Not a Potted Plant

This young lady feels sorry for herself because her full time well paying writing job does not afford her the adventure and glamour of a TV show’s heroine. I know lots of people who would say she’s flat out made it at age 22.

Seems to me the world is her oyster. My dear, just consider how very, very much worse it could have been. You could have made the same mistake so many of your peers did, and gone to law school. Instead you’re being well compensated to do something you love. Mazel tov.

Matthew Yglesias is complaining that too much transit is going towards rural states:

Only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas, and the quantity is dropping, so naturally the U.S. Department of Transportation proudly announced today that “of the $500 million in TIGER 2012 funds available for grants, more than $120 million will go to critical projects in rural areas.”

This has been one of Yglesias’s ongoing things, the overspending in rural America. To be honest, in the case of transit, the Interstates out here are probably nicer than they need to be. They’re repaving the Interstate between Callie and Redstone when, to be honest, I hadn’t noticed the slightest bit of a problem. So I’m not entirely unsympathetic to his viewpoint.

He goes on…

You see this basic dynamic in all kinds of federal grant programs. Typically any kind of rational grant formula would fail to give money to rural areas in a manner that’s consistent with rural areas’ strength in the U.S. Senate. Therefore you end up with either implicit or explicit special set-asides for rural areas.

It’s an article of faith among many that because of that damnable Senate, we overspend in rural areas. There is some truth to it, but it’s actually more complicated than it appears, if we are to look at aggregate spending. Per-capita spending in Montana and the Dakotas, for instance, ranges from somewhat to very high (between 12-30% more than the national average). However, public spending in Idaho is comparable to that of California (-10%) and Utah is downright cheap (-20%, only Minnesota gets less) despite the fact that they have two senators just like everywhere else. Wyoming is a special case, bringing in a lot of money due on account of its natural resources and the NMLA. Take that out (and we should, since that’s merely kicking half of their money back to them) and they’re somewhere below average. If the senate were as powerful as they say in the making of donor states and beneficiary states, this would not really be the case. Of course, the aggregate power of the farming states and the senate leads to the farm subsidies, which I believe to be among the things that differentiate Montana and the Dakotas (and others) from Idaho and Utah (which do less farming).

He does have a point with regard to the low unemployment rates.

On Yglesias’s other point, we don’t traditionally spend federal funds in accordance with who delivers the taxation. There are some attempts at this, with Social Security and whatnot, and there are government favors that rich people buy, but it’s not our organizing principle. We try to hand it out according to economic need, and per-capita transit (for example) is going to cost more in rural places than urban ones. Complaints that they’re not “earning their keep” and suggesting that we deny further assistance on this basis are not ones the people making this argument make in many other contexts. To be fair, it may be in our interest to invest more in economic hotspots and areas of economic growth with an eye towards spurring people to move there, but there are reasons not to go whole-hog and simply smoke people out by denying them infrastructure (by denying them farm subsidies on the other hand…).

Disclosure: I live in a rural place. This not a permanent arrangement and it’s unlikely that we will end up in a place as rural as we are now.

My uncle died this weekend in a senseless auto-versus-bicycle collision. His funeral is Thursday, in Wisconsin. I truly do thank you my Readers in advance for your sympathies. But I do not write today to seek sympathy for the loss. I write to point out a dilemma imposed upon me by this very saddening turn of events.

Death, you see, cares nothing for one’s professional obligations.

Continue Reading →

Well, it’s one part bookstore and one part coffeeshop. A competing chain of B&N. I come here because, aside from Starbucks and convenient stores, it is the only place in Redstone where I can get frou-frou coffee after 5pm.

There are two downsides, the first is that the WiFi here is so bad that while I can read websites, I can’t participate. Trying to comment sends everything all to heck. Too little upload bandwidth, I guess. The second downside is that they don’t let you use the bathroom without an escort. They don’t escort you into the stall, of course, but rather they have to unlock the bathroom for you. This is not good for a place that serves coffee.

In order to compensate for the Internet, I have my phone rigged up for tethering. Since I’ve started relying on WiFi at home, I have bandwidth capacity to spare on my plan.

Here’s an odd thing. The poster for this place here in Redstone has a mildly hipster-looking guy a tattoo and a wedding band. The same guy, I’m pretty sure the same picture, back home in the South has neither the tattoos nor the ring. They’ve been photoshopped on, or off. Either one got the poster before the other, or it has something to do with market research. That would be some pretty wicked market research: I would actually bet that people (whites, anyway) around here are more likely to have tattoos, and more likely to marry young.

I arrived in time for happy hour, which is buy-one-get-one-free. Frustratingly, they won’t let me buy one now and get the free one later. I guess they’re betting I say “never mind the second one” but the end result is that I get two, just in case. I may put the second one to waste. Or drink it cold with a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the coldness.

Sitting here alone with two cups of coffee on the table makes me feel oddly lonely.

Next door to this place is a Rent-a-Center. The existence of Rent-a-Center brings out an unpatriotic side of me. It… should… not… exist. At least not in its current form. A more stunning indictment of American consumerism/capitalism does not come to mind.

It’s amazing to me that kindergarten remains a controversial subject, but a specimen in one of those great laboratories of governmental ideas, the state legislatures, has managed to come up with this…

I went to the Department of Education and got a list of kindergartens and I went to the safety department and got the crime report. … In general, the towns with a kindergarten have 400 percent more crime than other towns in the same county. In every county, the towns and cities with kindergarten had more crime.

You know, I’m a sucker for counterintuitive conclusions about things that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. But I don’t think this one holds up to analysis.

Rule #1: Shut up.

Rule #2: Seriously. Shut up.

Rule #3: The right time to hire a lawyer is immediately. The right time to start following your lawyer’s advice is also immediately.

Rule #4: You may act contrary to your lawyer’s advice if you choose. However, before doing so, you must hand-write, five times in a row on the same sheet of paper, the following sentence:

I do not care if I lose this case or what bad thing will happen to me when I do lose it, because [doing this thing that my lawyer has told me not to do, e.g., telling off the other party in a drunken phone call] is important enough that in order to do it I am willing to risk a) losing all my money, b) losing every piece of property I own, c) endangering my health, both mental and physical, d) losing my marriage, my children, my career, and all of my friendships, and e) going to prison.

Once you give the signed original of that document to your lawyer for notarization and safekeeping, you may then act contrary to her advice, in the manner you wish. (Protip: you’ll be seeing that document again later.)

Rule #5: The words “all” and “every” are intended literally. This is especially true when used in the context of documents, evidence and information. You are not a good judge of what constitutes evidence, nor whether that evidence is relevant or beneficial. Let your lawyer make those decisions, that’s why you hired her.

Rule #6: In litigation, your lawyer is your only friend in the world. Treat her like a friend. That includes paying her (in full and on time). It also includes not insulting her and not verbally abusing her staff.

Rule #7: The police are not your friends. They are not there to help you. They have no intention of “excluding you as a suspect.” They are lying to you. Yes, they are. See Rule #1.

Rule #8: Publicity, press, and the media always hurt and never help. Going to the media is the mark of a desperate amateur whose actions can only be reasonably interpreted as that he not only wants to lose his case, but he also wants to be humiliated in the process. See Rule #1.

Rule #9: At least half of the people who said they’d help you if it came down to a court case will fail to do so when actually asked, up to and including ignoring a subpoena. Many of them will not only not support you, but will actually betray you and support the other side. The ratio of former friends who will not help you in court when you ask them to is typically closer to “all” than “half.” See rule #6.

Rule #10: In case you didn’t think I really meant it the first two times. Shut. Up.

In a conversation the other day, Stillwater made the comment:

Another is that culturally determined self-identity markers will continue to define preferences even as we slide down the rabbit hole. That means culturally determined self-identification markets will create labor stickiness even as the market demands increasingly flexible labor markets.

In the Redstone documentary, there was a point, before The Company went under, when with the increasing wages and benefits of the workers nudged the company towards finding ways to mine that required less labor. It involved dynamite and trucks. Even though there weren’t hazardous conditions in the mine anymore, you can imagine how well that went over with the employees that were laid off.

What I found to be particularly interesting, however, were the guys that they talked to who still had jobs. One of them was kept on as a forklift driver. Rather than being excited, he was rather frustrated. He wasn’t a forklift driver, he was a miner. This of the career that the movie spent the first 40 minutes discussing how dreadful it all was.

It makes sense, though, in more ways than one. He had bought into the mining culture. The fact that it was dangerous, unpleasant, and not remarkably lucrative actually only adds to the degree to which the tendency to identify it is natural. Nationalism is often at its peak when something is wrong. When you don’t have much else to hold on to, you hold on to your identity.

As an aside, this is one of my theories for why the south behaves as it often does. It’s disproportionately poor, stricken with racial strife, and was on the wrong side of two of the nation’s greatest moral struggles. Confronted with all of this, what you primarily have is your pride. Those (whites) with the least are the ones who fly the Confederate Flag most proudly.

Anyhow, back to the career sector, there are various jobs where one’s employment becomes a cultural identity. I notice this with teachers, for instance. Their desks and sometimes their homes are full of teacher pep-talk about how important the job is and so on. It’s there to a greater extent among teachers than it is doctors, and the former are notably less financially appreciated than the latter.

By and large, my own career has been wide and varied. Due to the flexibility that was required from one move to the next, if it was IT-related, and you’d pay me for it, I’d do it. I eventually settled into QA work for a couple consecutive jobs and identified with it. When my child is born and I find out it’s a boy or a girl, I plan to order a blue or pink baby outfit that says “QA Approved.” Geeks are, of course, notoriously proud of their occupational culture.

Little of this speaks to the meat of Stillwater’s comment, which is more broadly on the weightier subject of how our environments influence our career decisions. I don’t have a whole lot to add to that except an anecdote from back when I was in high school.

I was raised in a place with lots and lots of engineers. In sociology class, the teacher asked everyone to raise their hand if they planned to be… a doctor (one or two hands), a lawyer (no hands), an engineer (2/3 of the class raise their hands). I doubt that 2/3 of the class actually went into engineering, but it’s important and worthwhile to note how much the careers of our parents and the local culture influence where we aim to go in life.

Sheila Tone, my coblogger on Hit Coffee and a former journalist whose present legal career presently has her doing a lot of work with the disadvantaged, wrote a post on the Rolling Stone article that’s been getting a lot of attention:

This article isn’t really about homelessness or the middle-class downturn. It’s about welfare. Its message is that we need more welfare, fast, and it needs to be made easier to get. Liberals on the Internet are aflutter over this piece, because it passionately validates the premises that people on welfare are JUST LIKE YOU and are there, as the four homeless sources here are presented, through absolutely no fault of their own hardworking, responsible selves. This is advocacy journalism, not objective journalism. That’s OK if readers actually know the rules.

But I suspect readers don’t really know how that works. I also suspect most don’t understand that with stories like this — where the sources are homeless, on welfare, or otherwise down and out, and they’re talking about what led them to their situation — reporters usually take what they say on good faith. I suspect that most readers assume that if, for instance, a homeless woman says she used to be a successful nursery owner in Moab, Utah, with revenues of $300,000 a year, that the reporter somehow made sure this was true before putting it in a magazine. How about if a guy who won’t give us his name says he was a soldier? How about if a homeless couple claims they always worked and made $60,000 a year before the recession hit? All on faith. There’s no way to verify that stuff, not under the conditions most reporters work. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t tell you they’re not leaving out some major, unflattering piece of the puzzle — their substance abuse problems, their criminal backgrounds, a thousand other possible common flaws that don’t mean we can’t feel sorry for them, but would be relevant to an informed opinion.

Furthermore, the average reader may not know that giving a sympathetic hard-luck story publicity — especially national publicity — often leads to an outpouring of generosity. Thus, a motive to shade the truth. There is also the fact that in general, more people lie than you might think. This is especially true of people claiming to have suffered circumstances that elicit automatic, unquestioning sympathy from others — homelessness, sexual victimization, domestic violence. And yet writers, in my experience, are less likely to scrutinize people who make such claims. This is sometimes due to blinding sympathy, and sometimes due to a well-grounded fear of being attacked as heartless by the true believers. (”How would YEEEEW like to be … [raped, homeless, a sweet mild-mannered girl beaten by her dirtbag boyfriend]?”)

In the comments, she links to this Antiplanner post, also on the Rolling Stone article, with this provocative closing line:

While the story Rolling Stone tells of homeless people is heartrending, it is not a story of America’s declining middle class oppressed by the 1 percent. It is a story of working-class people oppressed by the middle class.