on, I kept thinking “Just call him Tim!”

I was smacking myself over the head for not picking up on Talia. The signs were all there. How did I miss it? The timeline of Bane didn’t make sense (namely, Bane having simultaneously been crippled in the pit and having escaped uncrippled) as I tried to piece it together. The obvious answer just didn’t occur to me. Watching it the second time was even more painful in this regard. Could they have been more obvious? Tate talks about balance!

This was probably the best depiction of Catwoman that I have seen to date. Unlike previous depictions, rather true to the character. I was a little worried about Catwoman with no overhead mask and the cat ears, but they made it work.

Bane was also well-done, though much more of a departure. The trick of combining the concepts of the Lazerus Pit and Pena Duro was kind of neat. Bane just isn’t the same without Venom. And, of course, it turned out that we were dealing with Bane The Henchman rather than Bane The Mastermind. At least he was an intelligent Henchman and not a drooling idiot.

It’s a bit irritating that Nolan took two of comparatively few minority Batman villains (Arabian Ra’s al Ghul and Latin American Bane) and replaced them with two white people. I’m really quite tired of villains with British accents.

As with Catwoman, they did a good job with the Batman costume throughout the trilogy. One of the more ridiculous things about the previous Batman franchise were the stiff necks. To see anything that wasn’t right in front of him, he had to turn his entire body around. Here they produced a costume that not only looked good, but had much more passable functionality.

Notably, a porn production also did a pretty good job with both Batman and Catwoman’s costumes.

Out of curiosity, will Harvey Bullock or Rene Montoya ever appear movie form? They made Flass a Bullockesque character in appearance, not unlike the corrupt Lt. Eckhardt from the 1989 movie. They had a Montoya-like character in the second. I had actually guessed that she was a mole because they hadn’t named her Montoya. The inclusion of Hugh Foley was an interesting touch.

The lack of an actual Batmobile in this series was an interesting and unexpected decision. Mostly because it’s the kind of thing that directors/producers seem to like to have fun with.

One of the things that struck me is that, starting at the second movie, was that Gotham really had too many good and loyal servants. Commissioner Loeb, a corrupt piece of work in the comics, was actually a good commish. Mayor Garcia. By the time Harvey Dent came along, the city already seemed like it was in good hands.

Whenever a series of movies conclude, I always feel a bit of loss for the villains who weren’t used. I liked that this one introduced some less common ones, like Ra’s, Scarecrow and (a non-drooly version of) Bane. I’m sorry that Riddler and Penguin didn’t get a showing. One of these days I want to see a master franchise. Five movies or more. Let it build, let it continue, and so on.

We begin with an amusingly bland description from the intentionally-bland wikipedia: “Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist punk-rock collective that stages politically provocative impromptu performances in Moscow, on subjects such as the status of women in Russia, and most recently against the election campaign of Prime Minister Putin for president of Russia.”* In particular, they seem to dislike like that Putin has made an informal political alliance or understanding with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.

So as you may already know, the reason this punk rock group is presently a cause célèbre, and earning mentions on NPR (that earns double takes for treating the band’s name as utterly unremarkable) is their now-famous anti-Vladimir Putin cathedral performance:**

Let’s compare what’s happening in Russia to these young ladies to what we would expect would be happening to them had they done something similar in the United States. Continue Reading →

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.”

When we talk about school choice, one aspect of it that I don’t see discussed enough is the effect that our current model has on larger society. Namely, our districting system has distorting effects on real estate prices and economic segregation. If you’re against sprawl, school choice can mitigate that.

Under the current model, one of the first questions people with kids ask about living in a particular part of town is how good the schools are. With good schools, demand rises. With bad schools, demand falls. There is no way for this not to have a significant effect on how much homes in a particular area cost.

I went to a five-star high school. I wasn’t actually in a remarkably nice neighborhood, and also feeding into to my middle school was a larger community of blue collar types and fishing families. There were constant efforts to get my middle school removed from the mix. A few years ago, they succeeded. Now, kids from my neighborhood and the fishing neighborhood now go to school with a lot of other families that make their living on the sea. The end result is that instead of a five-star school, they have a four-star school (still lots of suburbanites). It’s apparently already having a deleterious effect on real estate prices.

It might be preferable that families across the economic spectrum live together and have their children go to school together, but it’s not realistic. Even if they stick around, their kids are likely going to private school. If they can’t afford private school, they’ll go somewhere that they’re comfortable sending their kids to the local public school. Hence, sprawl. Hence, exponentially higher neighborhood-exclusivity requirements. You don’t just build the houses bigger and get better asking prices because people want bigger and more expensive houses, you do so in order to keep out the children of fishermen and, if you can, auto mechanics.

So if we want to curb the economic divide, one way of doing that is to separate school from housing. School choice is something that might help. Or, I should say, absent school choice then economic segregation becomes much harder. Busing is pretty much the only other option, and that’s politically quite difficult.

In some places, such as where I grew up, districts are drawn by relatively arbitrary lines outside of city and/or county limits. This sort of thing does exacerbate the problem, but only to a degree. Both the old and new high school of my old stomping ground were in the same district (arguably, it’s only because it was in the same district as the five-star that the four-star looked so bad). Beyond that, the Big City district has schools that run across the spectrum. The schools that cater to the well-to-do actually get less money than the others (they need it less) but knock the socks off them. And so, if you want to live in a place that’s going to send you to one of those schools, housing prices skyrocket. It’s possible that it distorts it even further because you want to live in the middle of that school’s jurisdiction, lest you get carted off the same way my old neighborhood did.

Anyhow, regardless of what we think of school choice in the overall, this is very pertinent to the discussion at hand. To the extent that we want to argue the problem is with suffering communities that are poor and isolated, the current model arguably exacerbates that isolation. A school system that is less dependent on geography and housing would, among other things, make it harder and less desirable for the well-to-do to isolate themselves for their kids’ sakes. They’d more likely be in the same lottery as everyone else.

Incidentally, the places I have lived out west had an ageographic system of schooling. There were vouchers and charters, but mostly they didn’t pick your high school by where you lived. They had a lottery. I’m not going to say that there wasn’t neighborhood segregation, but there was less of it. You couldn’t guarantee your kid went to X-school by living in X-neighborhood. Where I live now this is mostly the case due to the fact that the town has only one set of schools, but that wasn’t the case where I lived in Deseret. Everyone wanted into High School X. All you could really do was cross your fingers, though. High School X probably wasn’t as well-performing as it could have been if they could have gotten their students based on living in the right neighborhood, but High School Z actually wasn’t that bad, cause it had good kids from the right neighborhood going to it.

You don’t have to have vouchers or charters to institute such a system, of course. That last part is mostly in reference to their being advantages to not having the neighborhood schools of which we are so fond.

Kristen Stewart, the attractive actress who woodenly plays the Mary Sue heroine of the astonishingly bad yet ridiculously popular “Twilight” movies by never smiling ever (seriously, this is the best I think she can do), turns out to have been having a fling with her director in that Snow White movie I didn’t see and probably will never see even though it has that guy who played Thor in it who I think is kind of cool. Ms. Stewart was very publicly dating her co-star from the movies, that kinda-creepy-looking Robert Pattinson guy who seems to have eyeliner tattooed on his face. The director, Rupert Sanders, is married and has children with his wife, who happens to have also been an actor in that Snow White movie I am likely never going to see. (As far as I know, they’re normal-looking, although she does high fashion modeling so she probably looks weird doing that.)

Celebrity gossip. So what? 

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