Blog Archives
I agree with the first part, though am skittish on the second. There is no doubt that with some possible basic exceptions there is not a Constitutional conflict. I don’t think that entirely lets us off the hook, however.
There are a lot of good reasons to have regulation when it comes to childcare. While excessive licensure may be an issue in some domains, it’s hard to imagine childcare without some sort of licensure regime. Parents don’t know what goes on after they drop their kids off, kids are not necessarily able to articulate what’s going on, and parents may not entirely believe them when they do. It’s not like a bad haircut either in terms of actual damage done or in the ability to hold people accountable (in the case of a barber, simply not going there again).
There are definitely limits to this, though. Not just in how rigorous the requirements should be, but where they should apply. Lain’s babysitter, for example, is completely unlicensed. It’s the daughter of one of my wife’s colleagues. She may have some basic training, but certainly hasn’t undergone any rigorous process or anything of the sort. But we leave our daughter with her because we know her family, trust her upbringing, and we’ll take that chance over someone with all of the appropriate paperwork that we do not know. We’ll obviously take the discount as well, though that’s obviously not the issue for us that it is for other people.
I don’t think that’s entirely dissimilar to a church. I think there can often be that same sort of intimate relationship where the common faith and social relationship can stand in replacement of the ordinary markers of trustworthiness. That a parent might reasonably trust their church to look after 15 kids while a private entity needs to cap it at 10 (or whatever). The existence of the regulation makes it so that parents who don’t have a church, or a colleague’s daughter, or whatever can have maybe a little degree of assurance that it’s not a bum outfit that is going to abuse their child. But with that option available, alternate arrangements for others also seems reasonable.
Which is not to say that I want to give churches a pass. Like I say, it’s tricky! Because you don’t want churches running reputable childcare centers out of business on the basis of the lower costs they can achieve through these exemptions. You don’t want someone to set up a center, hang a cross by the shingle, and do whatever they want. This is further complicated by the fact that governments tend to loathe trying to discern genuine faith and the genuine faithfulness of an institution. I can definitely understand why Kazzy in particular, who views things from the prospective of a provider, believes that it’s important for all providers to maintain certain standards of care with no exceptions.
It could also be the the exemptions I might carve out would be pretty worthless anyway. That’s something Kazzy would know a lot better than I do. But I’d be less inclined to support a “religious daycare” outfit that wasn’t actually connected to a place of worship or religious organization that exists apart from the center… though that would likely put me in more First Amendment hot water than what the states are doing. I also might look at churches that offer day care selectively to members of their faith. That may not be workable, either of all of them flat-out rely on outside families. So the end result might be that I end up supporting all of the same regulations as Kazzy and Oscar, if a bit more reluctantly.
Alright, I’m going to ramble a bit about the South here. Don’t know how long this one’s gonna be.
— Asinus Pervicax (@Cato_of_Utica) April 15, 2016
You cannot understand the South without understanding the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
— Asinus Pervicax (@Cato_of_Utica) April 15, 2016
Emancipation didn’t just end slavery. It also wiped out at least a year of US GDP’s worth of real estate ‘assets’.
— Asinus Pervicax (@Cato_of_Utica) April 15, 2016
I don’t have an exact figure, but it’s safe to say at least a quarter of the South’s capital pre-Civil War was tied up in slavery.
— Asinus Pervicax (@Cato_of_Utica) April 15, 2016
Robert Tracinski argues that Donald Trump is an Ayn Rand villain.
Chuck Wendig is not so impressed with Tiny House Hunters. Where there’s a lack of land availability and a lack of money I can understand it, as well as for idealistic environmentalists, but mobile homes are relatively cheap! {via Saul}
Trumwill being Trumwill, I’m kind of jazzed at the prospect of floating houses. {via Jhanley}
Robert Colvile talks of the schools that Katrina Built. Though the most recent data on vouchers in Louisiana isn’t good, the charter school system has produced some pretty solid results.
Yahoo had better hope that Verizon buys it up, because the alternative is just too embarrassing.
This kind of bums me out, because Alaskan Socialism is Socialism I can believe in! {via Jhanley}
The good news is that there are some teaching jobs in paradise that pay $50,000 a year. The bad news is that Hawaii is expensive.
The intersection between church and daycare regulation is… tricky.
Frank Marcopolos says that audiobooks and “earbud content” are only getting started.
Uber found an interesting ally in the Travis County Sheriff’s office, on account of what they believe it does for the prevention of drunk driving.
Even setting aside the Brutalism (yay Brutalism!), these pictures of Hong Kong are surreal.
Joe Carter explains how churches can help the poor by combatting predatory lending.
“Do what you love” is still terrible advice.
There was a train line in Japan that continues to run to deliver one high school student to and from school. Then he graduated and it stopped.
Kriston Capps takes on the question of DC Statehood and state pre-emption:
Capps is essentially setting up a systems question. Why should states be allowed to pre-empt local legislation on the minimum wage, LGBTQ protections, and so on. These are all very interesting questions, though it’s quite apparent from his piece that Capps takes his preferred policy conclusions and works backwards.In Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley signed a bill into law blocking cities from passing local minimum-wage ordinances the day after the Birmingham City Council voted to raise its minimum wage. In Texas, the Denton City Council was forced to repeal its ban on fracking after the state issued a law prohibiting cities from passing fracking bans. Tennessee is mulling preemptive anti-transgender legislation; Mississippi has already gone there.
Paid sick leave, smoking bans, environmental controls, refugee relocation, transgender rights, plastic-bag fees, the minimum wage: All of these issues matter to voters. Residents make decisions about these matters by voting on them. But then lawmakers that residents usually did not elect make decisions about their lives, over their heads. That’s preemption—and that’s the way many things work in the District, except that instead of state legislators preempting city councilors, our laws are preempted by Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz.
Let’s take the minimum wage, for example. The question should not be as narrow as “Should Alabama pre-empt Birmingham’s desire for a higher minimum wage?” but rather “Who should set the minimum wage: local government, state government, or federal? To some degree, it’s going to be a combination of them and that’s fine. I further have no real problem with the status quo where federal standards, then state standards, then local standards are set and each must be higher than the other. In fact, that’s my preference. However, there is no systems or process reason why this must be the case. More to the point, if it is legitimate for California to set Bakersfield’s minimum wage higher than it otherwise would, it’s equally legitimate for Alabama to tell Birmingham to set its minimum wage lower than it otherwise would.
Everything else is just a preference for a higher minimum wage or a lower one. Which is to say, it’s a policy preference and not a process or a systems one.
As I say, my own preference is that for a ratchet-up option. Though the purist in me would love for all minimum wage issues to be handled at the state or local level, I’m not quite that pure. There ought to be a floor, at least for the states (pulling Puerto Rico on board may have been a mistake). However, the floor being the floor, it should be made with Mississippi in mind. If we’re only going to allow a ratchet-up, then it only makes sense to start from a low point. California and New York didn’t do that, making my response to their decisions entirely different from that of Seattle and San Francisco.
The other issues he presents are more complicated. LGBTQ rights are, or ought to be, more universal and not so much a response to local economic needs. And while patchwork laws on employment make a fair amount of sense, it makes less so when it comes to which bathroom which person can use (or which hotel which person is allowed to stay at, and so on). So from a process standpoint, it makes a lot more sense for it to be established at the state (or federal) level. Which I sort of hate, because man was I thrilled when Salt Lake County passed its anti-discrimination laws for gay folks. But from a process standpoint, I wouldn’t really be able to object to the state pre-empting that law. I’d just really hate it from a policy standpoint.
As far as Capps’ DC question goes, while I don’t support statehood I do support DC having all of the self-governing authority that the states have.
I come up with four. Dave Hackensack says three. Answers seem to mostly range between two and four.
Whatcha got?
It's 1AM and I decided I wanted a milkshake. So there's a McDonald's near my house. I'm greeted at the drive thru by the following sentence:
— Josh Raby (@JoshRaby) April 11, 2016
"Hey holy shit hello, you are at McDonald's, and I am begging your patience."
— Josh Raby (@JoshRaby) April 11, 2016
There are no other cars here, by the way. I'm caught off guard so I mumble "Um, ok you can have it."
The voice comes back:
"Praise you."— Josh Raby (@JoshRaby) April 11, 2016
A new study finds that hand-dryers give white blood cells a good work out and make them muscular and strong, while paper towels will let their muscles atrophy as they get lethargic. So I strongly recommend that public restrooms please use hand-dryers.
Virginia Postrel argues that conservatives can make it in the academy, but only if they stop living in the closet.
Attention Michael Cain! Californians are moving to Texas! More seriously, I find the statistic about them moving to states with better business environments uninteresting because isn’t that like 47 of the other states?
Though I was critical of the Minnesota gun firm that made guns that transformed into looking like a cell phone, I find this pretty cool. I can’t tell if I’m being inconsistent.
Erin Einhorn looks at the hardships of Detroit kids that go to charter schools. I suppose it would just be better if we relieved them of that option?
Buyer’s Remorse? More than a third of millennials say they wouldn’t have attended college if they’d known the costs in advance. Is there an argument for a five-year price lock-in?
Leonid Bershidsky looks at Swedish and German approaches to prostitution. I’m somewhat partial to the Swedish model. That the German model created trafficking problems (and other degeneracy) doesn’t compel me to reconsider.
Maybe soda bans and taxes aren’t going to make everybody lose weight.
A new study shows that being a smoker is a cause, rather than merely an effect, of shafty treatment from potential employers. I was pretty meticulous about not showing any signs of being a smoker on any job interview.
Who’s not buying what Bernie Sanders is selling? Soviet refugees, that’s who. Many are, unfortunately, buying what Trump is selling.
I don’t think the problem is that we’re too reliant on GPS, but rather that they are not sufficiently accurate that we cannot be completely reliant on them.
Everybody’s raiding Kansas! Also while we don’t know where the unmatched socks end up, lost phones end up in Atlanta.
Wow! Infertile mice have been made fertile with 3D-printed ovaries.
Back home, there is a term for this: Alcohol Abuse.
Yep, the real story of Denny Hastert sexually abusing kids is the hypocrisy. What else would it be?
In a review of the follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Ted Trautman talks about love plots in sequels:
Each genre that celebrates romantic love—rom-coms hardly have a monopoly on it—has its own way of abandoning relationships just as they’re getting interesting. Among romantic comedies, the most common solution is to simply not make sequels—to bury Jerry Maguire under Yucca Mountain and let its fiery passion cool into domestic routine far from public view. Which, frankly, is as impressive as it is disappointing: In an industry where intellectual property is increasingly recycled and warmed over, it must take tremendous willpower (or tremendous deference to young audiences’ tastes) not to throw Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a room together and call it Swipe Left in Seattle.{…}
The first is introducing a new love interest: Call it the “When Harry Met Someone Else” approach. Sometimes an actor is unable or unwilling to return for a sequel; sometimes filmmakers just prefer new blood. In either case, the sequel ditches one lover in favor of the other, setting him or her—usually him—on the path to falling in love with a new character. A recent example of this is Zoolander 2, which kills off the title character’s wife Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor) in a tragicomic accident in the film’s first few minutes, clearing the way for a much less compelling postscript of a romance between Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and Valentina Valencia (Penelope Cruz). In a classic, more extreme instance—Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me—Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley) literally self-destructs to make room for Powers (Mike Myers) to fall in love again with Heather Graham’s Felicity Shagwell. For other serial monogamists, see: Bond, James; Jones, Indiana; Wayne, Bruce; the Ted movies, the Missions Impossible, and plenty of others.
The second method is artificial estrangement, or when couples who once attained marital or premarital bliss have suffered some falling out between movies—but who maintain enough grudging affection for each other that they spend their sequel falling back in love along more or less the same narrative lines as in the previous film. A relatively recent example is 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which pits Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) against his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) in pursuit of a coveted promotion. In no time at all, they’re reenacting the bitter rivalry that was already exhaustively explored in the first film, and round two falls flat. Other movies to follow this pattern include Wayne’s World 2, Spider-Man 3, and my personal favorite, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, which features a characteristically chipper Nicolas Cage breaking and entering into the home of his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Diane Kruger) in order to steal her National Archives ID card—you know, just regular breakup stuff.
The quick jettison tack has often annoyed me. Whether the romantic plot in the first movie was the main plot or a subplot in an action film, it’s annoying to have all of that build-up for a story that’s often scratched almost immediately in the follow-up.
We’ve gotten used to this notion that just about every story needs a romantic plot, and it’s usually one of the two above. Book series tend to be a little better about this if only because the author knows that this can’t be done for every novel. So often, love interests will last several books before being dispatched for one reason or another. In crime series, often in a violent manner, sometimes in a dramatic manner, and sometimes in an oh-by-the-way manner.
One of the things that really impressed me about the Jason Bourne series was Robert Ludlum’s commitment to the relationship and marriage between Jason Bourne and Marie St Jacques. This was especially impressive because St Jacques exhibited many of the problems with first-book love interests. Namely, that first books are often the busiest in a series. You’re introducing the main character, the man character’s world, and the love interest. It’s hard for the last character to get all of the attention she (or he) deserves to be a sufficiently compelling character in subsequent stories. But Ludlum did it! He even managed to make Bourne a family man, which is not easy for an action hero. Meanwhile, in the movies, she was dead in the first ten minutes of the second movie, and a new love interest, Nicky Parsons, was added*. Parsons hung around for more than one film, though, so there’s that.
I found it noteworthy that, after Ludlum died and his books were taken over by Eric Van Lustbader, the very first thing he did (off-screen, in between novels actually) was kill off Marie. Van Lustbader may have replaced her with someone else, but that decision as well as other changes in direction made me less interested in the Bourne novels.
The dispatching of love interests off-screen in between sequels – or in the opening salvo of the sequel – is the ultimate cheap shot. If the last romantic plot was disposed of so easily, why should I invest at all in the new romantic plot? As understandable as the desire may be to have a by-the-numbers characters-meet-and-fall-in-love story, it’s a mark of laziness. Good on those writers who do a better job.
* – I was relatively certain a character named “Nicky Parsons” appeared in the books, but as a relatively minor character allied with the antagonist. Poking around has only dug into a number of assertions that the – or any – character did not exist in the books.
Over There, I wrote my piece advocating screwing Trump out of the nomination declining to let Trump become a plurality winner:
Sometimes, though, you can’t just get along. It is my own extreme view that even if Trump gets to 1237 delegates, the party should look for ways to stop him. I don’t expect that they will, for a variety of reasons. I believe doing so would be wrong, in the sense that changing the rules midstream typically is, but wrong in a way that two wrongs can make a right. It wouldn’t be for their own benefit (they would be spat upon), or their party’s benefit (the party would be destroyed), or their party faction’s benefit (no party to have a faction of). It would be for the country’s. I would not be comfortable with the means, but the ends would justify them.
But we’re not even talking about that. I am not comfortable with the means above because, while yes there are rules about changing rules, there is nonetheless every reason for a candidate to believe that if they can round up a majority of the delegates that they are the nominee. Depriving them of that would be cheating and would be “stealing” the nomination. However, the 1237 threshold exists very explicitly for a reason. No major rule change is required to deny Trump the nomination if he fails to reach that threshold. When they were revising the rules to solve Yesterday’s Problem, they easily have said “A majority of voting delegates whose votes count” (ie not those voting for people ineligible under Rule 40b), but they didn’t. They said a majority. As badly as the party tried to rig the rules for a plurality candidate, that was a bridge they didn’t cross. And for good reason.
Nowhere has it been written that a plurality winner automatically becomes the winner or that a convention is a formality for the delegate leader. The West Wing had an episode devoted to it, where the candidate who came into the convention with the most delegates lost to the protagonist. Not only has it not been written, it has not historically even been assumed. Every year journalists daydream of a brokered convention or a contested convention. . That these concepts even exist in our vocabulary indicates that, even pre-Trump, it was known that the plurality winner did not have the nomination democratically conferred on them. The only other time in modern history where nobody came into the convention with a prohibitive delegate count, the convention was contested.
I haven’t terribly much to add here. There seems to be a persistent underestimation to how bad a Trump nomination would be for conservatives and Republicans. That it would amount to a score on a scorecard. Even further, there seems to be an odd dynamic that because nominating Trump fits a certain narrative, that the party is obligated to validate the narrative. A couple narratives, actually, first “The guy who gets the most votes should win” which at least has some logic to it, but also “This is what the Republican Party has become.” So become that, dammit.
Over There, I left the following comment in reference to boycotts of North Carolina in response to their Bathroom Bill:
Not bothered by Apple and PayPal, and believe it is entirely appropriate for them to hold US states to a higher standard than foreign countries. For the most part.
The governors and state legislatures trying to get into the act with “unnecessary travel”, though, seem mostly to be preening and showboating.
Photo by Kristofher 
A couple months ago, I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, but I thought this piece made some good points. Which in turn got me thinking about “unnecessary travel” and why states are supporting it to begin with. Would my wife have to skip a training conference in North Carolina? I… sort of doubt it. So what’s unnecessary? How much effort is going to have to go in to sorting it out? Have they really even thought about it? Maybe I’m being unfair and they have.
It’s not exactly a public/private distinction. If a governors’ association decided to hold their conference in Richmond instead of Raleigh, I would largely respond the way I do to PayPal. The tangibility of declining to do a particular thing in a particular state is pretty clear cut. There are a lot of good alternatives for places to hold a conference or build an office center. So I get what they’re doing, and why, and so it seems less showboatty. It’s tangible, the costs are easier to measure. On the other hand, I can imagine states quietly approving the vast majority of travel as “necessary” while retaining their headlines for Goodthink.
My view on the bill is general, but not emphatic opposition. Attempts to portray the bathroom issue as clear-cut bigotry aside, it’s not an uncomplicated issue. Indeed, opponents of the bill themselves don’t always have their arguments straight. When Houston was going to pass the opposite bill (forbidding business from forcing people to go to the restroom in accordance with their genitalia) I read simultaneous arguments for the righteousness of the bill doing X and that X is a strawman argument that the bill doesn’t even do. The discussion has landed on the former, though, and thus far at least it doesn’t appear that there have been any problems. My current inclination is to let businesses do what they wish (with the possible requirement that they allow a unisex option).
Some have taken North Carolina to task for being anti-local government, but that argument doesn’t really stick with me. This does seem like the sort of thing that is appropriately (though perhaps not exclusively) dealt with at a state level. Since it deals with conflicting rights, I can understand why if you want it (whichever “it”) in Charlotte you would also want it in Podunk, and vice-versa, and given travel having different rules in every municipality are complicated.