Not a Potted Plant

It’s been over twenty-four hours since I wrote about Newt Gingrich, so I’ll complete my trilogy of observations about his insurgency here. I’d be less interested in Gingrich if it didn’t look for all the world like he’s about to win the South Carolina primary. South Carolina voters, at least, seem to like what he’s selling. And the political goods hawked in Gingrich’s shop, if not exactly theocracy, are a flavor of republican democracy that’s been flavored by it. I offer evidence below, from the man’s own words, which I propose demonstrates why he ought not be President — Christianity is more important to him than the American value of religious tolerance. Continue Reading →

Felix Salmon complains about a pricing innovation I had not yet heard of: ATM’s working off a percentage fee rather than a flat fee. Or, as these things generally go, whichever fee is greater. In the case he cites, it’s $3 or 3%.

Look, I’m not going to get all market-worshipper on this, but as far as price gouging goes, this is far less of a big deal than what we put up with at sports arenas, amusement parks, and so on. If I don’t like Holiday Inn’s charge, I really, genuinely can go elsewhere. Maybe this will take up like wildfire and all of them will be doing this and so at some point in the future I won’t have a choice.

Even then, though, the pricing model itself doesn’t seem particularly outrageous. In order to trip up to the percentage-based fee, that means that you have to be extracting more than $100. If you’re extracting more than $100, maybe you need to find the nearest branch of your bank. If anything, I think this fee is to guide people to do just that. Extracting large sums from an ATM machine actually does cost them more money. It means more regular restocking. So I can very easily see why they would be cool with people taking out $40, but wanting those who intend to take more out to think twice, go elsewhere, or pay extra.

Of course it does not cost them $3 per small transaction or an extra $3 for a transaction of $200. But the ATM, the security involved, and restocking all do cost money. Is Holiday Inn making money off the ATM? I would imagine so. Maybe it would be better if they provided it as a cost-neutral convenience. Maybe we should go to hotels that do just that.

But really, there has never been a better time for a consumer as far as this stuff goes. More and more places offer cash-back on purchases to the point that I almost never use an ATM anymore (not even my own bank’s). But more to the point, we need cash a lot less than we used to. $100 in cash goes a lot further than it used to with credit card swipers everywhere. And if there is one benefit to the increasing consolidation of banks, it’s that it’s more likely your bank has an ATM nearby just in case you happen to need one. The last couple of times I did use an ATM it was while traveling. A quick google and a quick drive and no ATM fees at all.

Now, maybe it’s not worth it to get in your car and drive for ten minutes in order to save $3 or $6. If so, that only suggests that the Holiday Inn’s convenience charge is reasonable.

If everyone said they saw “X” and you didn’t, would your first instinct be to wonder if there was something wrong with your vision, that “X” was there and you had somehow missed it? Make It worse – what if your failure to see “X” represented not just a mistake or oversight on your part, but something that you would call a serious moral deficiency?

That’s how I’ve felt the last two days since the Republican debate on Fox generated massive amounts of the online equivalent of hooting and hollering about Newt Gingrich the racist. If I’ve really been blind to something important and obvious, I want to correct myself. But the honest truth is that I didn’t see any “there” there.

Let me be very clear: I do not want Newt Gingrich to be the next President. (Not that I believe there is a serious danger of this actually happening.) I disagree sharply with his views on basic issues about the Constitution. He has already promised to break his oath of office if elected. He is not temperamentally, intellectually, or experientially suited for a job as an executive. If it came down to a choice between the incumbent and Gingrich, I would prefer four more years of Barack Obama, a weak leader, a sellout with respect to civil liberties, and overall a profound disappointment. Obama is at least less of a loose cannon.

But I have simply not heard or felt the outrageous racism of which he has recently been widely accused, including by writers here whose opinions and insights I respect. I did hear him do something else, of which I am not particularly fond and which does not make a great deal of sense to me. But I haven’t been able to summon up the same righteous indignation about this thing that I did not see or observe. That’ll come at the end of the post, if you can make it all the way there without dissolving into an apoplexy of outrage at my appalling racial insensitivity.

Continue Reading →

At Blinded Trials, co-blogger Will Truman offers this story:

…one of the reasons that my wife’s hospital is short-staffed on obstetrical services is that one of the doctors refuses to deliver any more babies after a prolonged lawsuit (that he won). Rightly or wrongly, there is the perception among doctors that being sued is not in accordance with how careful you are or how good you are, but rather a game of roulette. Wrong patient (or patient family) + bad outcome = lawsuit. And once you’ve been sued, you’ve already lost. The only question is how much you have lost (maybe a little, maybe a lot).

I believe this to have a detrimental effect on care that outstrips the positive effect of “I’d better be a good doctor or I will get sued.”

For all of my eagerness to defend the tort litigation system, I think that this episode, and Will’s trenchant evaluation of it, demands a thoughtful response. Dr. Truman’s colleague (whom I’ll call Dr. Colleague for the rest of the post) did nothing wrong in the delivery in question and was ultimately vindicated, yet still become embittered enough by a lawsuit that he withdrew from a vital practice area.  Now the world is less one OB-GYN, a practice group in high demand compared to supply. The problem is not that the legal system reached a bad result. The problem surely is that the transaction cost — both monetary and non-monetary — of reaching a good result was so high that Dr. Colleague decided that “The risk isn’t worth the reward.” I, of all people, can’t possibly accuse him of being unreasonable.

“Once you’ve been sued, you’ve already lost.” Will is right. That is a problem, one endemic to litigation. That makes this a problem resident in my profession, not Dr. Colleague’s.

Continue Reading →

Newt Gingrich channels the legend of Andrew Jackson*:

[Gingrich] told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South Carolina’s primary election that as president he would ignore supreme court rulings he regards as legally flawed. He implied that would also extend to the 1973 decision, Roe vs Wade, legalising abortion.

“If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it,” said Gingrich to cheers.

Yes. Yes, he can. As long as he does not mind behaving lawlessly.

Continue Reading →

As I have mentioned in the past, it’s a bit ironic that so many of the white cross arguments involve Utah. By “white cross” arguments, I mean the desire on the part of secularists to do away with the tradition of white crosses to mark the death of someone. The ironic thing about Utah is that it is the one state in the continental United States where the cross is not a symbol of the dominant religion (Mormons don’t really do crosses). In fact, it’s Utah first and foremost that I look at and actually believe that no, the cross does not have to be an establishing symbol of a specific religion (or series of religions). If that is what Utah were going for, they’d have little tooting Moronis on the site of the road. Or something.

As far as such crosses go, I can understand the objections even though I don’t actually share them. If anything, Christians themselves should be kind of anxious about their holy symbol being used for something that isn’t religious in nature. Sort of like the secularization of Christmas.

Arapaho makes extensive use of roadside crosses. And there is more of an establishment concern here than elsewhere, because they are put up by the state. There is one stretch of dangerous highway where my wife and I counted 30-something over just a few miles. They were put up by the state to underline, once twice and thirty-something times to drive carefully.

And part of the problem is that there is no other symbol that you see on the side of the road and know immediately what it means.

Which brings me to the point of this post: If crosses are really a problem, those that want to take the crosses down need to come up with a replacement. That would sell me on the issue. Instead of saying “Take down that cross” they should say “How about we use this instead.” I don’t know, and don’t really care what is used. It could be just a white stake in the ground. Something immediately recognizable and identifiable. Arapaho can put up a sign as you enter the Danger Zone saying (more concisely so that people don’t get into accidents as they try to read the sign) “Hey, you’re about to see a bunch of white stakes in the ground. This is where people died. So drive carefully!”

The Wife and I had a dinner party for two other married couples and a single friend over the weekend. But I did not have to miss substantial amounts of time, and found preparation significantly well relaxed, because of good planning and the magic of my sous vide oven allowing me to cheat on prep time. Continue Reading →

North Dakota has the most. Followed by Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, South Carolina, Montana, Vermont, Michigan, Maine, Kansas, New Hampshire, Florida, Indiana, Idaho, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Arizona.

Russell Saunders’s comment on a recent post of my knocked loose a box containing something I wanted to post about.

Back when I was in Deseret, the vast majority of my coworkers were somewhere to the right of center. It’s a Mormon part of the country and Mormons tilt to the right. It was a white collar employer, and white collar jobs are disproportionately taken by Mormons. The COO was the bishop of the local church, and people often got jobs through him. My own department, where word-of-mouth hiring expanded the rebellious gentile population’s network, was the only exception.

There was a guy who worked in Account Management who I will call Nick. Nick was the prototypical Super-Mormon, for good and for ill. Practically a Huntsman, though that wasn’t his name. He was ambitious and had a good work ethic. He had a family of five (at the time, nine now) to support, two kids by birth and one foreign-adopted. He had at least a touch of Mormon Male Entitlement Syndrome: God told him he was special and we had an obligation to respect that, or at least defer to His wisdom on the matter. For reasons I do not understand, he liked me. Professionally, we got along great. He was congenial on the surface, but also a bit frosty to people he perceived as Others. He was the type of guy who, when he thought someone had borrowed some of his cottage cheese, sent a company-wide email saying, in essence, “DON’T TOUCH MY STUFF!” But, in his sense of inners-and-outers, when I told him what had happened (I opened the fridge, his cottage cheese came tumbling out, and I spent half my lunch period cleaning the mess) he was all backslaps and no problems and the girls at the office sure do love to overstuff the fridge so we don’t have places to put things don’t they?

When I left, he was not one of the ones I was anxious to stay in contact with (to my detriment, now that I think about it, he is the type that would have written a stellar letter of recommendation).

I don’t know where I got the impression, but I had assumed, without even assuming, that he was a pretty hard core Republican. The guy exemplified a type of Republicanism. The type of Republicanism I am less fond of, to be sure, but all the same. When he sent me a friend request on Facebook, I fully expected to see that he had a business degree from BYU, that he was LDS, and that he was a Republican.

I was one for four. He got a political science degree from [Deseret] State University. He is, in fact, LDS (Not much of a guess on my part. I’ve never tagged anyone with MMES that wasn’t LDS). But he is a Democrat. And feels comfortable enough about this, even working in an office full of Republicans that fired its legal counsel because he was gay and under a family heavily involved in local Republican politics. I was impressed not only that he wasn’t entirely who I thought he was, but that he wasn’t shy about it. It makes me think that I did not know him as well as I thought I did.