Not a Potted Plant

Antecedent to Leaguefest, Mrs. Likko and I are visiting with family in Wisconsin. Obviously, being on vacation presents a more relaxed sort of world view. A time when money and calories matter less than “real time.” A more relaxed pace of activity. Less stress.
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Education:

[Ed1] Abel Keogh ponders the his third grade son being given a (closed) email address.

[Ed2] Private schools are struggling. A lot of what people used to need private schools, they now have charter schools for.

[Ed3] National Journal makes the case for the cost-effectiveness of supersized universities.

[Ed4] Matthew Yglesias makes the pretty obvious, but under-discussed point: Don’t go to college if you aren’t going to graduate. Another way of looking at this is that perhaps we (as a nation) shouldn’t be sending people to college who won’t graduate.

Health:

[H1] I was and am neutral-to-skeptical on PPACA, but the exchanges are one of the areas that I had hopes for. I’m pleased as punch that rates are coming out below cost estimates. Go markets!

[H2] John Goodman (not that John Goodman) thinks that we’re headed to a two-tiered health care system. Or rather, a more formal two-tier system, as we already have one. This is actually not far from my own predictions. I just don’t see it as dire.

[H3] Apparently some are suspecting that babies can be too fat. Great, something else to worry about…

[H4] Bicycle highways were once the future of transit.

Energy:

[En1] How the oil boom is improving the working class in North Dakota and maybe the tribes in Montana.

[En2] Scientific American writes on the revised estimates of the rate of global warming.

[En3] David Wogan argues that fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere, while NewScientist looks at wave power farms.

[En4] The Washington Post likes to use deceptive photography.

Business:

[B1] Doug Mataconis and Greg Beato ask whether driverless cars represent a threat to our privacy. Most likely, though I suspect that the threats will come in other forms, even if driverless cars don’t materialize.

[B2] As an avid Waze user, I’m keeping an eye on Google’s interest in purchasing Waze. I don’t know why, but I feel a little resentful that my input is helping make some Israeli a billion dollars.

[B3] T-Mobile’s no-contract plans appears to be working well.

[B4] The New York Times demonstrates how not to take a tribute

[B5] Successful people leave their loser friends behind. Fortunately for me, ambition is underrepresented amongst my friends.

America:

[A1] American morality.

[A2] The IRS has been targeted adoptive families. Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from a number of my friends, they probably had it coming. The list of right-wingers adopting kids is endless.

[A3] The Christian Science Monitor explains why high jackpot lotteries suck. I hate lotteries.

[A4] I wrote the Free State Project off when they chose inferior candidate New Hampshire over superior candidates Wyoming and Montana. But Garrett Quinn says they’re having some success.

[A5] The case against Portland’s rejection of water fluoridation.

[A6] I don’t know why I think this as cool as I do, but here are some illustrations of what New York City would look like on other planets. Also, what if Earth had a ring?

World:

[W1] Dave Schuler on the violence in Sweden and England. Police in England are arresting people for hateful Facebook posts, while in Sweden the people are resorting to vigilantism.

[W2] Robin Simcox looks at why soldiers get targeted by Muslim extremists.

Abigail Rine has a triumphant piece at The Atlantic about how some Evangelicals are rethinking the whole virginity thing:

In a recent summit on human trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart made some surprising remarks about why victims of rape may not try to escape their captors. Her conclusion? They, like she, may have been raised in a culture that says a woman’s worth in rooted in her sexual purity. Recounting an anecdote from a childhood teacher who compared having sex to being chewed like a piece of gum, Smart, a Mormon, tells her audience that she “felt crushed” after being raped: “Who could want me now? I felt so dirty and so filthy. I understand, so easily, all too well, why someone wouldn’t run.”

Smart might be the most famous figure to speak out against her conservative religious culture’s sexual ethos, but she’s not alone. Increasingly in recent weeks, prominent evangelical writers and bloggers have also decried the emphasis placed on sexual purity in conservative Christianity. While exposés of evangelical purity culture are hardly new (see, for one, Andy Kopsa’s recent article in The Atlantic), what is noteworthy is that these criticisms are beginning to emerge from within conservative religious circles themselves.

As someone that is not an Evangelical, I have very limited standing in their community to argue how they should or shouldn’t view sex. I don’t view sex in quite the same way that they – or Catholics – do. So it would be easy for me to say that they ought to take a more broadminded view like I do for, more or less, the same reasons that I think people who have no real reason to ought to agree with me on everything.

That said, I am considerably more sympathetic to their worldview than a lot of other folks. Certainly most of the folks at The League, and a fair number of people at Hit Coffee as well. My primary points of disagreement are (a) the inordinate focus on the female role in all of this, and (b) my belief that under the current social structure it is simply unrealistic to expect most people to wait for marriage. Evangelicals do have lower premarital sex rates than non-Evangelicals, but both rates are quite high and I have my doubts that the social prescriptions they apply to get that 10% reduction are ultimately worth it. But my context, of course, is different than theirs.

The article looks at both issues, the focus on women and the practicality of the demand. And so it shouldn’t be much surprise that I liked a lot, if not all, of it.

There are at least four dynamics through which to view sex that isn’t expressly procreational: physical consequences, economic consequences, emotional consequences, and spiritual consequences. It’s the last one, as much as the others, that Evangelicals are concerned with to a far greater extent than myself. And it’s there that I generally lack standing. Liberals primarily look at the first three. Usually through an eye towards mitigating the consequences (government support for children, abortion availability, social acceptance of sex, etc.) and an acceptance of the underlying act (the sex). I am not entirely unsympathetic to this view, but I am not entirely on board with it, either.

Which brings me back to (a) and (b). The first item in the piece involves this:

Moreover, while women are subjected to the language of purity and seen as irreparably contaminated after having sex, the same is not true for men. According to Beck, a boy losing his virginity is seen as a “mistake, a stumbling,” a mode of behavior that can be changed and rehabilitated. This, he argues, exposes a double standard at work in the language of sexual purity: women who have sex are seen as “damaged goods,” but men who have sex are not.

Which I do genuinely view as a problem. If men are the accelerator and women are the breaks, then both matter and arguably it’s the accelerator that matters more between the two. A distressing percentage of female first sexual encounters is “unwanted” (meaning not that they were raped, but that they were pressured into it). The men and the boys are the driver here. Which suggests to some degree that at the very least, parity in our response is advisable. And between the two views, premarital sex as an irreversible damage of one’s state of being, or premarital sex as a stumbling mistake, I suspect that a move towards the latter would be better with the effects that I am mostly concerned about (physical, economic, emotional) and the lesser (though not absent) extent I am worried about the fourth (spiritual). But, if I’m wrong about that, it’d be good to start coming down a lot harder on the men.

The second part is trickier. I read a chart a while back that the average age of first sexual encounter hasn’t actually changed nearly as much as the average age of marriage. If our young people are to wait until they’re married, then we need to start re-evaluating the post-collegiate progression. This is an area where the LDS Church has taken the bull by the horns in a way that Evangelicals have not. Not without reason, though. Most people just aren’t enthusiastic about their kids getting married young. Nor make the social changes required to re-order society in such a fashion (it would likely involve more welfare, and the elimination of “the college experience” – albeit not college itself – for many).

It also may not be possible more generally. The LDS Church succeeds in large part because it’s top-down hierarchy gives it greater latitude in shaping its culture. What we think of as “Evangelicals” is decentralized and lacks much structure at all. I personally have mixed feelings about the extent to which I want society to move in that direction, but it’s probably a moot question unless you can get the elites on board, and I don’t think you can get the elites on board.

Some of which I consider to be a shame. In a lot of ways I want to side with the knuckle-draggers and prudes. And I do in the cases where I think they’re right. I share their distaste for sex in popular entertainment. I share – at the least – a skepticism towards promiscuity. There’s really only one main difference between my idealized timeline (love-sex-marriage-cohabitation-kids) and theirs (love-marriage-sex/cohabitation-kids) and a lot more differences between them and their rivals (which I’d list out, but most orders are considered okay or the appropriateness is situation-specific).

Outside of “lookee here” articles in The Atlantic, I wouldn’t expect Evangelicals to ever actually accept premarital sex to the extent that I do. But any movement in this regard would be welcome. I’d guess the concern, other than the obvious, to believe it’s “give an inch, they’ll take a mile.” Which I understand, though it’s questionable to the extent that the hard line has actually worked. And there reaches a point that, for a whole lot of people, the way that things “should be” is so divorced from the reality on the ground that it’s not applicable advice to guide real world behavior.

Sayeth NewDealer:

Mega-Conglomerates and international trade are not relatively knew. They are as old as civilization. The Mega Conglomerate can be dated to the days of the various East and West Indies Companies if not before. Also Llyod’s of London. There has been international banking since the Medicis if not before.

And I am a city and urban kind of guy. I like big cities and even though I am not a complete neo-liberal like Matt Y, I do believe in economies of scale and that mega-conglomerates are necessary to produce highly-advanced goods like medicine and tons of other things on an affordable level. There are 7 billion people in the world, it would cause a lot of suffering and damage to go back to isolated agricultural communities and think even the most radical among us would find such communities mind-numbingly boring.

While I agree with ND that we cannot go back to the agricultural days nor would we want to, I think this invests a lot employment at large corporations and it’s potentially problematic to think in these terms. Among other things, reliance on large corporations portends some serious employment problems. Between a third and two-thirds of jobs are produced by small businesses. Actually, it has less to do with sheer size than it does with how new or old a company is, but that tracks with size to a degree (comparatively few large corporations are new).

It should be added that, though these jobs pay less on average than large corporate jobs, it’s not quite right to think of them in terms of shops with low-paying customer service jobs. A majority of my employers have been relatively small companies (I’ve worked at or for one, maybe two corporations you’ve heard of). I’ve also interviewed at more of these places than I have at large corporations. This relates at least somewhat to my field, but I can’t say that IT people were more than half of the staff at any of these places (I was the solo IT person at one of them). These jobs tend to be less stable than megacorp jobs, and pay less in the aggregate, but they’re extremely important.

It’s not just romanticism that has Republicans and Democrats singing the praises of small business and entrepreneurship. This is, quite honestly, one of the strongest arguments for a single-payer health care system there is. (Though, I should add, that single-payer isn’t the only approach – indeed, most plans that would move us away from employer-based health care would do us some good.) It also informs my views in the other direction on taxes and employment law.

As an economy, we can’t really rely on the multinationals. They reach a certain point and they can maintain a holding pattern, or more easily find ways to do more with less people in a way that’s harder for small and growing companies.

Matthew Yglesias defense Qualify Coffee’s “coffee roaster internship” program:

Their calculus is that, rather than picking who to hire first and then train them, it makes more sense to train first and see who does the best job of taking to the training. It’s not obvious to me that Qualia’s theory is correct, but it’s not obvious to me that Qualia’s theory is wrong either. The problem of identifying the right job candidate when you know the candidate doesn’t have the skills you want is a difficult one, and it’s appropriate that different firms will have different ideas about how to deal with it.

He makes a good point. I wonder the extent to which the calculus is so skewed that they won’t be looking for people to pay for the privilege of interning as a coffee roaster.