Ask Burt Likko Anything, 2.3

Burt Likko 11 Comments

Mike Schilling asks: “What’s wrong with the Dodgers?” Which I’ve been steaming about for a while. There’s only one possible answer at this point.

It isn’t lack of talent. The Dodgers have the second-highest payroll in Major League Baseball, given healthy rosters on all teams. And they have some very high quality players to put out in the field, particularly a trio of starting pitchers in Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Hyun-Jin Ryu who should be fearsome adversaries to behold. The fifty-four million dollar outfield of Andre Eithier, Matt Kemp, and Carl Crawford ought to be the core of a new murderer’s row.

But that isn’t happening.
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Why we can’t have objective tests.

Vikram Bath 45 Comments
Will Truman writes about one of the latest twists in the security-obsessed United States: the push to lower lower legal blood alcohol limits. Will’s claim that we are unable to accept even minimal amounts of risk seems obvious to me, which is often a good indication that it is a lie–probably in place to cover a bigger lie.Consider this related factoid: “talking on a cellphone will double the likelihood of an accident. What’s more, it slows a young driver’s reaction time to that of a 70-year-old.”Wow. As bad as a 70-year-old. That certainly doesn’t sound good.

The next question, of course, is why allow 70-year-olds to drive if their reaction times are no better than a texting teen’s? The answer, of course, is that it isn’t the 70-year-old’s fault that he is 70, and we can’t let anyone lose their license without it being their fault. That would make people feel bad.

Even that question is an evasion though. If reaction times are so important though, why don’t we just administer reaction time tests before issuing or renewing a license?

If we really were security-obsessed risk minimizers we’d have hard criteria to evaluate who qualifies to drive. We can’t have that though because a kind, no-criminal-record, but blind and senile granny somewhere who has never been in an accident and doesn’t present but nevertheless presents a real threat would lose her license. The responsible congressmen would have to fire someone and the test would be changed iteratively until granny can get behind the wheel again.

But we do want to pay some token of tribute to security. We can do this without threatening the status quo by passing laws that arbitrarily alter already arbitrary laws about how much of what you can consume how long before driving. And we can regulate arbitrary behaviors so that it remains OK to pee into a bottle while driving as long as you’re not also sexting your girlfriend while you’re do it.

We’re not obsessed with risk minimization. We’re obsessed with ensuring that no one should be prevented from driving without it being their own fault.

Edit: Our hypothetical granny presents a real threat.

Star Trek: Into Diffidence

Burt Likko 26 Comments

Just saw the new Star Trek movie today. It’s… loud. But is it good?

Nob posted a thread many days ago complaining that it seemed like adapted fanfic. And there’s some validity there. But there’s some other issues too, below the fold.

Avast matey, and take ye good heed. HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! If ye be wishin’ t’see this movie, be it on YOUR head an’ not mine if ye read below yonder jump. Arr.
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Daddy’s Day Out

Will Truman 3 Comments

smileylainClancy gave me a wonderful gift today: A day off.

This was made more awesome by the fact that it’s not like she really gets much in the way of days off. What she does get, however, is time away from the baby. More time than she would like, of course, but she is very sympathetic to the alone and away time that I am not getting. So one of her goals over the four-day Memorial Day weekend was that she would get all of her notes done and would be able to look after the baby while I could make a trip to Redstone.

Since we’ll be moving soon, the number of days I will get to spend in Redstone are limited. I can come up here with the baby, of course, but it hinders my ability to soak that fascinating town in. When I’m with the baby, the baby is of course central to my attention.

It’s funny how this can mean so much to me while, prior to the baby’s arrival, days like this were free. Abundant. Over-abundant, really.

I suppose it’s one of those things that you only appreciate it in scarcity.

When I get home, Lain will be asleep. So I’ll likely miss out on seeing her excited face upon my return. At least, I assume that her face would be excited. I see it sometimes in the morning, if I’ve gone on the couch in the living room as Clancy takes the morning shift (feeding, mostly). The’s not ordinarily excited to see me because I’m pretty much always around. When Clancy gets home, though, she blows up in excitement. Some of that is the fact that she’s the milktruck, but I think a lot of that is the appreciation that comes with scarcity.

I haven’t been a father for long enough for it to not blow my mind that, whenever I do leave, that I have a daughter when I get home. My daughter. We’ve waited quite some time for this. We’ve tried to keep expectations to a minimum, since there was reason to believe that pregnancy might be more difficult to attain than it turned out to be.

The other day, an acquaintance mentioned having had a child before the two that I knew about. The child died of a heart abnormality within a couple weeks. It struck a chord because of a trip to Umatilla we had to take when a test on Lain’s heart turned something up. That was the first (and to date, only) threat of losing Lain that we’ve had. But I remember it well enough that, though I immensely enjoyed my day out, I am nonetheless glad they get to be so rare.

Ask Burt Likko Anything, 2.2

Burt Likko 90 Comments

John Howard Griffin asks: “What problems occur because we have a Capitalistic form of legal representation?” Which is a big question. A BIG question. And, although I don’t think Mr. Griffin intended it this way, a trick question. To say we have a “capitalistic legal representation” means that the lawyers get paid money, and hopefully make a profit, for guiding clients through the legal system. Continue Reading →

Ask Burt Likko Anything, 2.1

Burt Likko 6 Comments

Patrick asks:

Let’s say you’re stuck preparing only one set of meals for the rest of your life. I’ll let Tod construct the fanciful description of why.

Breakfast, lunch, or dinner?

Wrinkle: the other two are prepared by two wretchedly unskilled chefs who produce meals that are safe to eat, but half the time they’re unpalatable at best and the other half of the time they’re actively bad.

As I see it, there’s two ways to approach it. Continue Reading →

Triaxial Epistemology

Burt Likko 43 Comments

By way of Popehat, Arnold Kling on a root problem with contemporary political discourse, summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Kling’s three “languages” are ways of talking about politics and government, and they align roughly with the progressive, conservative and libertarian viewpoints. Progressives, Mr. Kling thinks, typically express opinions using an “oppressed-oppressor axis”: societal problems are envisioned mainly as forms of oppression of the weak by the strong. Conservatives favor a “civilization-barbarism axis” and worry about how to defend traditional values and institutions. Libertarians use a “freedom-coercion axis” in which the threat is governmental encroachment on individual choice.

Sometimes you’ll come across a framing so neat and concise it’s hard to imagine how you made such a mental hash of the problem yourself before. As here, at least for me. Of course we’re all talking past each other, and of course everyone else’s axis of political conflict countenances evil, because their axes miss the point completely. You’re moving on the irrelevant X axis, when what matters is how much Y you have, and who the hell are those people over there talking about Z?

Ask Burt Likko Anything, 2.0

Burt Likko 68 Comments

QuestionsLast January’s experiment was fun and I’m leaving a week from tomorrow to go visit family in the Midwest prior to Leaguefest 2013, so we should be able to finish off this round of the ask-anything game right before then.

So here’s the rules again: You get only one question. Ask it in the comment section. I pick five of those questions to answer, one a day over the course of the next week.

In advance: Great Cases No. 6 will be Gibbons v. Ogden. And I feel as though there are three entire books I need to read before I can do it justice: it’s a king-sized case in every sense of the word. Which I’ll get to finishing as soon as I’m done with In The First Circle, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, Ike’s Bluff, and The Mongoliad: Book One.

Linky Friday #26

Will Truman 49 Comments

gah2Food:

[F1] I hate finding out that there’s a kind of meat that I haven’t eaten yet. Now I need to figure out how to get me some swamp rat.

[F2] I didn’t think I wanted to know what was in dog food. I was kind of right.

Development:

[D1] In education, diversity is hard.

[D2] The origins of prejudice?

[D3] I’ve talked in the past about Bregna, a place I used to work that monitored restroom breaks. Sadly, it turns out that tracking workers’ every move can boost productivity.

[D4] The case for and against young marriage. According to the Deseret News, once you’re out of your teens, it doesn’t matter much.

Rad:

[R1] For a potential writing project, I’ve been looking into (mostly Golden Age) superheroes in the Public Domain. Here are a couple of resources I’m using [Wikia][Comicvine] (Warning: the latter link takes up a significant amount of computer resources, do not open if you are running low on RAM)

[R2] Incredible fantasy maps. It seems wrong to me for fictional places not to have maps.

[R3] The National Museum of the USAF provides some cool images to some pretty awesome cockpits.

[R4] Kevin Bullis argues that we need nuclear-powered airplanes. The Air Force proposed it back in the 50’s. The book Idaho Falls mentioned this as indicative of the silliness of the nuclear craze. (Not that there isn’t a difference between what is being proposed here and what was proposed then.)

Money:

[M1] When selling efficient lightbulbs to conservatives, just don’t mention the environmental benefits.

[M2] I’m not usually the kind of guy that spends $100 on shirts, but this shirt has my attention.

[M3] I was all prepared to be outraged at this Jordan Weissman article about how colleges are selling out the poor to court the rich, but then I saw it was primarily about merit scholarships, which I do agree with. Self-righteousness defused.

[M4] The case for congressional raises. I dunno. Are any of these guys really strapped for cash? How much would it take to meet these guys’ next best offer? What about staffers and the like? Also underpaid, also often able to get much more in the private sector.

[M5] More indication that, as far as the banking-housing crisis goes, they knew not what they did. For those that missed it, a previous linky post drew attention to this article, coming to the same conclusion.

[M6] I have to agree with Aaron Tring about why Marvel and DC’s digital comics failed. No doubt they will blame it on the rising cost of paper.

Technology:

[T1] Between Google Glass and this superhuman mask, in the future will we all be dressed up like superheroes?

[T2] Jon Perry takes ten views at concerns of technology putting us out of work. Ron Bailey examines whether the Luddites are right.

[T3] Cell phone networks, democratized? It’s an interesting concept. The question is whether mobile carriers actually want us using less data. I think they do, but at some point once minutes and messages are free, data tiers will be their profit center.

[T4] Huawei has a “ridiculously thin” new smartphone. Thin is nice enough, but I wish it were being used to bring back physical keyboard. Or that it being so thin didn’t mean that we needed to put a cover on it to be thick all over again.

America:

[A1] One in ten Americans would have sex with a robot.

[A2] Dating in the 50’s. And Child-rearing at the turn of the 20th century.

[A3] Far be it for me to get all complimentary of Paul Krugman in the NYT, but I thought this piece on density and housing prices was quite good.

[A4] The New Atlantis has a good piece on the nuclear energy, nuclear waste, and Yucca.

World:

[W1] In Victorian society, ladies defended their honor with Jiu-Jitsu.

[W2] I don’t know if this is the equivalent of New York Times’s trend invention or not, but I found this article about attempts by British people to tone down regional accents to be interesting.

[W3] More than 300,000 babies die in India every year.

Taking A Dump On North Dakota

Will Truman 69 Comments

Forgive me for falling behind on my posting on certain things. It’s time to play catchup. So a while back, Mercatus came up with a rather problematic list of the most and least free states. It rightly got a lot of pushback due to the criteria and weighting that it used. Namely, choosing sides on tort but leaving abortion alone, while also giving 2/3 weighting towards economic freedom over civil liberty freedom. And, of course, everyone is going to weigh these things differently. To their credit, Mercatus gave you some tools to that end.

In response, though, The American Prospect wrote a truly snotty piece critiquing it:

After North Dakota, on their list comes South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. As it happens, a lot of people are moving to North Dakota, but that isn’t because you can be so free there, it’s because the state is experiencing a fossil fuel boom, so there are a lot of good-paying jobs in and around the oil and gas fields. I feel like I’ve read a half-dozen overly long “Letter from North Dakota” magazine articles in the last couple of months, and the picture that gets painted from all of them is that the people flocking there plan to work for a few years, save as much money as they can, and then get the hell back to civilization.

The piece is entitled “Not Fun to Visit, and You Wouldn’t Want to Live There. But the Taxes Are Low!”

North Dakota, what a hellhole. Except not, really. North Dakota is, on most lists, one of the happiest states in the country. And as convenient as it might be to say “People are only moving there because of the jobs, but they hate it there,” there is really little indication that it is true other than the fact that the author of the piece would hate it there. There’s no shortage of people moving to Fargo, on the other end of the state. Nor is there a shortage of people moving to the other listed states, including and especially internal migration.

Now, is this because of the low taxes and disregard for some of the freedoms that liberals care about? I’m certainly not making that claim. Anyone from the south is familiar with the migrant from someplace else who comes in and does nothing but complain about how this place is nothing like the awesome place that they left. It’s tied to jobs, as much as anything. Whether this is tied to low taxes and low regulation is an open question. Mercatus argues that it’s causal. I’m not sure it is, but there does seem to be a relationship, even if it is imperfect and with exceptions.

Waldman closes with the following:

During the 2012 primaries, I wrote about Rick Perry’s love of his tiny home town of Paint Creek, Texas, where he supposedly learned so many valuable lessons about life and America. The most important lesson he learned, however, was I’ve got to get out of Paint Creek, which he did at the first opportunity.

Well, speaking as someone who is looking forward to getting the heck out of Callie, Arapaho, I can relate to this. And if you look at a lot of these states, there is a huge drain of people in the more rural places. Whether this is because these are terrible places or merely places where it’s difficult to find work, it’s hard to say. But the status of Paint Creek actually tells us very little about the status of Texas. The boonies aren’t growing. Now, to that you can say “Ah-ha! It’s really the blue parts of Tennessee that are attracting people so it doesn’t count!” Except that a whole lot of that growth as occurred in the red parts (suburbs) of the blue parts (metro areas) of the red states. And beyond which, no matter how blue Nashville is, it’s still under the state laws of an electorate that is red, which is what we’re looking at.

I’m not trying to pump up North Dakota and South Dakota too much here. A lot of folks – particularly at The League, and many at Hit Coffee – would absolutely hate it there. And there’s nothing wrong with that, says the guy looking forward to leaving Callie. But the depiction of a hellhole that everybody is looking to get out of is not only snotty, but doesn’t particularly match up with reality. Taking a dump on North Dakota doesn’t make the point that the author seems to think it does. Even if neither North Dakota is not without its downsides and Mercatus is not without its faults.