Varad Mehta says that we can’t let the Wookies win, but Anthony Domanico disagrees.

Emma Pierson contemplates being an affirmative action admit.

A report suggests that Austin needs to increase the number of granny flats.

A couple years ago, Sweden instituted a program to text people who knew CPR when there is someone around who needs it, and now they’re texting blood donors when their donated blood is used.

Jane The Actuary looks at College For All, Lee Siegel, and path dependency, with an eye towards Europe’s different expectations for its college-bound than we have.

Whenever there is a breakout at the zoo, it’s only the flamingos that get away. Here’s why.

It looks like Terry Pratchett will have no successor to write the Discworld novels.

Good walls make good coworkers. I actually found, over the years, that I prefer cubicles to offices and prefer the open environment to a closed one. This is, for me, quite odd.

Here are the eight strictest states when it comes to homeschooling. North Dakota, I’m disappointed in you.

In Mansfield, Ohio, Stranger Danger training has possibly saved children from a nefarious man who got out of his car to wave to his children.

InsideClimate News wonders why TV meteorologists don’t believe in climate change. Jose Duarte says that the “97% consensus” on climate change is closer to 80%.

Relatedly, Francie Diep looks at physicians who don’t believe in evolution.

If you’ve lived or work there, Minnesota may owe you money. But if so, they aren’t telling. Some of y’all may recall a few years ago I found out Deltona owed me money (somewhere between $100-200, if I recall). I found out about it shortly before I found out that it was going to claim it outright.

The Atlantic looks at what it would take to double a cell phone’s battery life. Getting to 24 hours with intense use is something that absolutely happens. If you want to take away my removable batter, you absolutely need to do that first. If Samsung hasn’t by the time I need a phone, I may have to get LG (assuming they don’t flip).

Wall Street Journal looks at how colleges are struggling with Chinese student application fraud.

Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are suing Harvard and hiring consultants to tell them to downplay the whole ‘coming from Vietnam with $2 in a rickety boat and swimming away from sharks’ thing. (Perhaps swimming lessons are a mark of privilege…)

How activists investors are improving our lives, Olive Garden edition.

Ever want to give a eulogy at your own funeral? Now, maybe, you can.

Ross Elliot argues that better suburbs make for better cities.

Fortunately for people who like their contact lenses, people in power like contact lenses, otherwise they might not be legal.

Is there really any way that gun control can work in the age of 3D printers?

I disagree with some of the examples of antagonists who were right, but I pretty much agree about Iceman.

Katerina Cizek argues that Canada needs to recognize that it is a nation of highrises.

Well this is a lovely story, if true. A man’s wife runs off with their daughter. Sixteen years later he finally tracks her down, discovers that she spent most of that time in foster care, and then is handed a bill.

According to Brookings, even controlling for the obvious factors, getting welfare correlates with unhappiness. They blame the stigma.

The rise and fall of Subway. There’s actually a case that this is less about Subway and more about the state of affairs of those who sell to those who are well off and to those who are not.

Professor Alan Matthews argues that Ireland should, in the words of Michael Brendan Dougherty, “stop making food its people can eat, start planting trees they can’t sell.”

Hayley Manguia reports that the class of 2014 is doing alright. Naturally, I’m more interested in the helpful chart about positive and negative outcomes for various majors.

Wait, there’s an equivalent of the Kelley Blue Book for… used sneakers?

Not only is the Great Inversion not really happening in the US, but Europe is suburbanizing.

Some Tories are complaining that Cameron is rigging the EU referendum.

Though maybe it wasn’t actually a cigarette in Obama’s hand, I agree with Philip Bump that we shouldn’t really care if it was.

John Kasich has apparently decided to go Full Huntsman, breaking several of Dan McLaughlin’s rules (3,50,52, and 65) and removing himself from my list of credible candidates.

Amber Frost reports back (sort of) from the Commie Con, a gathering of leftists known as the Left Forum.

Erica Grieder expresses sympathy for the social conservatives in Texas, who had a disappointing legislative session.

The networks made fools of themselves ignoring Ron Paul in 2012. Is Fox continuing the tradition in 2016 with Rand? I find their explanation less than satisfactory.

The Republicans should use this data to keep Donald Trump out of the debates.

Among the more surprising about-faces on the Confederate Flag: The Southern Avenger.

I don’t think the use of the Confederate Flag in southern Italy and Donetsk changes the context here in the US, but it is interesting.

I enjoyed Lion’s account of his trip to Reno.

That fathers on television are portrayed as bumbling idiots is not new to Hit Coffee readers, but the thing about working class fathers being portrayed more generously than middle class ones is interesting.h

Amazon is changing how ebook authors are paid under Kindle Unlimited, from “must have read 10%” to looking at page count. Hit Coffee patron Abel passes along this defense of the plan. I’m wondering – and kinda hoping – that writers try to game the system by adding art to beef up their page count. More books should contain art. McMegan also comments.

Birds are scary, and smart.

Jonathan V Last argues the greatness of Jurassic Park. I watched it again earlier this year, and was really impressed by the movie’s pacing.

Will virtual reality help college football players practice more safely?

Saudi Arabia is claiming success in killing US shale drilling, but production in the US is rising as the drilling costs are falling.

Damon Linker looks at Vox’s terrible track record on ISIS, and touches on just about every problem I’ve had with the site since its inception. It has a roster whose writers I enjoy, and somehow made me enjoy each of them less together than I enjoyed them separately. Also, here’s the voxiest headline ever written.

“Waitaminute. What happened to #Dontbackdown! Free speech is at stake here!” –Stillwater

A small bit of backstory. Over There, we had a series of conversations about the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the free speech implications. There were two lines of thought. The first was that we should rally behind Charlie Hebdo and the notion of free speech. We’ll call this TFS (Team Free Speech), and consisted of James Hanley, Mr Blue, Oscar Gordon, myself, and others. The other side of the conversation consisted of people who believed that the murders were wrong and claimed varying degrees of commitment to free speech, but believed in the importance of expressing disagreement with Hebdo’s speech, defending those who express disagreement, and often against exercising one’s freedom of speech in support of such blasphemy in general. We’ll call this TAB (Team Against Blasphemy [2]) included Stillwater (who doesn’t participate here), Chris (who does), and others.

The conversation created a lot of bad blood, that still gets spilled in ostensibly unrelated threads. Stillwater’s above comment was a reference to it.

I’m not sure whether Stillwater was trying to point out an inconsistency within TFS, or mocking them for being indifferent to offensiveness, or both. It might have been both, the first for those who want the flag to come down and the second for those who don’t. I can’t really speak to the second, but as a TFSer who wants to see the flag come down, it does present an interesting question: Do people who would defend Charlie Hebdo’s offensive cartoons similarly defend the Confederate flag?

The issue, for me, is that context matters a great deal. While some TFSers might object to any criticism of any speech ever, or at least object to criticism of any speech they disagree with on the basis of “Free Speech”, that wasn’t really my position or how I read the position of the others. Most of the time, the justification (or lack thereof) in criticizing Hebdo depends almost entirely on whether the criticisms are correct. Which is to say “Are these cartoons offensive or should we defer to those who believe they are?” is the primary question of relevance.

Which changes almost immediately, though, when violent terrorism occurs. As soon as that happens, the context changes. Not permanently, and pretty immediately. At that point, I could care less if the cartoon was disrespectful. It’s beside the point. Conversations about whether or not we should say offensive things become out of place. In the context of blood a murder having just occurred, it’s really the murder that’s the important thing and any mention of objecting to the cartoons is an afterthought. I mean say it, or don’t, but if that’s your central point, I’m not particularly interested in your point of view.

Time has passed, though, and the context has changed. So if you want to talk about whether we should or shouldn’t make fun of religion in a way that makes people mad, we can definitely have that conversation. I find many of Hebdo cartoons to be rather defensible, but I think a lot of criticisms of Islam – including cartoons – are often things that are better left unsaid.

What about the Confederate Flag? This is where context matters. And I don’t see much inconsistency here. I want the flag to come down from the South Carolina statehouse. I want the emblem removed from Mississippi’s flag. Last week I approvingly tweeted a photo of people burning it. And though people have a right to fly the flag on their cars, I’d like them to take it down. I have no issue – whatsoever – of criticizing the Confederate Flag as bad speech that should be scorned.

But if someone bombed a Daughters of Confederate Veterans office building, or shot someone who had it flying on their car, then my objections to the flying of the Confederate Flag go on hold. And I would be (at least) biting my tongue on anyone whose primary interest in such a story is that the Confederate Flag is wrong, wrong, wrong. Yeah, it may be wrong, but in the aftermath of such a killing, it’s secondary. (And meanwhile, in our timeline, taking down the flag would be a thumb in the eye of the person who committed the violence.)

Would I put the Confederate Flag on Hit Coffee? No, for some of the same reasons that we didn’t republish Hebdo, and for some different ones as well. The first of those reasons are personal and not especially pertinent[1], but the second reason is a rather significant difference between the two. There is no ISIS for opponents of the Confederate Flag. There is no group of people where I believe that giving them what they want might encourage them to engage in more violence. There is no organized violent opposition to “Back down” from, assuming that the bomber or murderer either acted alone or as part of an otherwise-irrelevant group. But tweak the circumstances – and context – a little, and my views align perfectly.

But even though I have negative assumptions of people who put up the flag generally, in the context of violence having just occurred, I would consider it an expression of speech rather than an expression of support for the Confederacy.

[1] The first reason is that I am myself a southerner, and therefore I have to be particularly careful about such associations. It’s too likely the content of the speech would be considered endorsed, rather than the speech of the speech. The context for me, personally, as well as most white southerners, is inherently going to be unfavorable.

[2] In the comments, Chris says it was not so much blasphemy as mockery that he was objecting to, so wherever you read TAB, TAM (Team Against Mockery) may be more appropriate.

One of the result of family-friendly policies is that women end up being paid less. Whenever Clancy interviewed for a job, I was always concerned that they would see her as a woman of reproductive age – with not a lot of time to spare – who would need some time off in the near future.

I was really surprised to discover that there was a lyme vaccination for our dog, since I knew that there wasn’t for people. Turns out that there is and we just can’t get it either because of anti-vaxxers or market failure.

Solar-powered airplane? Cool.

Erica Barnett looks at new rules in Seattle that would serve to limit density.

Has Silicon Valley been displaced by Austin?

Marshall Islands, where the US tested our nuclear weapons, is suing the nuclear-superpower world.

Men are more likely than women to be down with the idea of being time-traveling assassins.

Thirty embarrassing facts about thirty cities or so. I actually only knew about The Strip not being in Las Vegas proper because of UNLV being in the same townlet.

Average SAT scores and graduation rates track very, very closely (in California).

Danny Resnic contracted HIV, and has made it his life’s mission to build a better condom.

The Science of Ouch: Why it hurts so much when you stub your @$*@ing toe.

Some of those cute animal photographs you see have kind of a dark background.

I thought that everybody knew that Disney ripped off the Lion King?

Andrew Stuttaford argues that with regard to Snus, anti-tobacco advocates are putting purity and dogma before safety and science. What’s particularly frustrating about some of these prohibitions is that they prevent companies from advertising their product for what we want people to use it for: smoking cessation.

Andy Pascal went to his summer house in Romania and discovered it had been replaced by a cornfield. More on the history of house theft.

ThinkProgress has a good story on an Imam talking kids out of joining ISIS.

Ricardo Hausmann argue that the relationship between education and economic progress is more mixed than we think.

North Dakota is welcoming Uber with open arms, and would frankly welcome some poop.

Jonathan Manthorpe explains how foreign investment in has changed Vancouver, hitching the fate of the city to the fate of China.

There’s not much particularly novel in this Glenn Reynolds piece on the cost of higher education, but I hadn’t heard this statistic before: Cal Poly in Pamona has one administrator for every two students.

Sonny Bunch applauds Mike Judge for keeping the liberal agenda out of his work.

So happens when a Jihadi returns home?

Housing in some suburbs are being consolidated, swallowing up multiple more modest homes to make room for mansions. One of the reasons that inequality is more felt in urban and land-scarce areas than elsewhere. {More}

A website is creating a blacklist of Pro-Palestinian activists.

Foreign investment in France is seeing record-highs, but employment law and costs may be holding back employment.

Black solar cells are pretty cool, for both aesthetic and technical reasons, and they’re advancing.

A look at some of the photography of Mary Ellen Mark.

When it comes to attraction and age, men really kind of are dogs.

How costs, regulations, the economy, and more are killing the starter home.

It’s a clear statement of… something… that after years and years of using taxes to incentivize the purchase of electric and hybrid cars, we’re complaining about the taxes they aren’t bringing in.

The Guardian has a couple of articles on the privitization and gating of cities. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry looks at private cities. The whole concept makes me think of this article on post-democracy.

Pluto is too a planet, says Philip Metzger.

New research suggests that Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and even her more scantily-clad counterparts – really is good for empowering women. More on gender identity norms.

This stands to reason: If your job is routine, there’s a good chance it’s going to disappear.

Adam Ozimek continues his sysiphean quest to make the point that no, government assistance to low-wage workers are not employer subsidies (except possibly the EITC)… even though in his view (as in Oren Cass’s) we should structure things so that they kind of are. My own view is actually expressed pretty well by Coyote here, though without the first-hand perspective.

This is pretty cool: Things that foreigners like about America.

It’s like a pimple that showed up on the planet earth, except it’s an 800C pit of fire.

Here is a handy article on where states get their revenue.

A battle of stars versus lawns: astrologers and the maker of robotic lawnmowers are going at it.

I don’t know whether the SEC was more obnoxious when they were full of themselves for winning championships, or when they whine when they don’t.

It has been making the news lately, and here’s an article on what makes Nebraska’s legislature different.

In the UK, Nick Cohen says Labour doesn’t realize why it lost, and in Alberta, people – such as myself – may be underestimating the NDP victory.

UAB Football program, terminated last year sparking a lot of anger, is coming back. It has a tough road ahead of it, and ifthis is true the university itself as it exists may be doomed.

Former Green Bay Packers and Texas A&M football coach Mike Sherman has taken a new job… at a Massachusetts high school.

St. Thomas University has a pitcher who weighs in at three-hundred pounds.

HBCUs are having a lot of trouble meeting NCAA academic requirements.

The Connecticut Huskies went 2-10 last year, with its only FBS-level victory against UCF. So what they did they do? They made UCF a rival and gave themselves a trophy. UCF is scratching its head, but UConn says that UCF’s permission is not necessary in the declaration of a rivalry. The two schools have played each other three times.

Friend of Hit Coffee Abel Keogh is quoted in this story about sex and the grieving widower.

Vice argues that the next president of FIFA should be… Mitt Romney, but Mark Thompson tweets explanations as to why that can’t happen.

The Cameron government wants to ban pleasure. Well, not quite, but they’re drafting some laws so broad that it’s hard to tell.

Will Wilkinson defends Rick Perry’s glasses. I still say Jeb Bush did a better job picking glasses out than Perry’s wife did.

Rick Perry is kicking off his presidential campaign with a BBQ. Though I hope not to be in a position to vote for Perry or Jindal, I might want to fly down and attend the latter’s kickoff if it includes a crawfish boil.

Robert Mann explains why Bobby Jindal is so unpopular, and Tunku Varadarajan explains his uncomfortable relationship with his race.

As a general advocate of school choice Nevada’s bill makes me nervous in the same way that some of the aggressive minimum wage increases should make advocates nervous.

As it happens, if you charge users for their water, they use less.

Australian researchers may have a breakthrough on Alzheimer’s.

Puerto Rico is losing its middle class, but gaining millionaires.

I’m not uniformly opposed to term limits, but the ones suggested here are too short. I’d be more open to 20 years in either house or 30 years total. (Senators would be able to complete their terms.)

Freddie deBoer looks at Purdue University’s newest pretty (and very empty) building, and contrasts it with important existing facilities, putting in a good word for cost-conscious alternatives. I’m personally a little bummed because I found out they’re tearing down the dorm I lived in for four years, and replacing it with more luxurious accommodations. They won’t be empty, at least.

To combat infanticide, China set up “safe havens” for abandonment (like we do with fire stations). Unfortunately, so many babies are being abandoned that they’re shutting them down.

Are investors getting in the way of traditional home-buyers?

I’m a tad skeptical of the plan of this DC developer to build “shared space housing.” You can think of it like dorms or retirement communities, but those places are narrowly selecting.

I… don’t even know how to feel about this: How would you like a perfume that smells like a dead loved one?

There’s water in that there valley, and oil in them there hills, in Antarctica.

Men and boys with older sisters are less competitive. I’ve long hoped that we have two kids with an older sister and a younger brother. It appears I am wise!

Michael Siegel points to an encouraging study on ecigarettes. So far the data has been surprising (to me) less encouraging than I had hoped, leaving me a bit dumbfounded. It worked for me and I want it to work for everyone. The public health community is doing what it can to make sure that it will help as few people as possible.

So what’s the deal with the medieval art with knights fighting snails? sdfsdf

The bad news is that judges, like the rest of us, are susceptible to motivated reasoning. The good news – which unlike the bad actually is news – is that they are less so.

A medical resident in Mexico was caught sleeping on the job and attempts were made to shame her. Residents from across the western hemisphere responded with pictures of them also sleeping on the job.

How the minimum wage moved from a national and state issue to a local one.

Child care providers in Los Angeles are concerned that they won’t be able to cope with a rising minimum wage.

Chinese businessman Li Hejun went to a clean energy conference, and lost $14,000,000,000 in the process.

Erik Kain’s piece on outrage culture is worth a read, in which he starts with this story where Internet Avengers managed to get two elderly hearse drivers fired on account of their need for sustenance.

Here’s an incredibly sad story of a woman who, on a plane, was texted by her husband that he was going to commit suicide, and the flight attendants wouldn’t let her try to call him to talk him out of it.

Bryan Lowder seems to really want to put gays in a pretty small box.

I found #CancelColbert to be silly until I realized that it was just a catchy phrase to raise a pretty ordinary complaint, and found the backlash against Suey Park to be kind of overdone. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote a piece on Park, and Freddie and Jay Caspian Kang had a dialogue about it.

The “bake my cake” argument, in reverse. A jeweler in Canada who opposes same-sex marriage agreed to make a wedding ring for a gay couple, and the gay couple is upset and wants their money back.

A DC councilmember wants to restrict charges of assaulting an officer to people who actually assault officers.

Courts in West Virginia ruled that drug addicts can sue their physicians even if they admit they have obtained the drugs illegally. Frances Coleman argues that bad pain doctors make things more difficult for good ones.

This pediatric dentist is the supervillain of the nightmares of young children.

Even though she lost, and I’m not on board with the anti-circumcision movement, I am with Heather Hironimus here. Circumcision should require the ongoing consent of both parents.

The atrocious ‘Innocence of Muslims’ ruling has been reversed.

The Supreme Court that two states can’t tax the same income. Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, and Sotomayor were in the majority, and Ginsburg, Scalia, Thomas, and Kagan dissented. This will be of limited utility when state borders have sales tax on one side and income tax on the other, however.