I think the prime factor of the VP isn’t the breaks-a-senate-tie. Or any of the informal influence given to them that can be taken away or given to anyone else quite easily. Rather, the issue is that they are the person in line for the presidency before you get into the constitutionally murky issue of handing it over to someone to the legislative branch. Which is possibly someone of the different party.

My view is that it would potentially be a disaster of epic proportions should both the president and vice president be incapacitated. There could be lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the POTUS while they are executing their duties (particularly if they are of a different political party than the president). The Constitutionality of it is actually a bit iffy. And even if there weren’t, it’s just bad policy anyway.

Granted, the best way to prevent this from happening is change the line of succession. Which would also be the easier fix. On the other hand, the reason that they did this was that they didn’t want the president to be able to choose his own successor. This is one of the reasons that we don’t want a president to be able to fire his Vice President: You don’t want an embattled president facing impeachment and/or indictment saying to his VP “If you don’t agree to pardon me, I will fire you and you will never be president.”

Whether that’s better or worse than a Pataki/McCaughey situation is uncertain, but I think I will take the latter.

The danger of a president being able to hand-pick a successor (assuming a vice presidential vacancy) has already been nullified when we allowed presidents to appoint successor vice presidents. And second, just as a vice president has to be confirmed, so too do cabinet picks. We’re not talking about putting the Chief of Staff on the list. A Secretary of State would be confirmed in part on the basis of their ability to serve as president if called upon to do so (and if eligible).

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever have a Glenallen Walken situation. There has been some interesting speculation that, in the event that the 2000 election hadn’t been settled, Larry Summers would have become acting president because the Speaker and Senate President Pro Tempore. On the other hand, if you have a Speaker or more likely a Senate President who is considering retiring anyway, I could very much see it happening.

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler waded through a rockin’ teenage party in search of his son and didn’t notice all of the drinking underagers:

Gansler, a Democrat who is running for governor, said this week that he stopped by the Delaware beach house to talk briefly with his teenage son and then left. He said he does not remember whether he saw anyone drinking. But even if he had, Gansler said, it was not his responsibility as a parent or a high-ranking law enforcement official to intervene.

“Assume for purposes of discussion that there was widespread drinking at this party,” Gansler said. “How is that relevant to me? … The question is, do I have any moral authority over other people’s children at beach week in another state? I say no.”

That’s a good point. It’s not as though he is the chief legal officer of the State of Maryland. Except he is. Nor is there an element of hypocrisy here because it’s not like he has made underage drinking one of his issues. Which he did.

This is low-hanging fruit, though. There is a fundamental truth here that underage people will drink and will party if they are invited to them. Should his son have to live in fear because his father is a politician and if his son finds the party it’s bound to get busted up by Johnny Law? In a sense, that’s unfair to the kid. Of course, it also goes to show the problems of things being against the law even when everyone pretty much knows that they are broken on a pretty regular basis. One would also assume that had the police been called, the treatment of the sorts of kids attending a party with the Attorney General’s son might be treated differently than a party attended by rabble.

Back when I was in high school, I attended one of my brothers’ frat parties. I remember some cops coming around beforehand offering their services for security. If you have a cop on sight, apparently you can get an insurance break. “Don’t worry, they said, we are keeping our eyes looking out and not in, unless asked to do otherwise. Which pretty much goes to show the nature of the law as it is in effect.

The only time I ever came close to having to deal with the consequences of such a thing is when I was about 17 or so and at a drinking party of my friend Charlie Langston. There was a cop there who came out of nowhere. Actually, judging from where he was, he had probably been there a while. He was sitting on a deck chair by the pool talking to a female attendee of the party. I am guessing he was acting as apartment security or something and not in his official capacity as a cop. I just remember screaming “Holy $%@#, you’re a cop! What are you doing here?!”

I was, in all likelihood, inebriated at the time. And seventeen.

Fun fact: I held up the left leg of the son of the State Treasurer (at the time) of Deltona while he did one of those keg things.

In addition to having to get a new driver’s license and car registration, Queenland also has state safety inspections. It’s been a little while since I’ve had to contend with them,, and honestly it’s never been a problem when I have. Until now, anyway.

The Toyota had a problem with the exhaust pipe, which the inspector made a clean $400 off fixing. We could have gotten a second opinion, but we gave them the benefit of the doubt in part because they’re the only inspection station around here and such chores become surprisingly more difficult when you have a baby. And besides, the car is approaching twenty years old. We expect problems to occur.

The Forester had a more verifiable problem. Not long after we got it, we got a crack in the windshield. The crack has been growing in fits and starts ever since. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t affect visibility unless you count my ability to clearly see my front hood. The previous state that I lived in which required safety inspections only cared if it was in the line of sight, but Queenland apparently sees (haha, no pun intended) it differently.

This is not, strictly speaking, a matter of freedom. There are certainly negative externalities when it comes to unsafe cars on the road. If my visibility were obstructed, it would represent a hazard first and foremost to myself, but also to others. Acknowledged.

It reminded me of James K’s post on the price of safety at League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I recommend reading the whole thing. The comment thread runs 370 comments long and, alas, nothing gets resolved. Within the comments, Mr. Blue actually comments about auto inspections being an example of safety regulations unduly impacting the poor (oddly enough, relating back to when he failed inspection for a cracked windshield). He backs off it a bit as not being the best example, but I think it’s a great point. Especially in light of what I was tagged for.

Replacing the windshield was no real burden on my part. It was less than the exhaust repair. But it’s a pretty clear case of something where the danger to myself – much less others – was positively minimal. While $250 isn’t much for me, it is a significant burden for some people. All for access to the thing they need to make money to do things like repair cars with actual problems.

A fair number of accidents on the road may indeed be attributable to car malfunction, but that shouldn’t be the question. The question should be the extent to which an annual (or less) check of certain things reduces them to any significant degree. And whether each thing we are forcing people to address, in itself, would save lives. How many lives, and at what cost?

It’s worth noting that my stance here is not some right-field hyperlibertarian one. Officials in no less than Washington DC came to the same conclusion and chose to junk inspections altogether:

The District of Columbia recently decided that its periodic motor vehicle safety inspections were flab. Performed at a D.C. facility along with emissions tests, the safety checks were junked for an annual savings of about $400,000. In justifying the cut, the D.C. Council cited a lack of data proving periodic safety inspections save lives.

Safety advocates, who’ve worked to expand periodic safety inspections beyond the 19 states that still require them, worry that others will decide to rethink the cost. They acknowledge that the way crashes are reported makes good data hard to come by, but argue that the current economy makes it even more important to check that drivers are maintaining their vehicles.

“Safety inspections are particularly needed in hard economic times, because when you’re on a tight budget, you tend to skip the badly needed maintenance,” says Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Automotive Safety advocacy group.

Like a broken windshield that obscures my view of the front hood! More seriously, the only danger is that a crack is more likely to explode into something else in the event of a major accident. That’s not nothing, but the aggregate costs of these checks are enormous. To the extent that there are externalities to be addressed, there is already a venue to do so: insurance companies. An optional inspection for a cut on your insurance rate could price out the total costs quite easily. They’d certainly have an incentive to know how much that would save in lives and property damage.

Now, you might say “Ah-ha! Insurance companies favor inspections!” I don’t know that this is true, but I bet it is. Even if it is, though, why shouldn’t they? Even if it does absolutely no good, it doesn’t cost them a dime. Let them put their money where their mouth is, if this is important. They don’t even have to wait for a state to end auto inspections. Most states don’t presently have them.

Making the rounds has been the story out of Montana of a judge who found himself in hot water:

A Montana judge has come under fire after handing down a 30-day sentence to a former high school teacher convicted of raping a 14-year-old student and for making statements in court that the victim was “older than her chronological age” and “as much in control of the situation” as her teacher.

Outrage is particularly sharp in Billings, where the crime took place, because the girl committed suicide in 2010, just shy of her 17th birthday, as the criminal case was pending. A protest was planned for Thursday, and organizers have called on Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh to resign.

The uproar began Monday when Baugh sentenced Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, to 15 years in prison on one count of sexual intercourse without consent, but then suspended all but 31 days and gave him credit for one day served. Prosecutors had asked for 20 years in prison, with 10 years suspended.

Both Dr. Phi and Mike Hunt Rice have taken issue with the press’s reference to the crime as “rape” without a qualifier. Having followed the issue, it’s something that I have noticed more generally. I don’t tend to believe that dropping the qualifier is “intellectually dishonest” as MHR put it, but I do understand the objection.

Is this rape? I am inclined to believe that it’s not, except in the statutory sense. Whether we believe such behavior should be legal or not, the differences between this and holding down a woman while forcing himself on her are manifest. Likewise, this doesn’t compare to a having sex with a woman who is drugged or drunk and unconscious or something close to it. On the other hand, I recently linked to a story in Louisiana about a guard and an inmate having sex, and I have very little difficulty calling that rape regardless of how much she (superficially) consented. There are circumstances in which I would consider consent to be impossible. I draw the line between Montana and Louisiana. Some draw it on the other side of Montana, while others draw it on the other side of Louisiana.

When “Nathan J.” was fifteen, he was legally raped. When the child of the rape was born, he was successfully sued for child support. The court ruled ‘The law should not except Nathaniel J. from this responsibility because he is not an innocent victim of Jones’s criminal acts.’

The Washington Post is calling for the judge’s resignation:

“I’m not sure just what I was attempting to say, but it did not come out correct,” the judge said in a mea culpa issued to the Billings Gazette on Wednesday. He said he would file an addendum to the court file to “hopefully better explain the sentence.” Actually, Montana residents, along with much of the nation, know all they need to know about this case and this judge. His parsing of the sexual exploitation of a troubled teenager by a teacher in a position of trust as not a “forcible, beat-up rape” — and his sentence of a mere 30 days — sent the message that this is a crime that is not to be taken all that seriously. Judge Baugh’s ignorant notions about rape and his insensitivity to victims are an absolute affront to justice, and he should immediately resign.

To their credit, though (both sides of the story and all that), they also ran this piece by Betsy Karasik, which argues that teacher-student sex shouldn’t be illegal and that it may have been the law, rather than the crime, that drove the victim to suicide:

I do think that teachers who engage in sex with students, no matter how consensual, should be removed from their jobs and barred from teaching unless they prove that they have completed rehabilitation. But the utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them. I don’t know what triggered Morales’s suicide, but I find it tragic and deeply troubling that this occurred as the case against Rambold wound its way through the criminal justice system. One has to wonder whether the extreme pressure she must have felt from those circumstances played a role.

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

Several years ago I read a book, the title of which I cannot recall (something about reading signs, there were signs on the cover), about early woman sexuality. It was mostly a descriptive book, the different approaches different young ladies take towards sex, though to the extent it had an “agenda” it tended towards being very supportive of girls taking control of their sexuality. It leaned considerably more towards the feminist direction than not. It had a chapter on young women and older men and was by and large supportive of the notion – or at least the right of women to explore the notion.

All of which drives at one of the complexities of the issue. Which is that it actually doesn’t fall strictly among ideological lines. There are liberal and feminist arguments in support of laws condemning this activity. Arguably, this may be where the framing of the issue as rape comes into play. Feminists would be hard-pressed to support anything that could be construed as supporting rape. At the same time, though, the counter-arguments are also quite feminist in nature. It involves young women taking ownership of their sexuality. Being allowed to decide not just to have sex, but who to have sex with. The notion that young women should be in control of their sexuality – including access to birth control and abortion – is mutually exclusive to the idea that they cannot consent to sex, or that they can only consent to sex with men (boys) roughly their own age.

Ultimately, though, I disagree with Karasik that I don’t think it should be legal, for a teacher, to sleep with a student who is fourteen. Or a non-teacher, for that matter, who is forty-something. I don’t believe in the unqualified sexual autonomy of children, which I consider a fourteen year old to be. Though I support a general loosening of our teenage sex regime, that’s a bridge further than I can go. And on top of that, I think that the power dynamics of teachers and students are, while not comparable to prisoner and guard, cause for potential criminal action in itself. But I don’t think it should live in the same tent as someone who holds a woman down and forces himself on her.

To open this book, and explore this issue, we would need a greater review of how we view teenage sexuality. The two things that shut down the debate are our cultural discomfort with the possibility of two people having sex, and a strong desire never to make excuses for anything that can be called rape. I am not holding by breath for reform.

Over at The American Scene, PEG makes a rousing case for the obligation associated with National Service:

f you won the sperm lottery and were born in a wealthy, democratic nation, you have a life whose charm is simply incommensurable and incomparable with the lived existence of the vast, vast majority of human beings who have ever lived on Earth.

You have the privilege of not dying of hunger and easily preventable disease. You have the privilege of having attended schools that, yeah, could be much better, but still taught you how to read. You have the privilege of access to technology and a standard of living that would have been simply unimaginable even to most kings of old. You have the privilege of not having to keep a spare set of clothes under your bed in case the secret police knock in the middle of the night. You have the privilege of being able to spout off whatever nonsense on the internet and not get thrown in jail for your opinions. You have the privilege of medicine which cures most ailments and is relatively available to you. You have the privilege of a relatively much much higher likelihood of having work that is not back-breaking and awful, and perhaps even meaningful and fulfilling. You have the privilege of having a life expectancy which is basically twice the life expectancy of most of the people who came before you. That’s right: you basically have A WHOLE OTHER LIFE on top of your “natural” life, as a reward for the hard work and toil of being born in the right place and the right time.

And the simple fact of the matter is that if your sperm was lucky and you were born in one of those countries, the only reason you enjoy this incredible, unimaginable privilege is because people who lived before you sacrificed, and toiled, and gave their lives so that you would have it. They fought wars and they gave their blood and their lives so that a certain political community to which you belong shall not perish from the Earth so that you could enjoy this.

We owe this incredibly charmed modern life not just to scientific progress and capitalism. We also owe it to the stubborn fact that many of our forefathers were willing to put on a uniform, swear an oath, and lay down their lives, for us, their children and their children’s children. Your blessed life is built on the blood and bones of your forefathers.

This will warm the heart of some liberals who have been stressing the social obligations inherent in a society (and some conservatives with their appreciation with upholding a tradition of service). Eat right, don’t smoke, you owe it to your fellow citizens. PEG is falling short of actually making a case for national service because he accepts numerous objections, but he really, really hates the notion of social obligation being laughable or comparable to slavery.

I am of a mixed mind on the subject. On the one hand, PEG truly makes a good case that we are the beneficiaries of a society and there is an obligation associated with that. Yet such a stance often makes me quite uncomfortable. In large part because it is a bottomless obligation. If the government’s investment in my health care gives the government control over what I do with my body, then what we’re talking about actually goes beyond obligation and into ownership. If I am alive but for the willingness of the state (or the community) to keep the barbarians at my gate, then what sense of individuality can I morally claim?

Some liberals mock the rugged individualist, but look: liberals make a big deal out of individuality, too. We all claim certain things – albeit not the same things – as being off-limits regardless of the state’s putative interest in our bodies, our finances, and our relationships. At some point, at least, it’s the healthiest thing to scoff at the notion of an obligation incurred by virtue of either (a) the security afforded by the state and the culture, or (b) the benefits given shared. We can argue that some of the things we do privately aren’t really private and are therefore not subject to approval. And that other things are not sufficiently private because, hey, we are where we are at the pleasure and with the resources of the state.

And so it is with the notion of national services and a draft. I find myself cringing at the notion that of course the state has a right to demand two years of your service.

And yet, and yet, it is quite hard to dismiss PEG’s arguments out-of-hand. Forcing people into military service is perhaps the most intrusive thing that a state can do. But I cannot, out of hand, say that the state should never have a right to do it. I used to make glib arguments that a society that requires a draft to defend itself probably isn’t worth defending. But that’s overly glib and simplistic. Something easy to say when you live in a country without proximate threats to its livelihood.

And if I can, at least in theory, support a draft. And in part on the basis of collective obligation, then national service should be a no-brainer, shouldn’t it?

The answer ultimately is “Yes” that I can support support mandatory service outside of the military just as I can inside of it. It’s just that in the post-Vietnam era, I see non-military as much more ripe for abuse and obligation-creep than military service.

While war has become taken lightly, a war with a draft is unlikely to. And it would require an ongoing, existential threat for there to be a permanent military draft. Otherwise, it’s akin to political suicide to suggest it as anything other than an attempt to make a point about something else (which is problematic in its own way).

I have a harder time coming up with any pressing national need sufficient enough to justify civil conscription. Which, unlike military conscription which requires both the obligation to society and the pressing need, civil conscription would be relying almost entirely on the former with some “Because we want” thrown in there. Because those kids aren’t right.

Ultimately, I have to believe that in order to overturn the presumption of liberty, a case has to be made that is so strong that the obligation we ostensibly have to the greater society is at most a marginal part of that argument. If the solvency of the nation rests in the balance, you institute a draft. If a society depends on somebody going down into the mines, and you simply can’t bribe enough people to do it, then maybe you consider conscription. But as long as you can rely on a volunteer army and you can pay people to go into mines, you simply need not fall to that last resort. Relying on the sence of obligation that PEG refers to so eloquently is, at best, the very beginning of an argument before you get to the actual important part.

Having said that, there is a strong difference between conscription and social pressure that is downplayed in some of the commentary surrounding this issue. I do think that there is value in social expectation of service of some sort. “If you ride alone, you’re riding with Hitler” is worlds apart from mandatory carpooling.

Where I could personally see a role for national service of some sort would actually involve the role that the military has often portrayed in the past: a path for non-college bound young people to have done something worthwhile as a way to avoid the post-high school “drifting” that a lot of people do. Or, honestly, for college graduates who are so inclined. I knock around in my mind some ideas for such programs that might be productive.

I think it’s great that we’re drawing down from war abroad. I do somewhat lament the lost opportunities some may have with the need for less military personnel going forward. And I like the idea of such programs at least on a conceptual level. But I wouldn’t want to go to war to justify such labor utilization, and I have less than a clear idea of what, precisely, we could do with them. Or, for that matter, how we would pay for it.

I was quite pleasantly surprised when the Obama administration responded quickly for allowing cell phone users to unlock their phones.

There has been some misunderstanding about what unlocking a cell phone means. It basically only means that you can prevent the phone from being carrier-specific as they are manufactured and released to be. This actually has very limited application, however, because in the United States, the carriers are generally incompatible with one another anyway. That’s one of the reasons that despite the current prohibition against unlocking, most of the carriers will let you do it anyway. Most Verizon phones cannot be unlocked to run on AT&T. No AT&T phones can be reworked to get onto Verizon’s network. Really, of the four major carriers, only T-Mobile plays really nice.

Derek Khanna, the GOP wonderkind who was fired from a thinktank for advocating a reworking of copyright laws and who initiated the petition, wrote a follow-up in The Atlantic stating that allowing the unlocking and jailbreaking/rooting* of phones is not enough.

Currently there is an exception for personal jail breaking (allowing individuals to install unapproved applications by altering the OS), but developing, selling, trafficking, or discussing the underlying technology is still illegal and there is no personal exceptions for tablets or other devices. This is unbelievable, especially when according to @Saurik, 23 million iOS devices are running a version of Cydia – a rough barometer of the number of devices jail broken. Until recently, personal jail breaking was illegal as well – meaning that all of the owners of those devices could be criminally liable. Unlocking new phones, as previously explained, is now illegal in all circumstances.

Accessibility technology has received an exception, but it is so narrow that it is nearly useless for persons who are deaf or blind. This exception was not the one requested on behalf of persons who are deaf and blind. And like the jail breaking, while there is a narrow exception for personal use — developing, selling, trafficking, or discussing the underlying technology is still illegal. What use is an exception for accessibility for personal use, if no one can develop the tools?

Technology to backup legally purchased DVDs and Blu-Ray discs for personal use is widely available and widely used but is completely illegal (in the US) – thus making millions of Americans criminals for a what most would consider non-infringing activity (if they own the content).

I agree with every one of his recommendations. I would, however, go a step further. The biggest problem in limiting legitimate smartphone usage is untouched by allowing jailbreaking, rooting, and unlocking. Namely, it’s the degree of control carriers exert over the phones in the first place. Daily Dot touches on it:

There’s another reason why Congress needs to step up to the plate: Open mobile devices and networks are key to future innovation. We’ve seen this before: In the 1960s policymakers finally put a stop to this kind of corporate nonsense in the landline market by allowing customers to attach their own devices to the network. The FCC’s “Carterfone” decision in 1968 ended AT&T’s practice of squelching attempts to innovate on its network or the devices that connected to it. The decision forced AT&T to allow unapproved devices to connect to its network—in this case, a device that helped increase the reach of rural telephone networks. More importantly, the move unleashed a wave of innovation in the U.S. and around the world. Telephone handset prices plummeted, answering machines and cordless phones became commonplace and computer modems were invented, ushering in today’s Internet era.

Once upon a time, I had a job that involved working on prototype smartphones. I primarily worked with devices that were under development from two sources. Both are names you would recognize. Both had a good product. Some of us preferred one, some of us preferred the other. Only one of these two companies would you associate with smartphones. The company that had the phones I preferred never released it in the United States, despite the fact that it was a fully operational device when I tested it. Why did one of these highly successful companies succeed in becoming a fixture in the smartphone world while the other remains just another electronics company? Because one of the companies got their devices onto the carrier networks. The other didn’t. So it wasn’t a question of which one made the better phone. It was a question of the carrier playing favorites.

To some extent, this is unavoidable. Carriers cannot endorse every every phone made by somebody somewhere. Even if they mean well. Except our carriers don’t. Unless you’re Apple, your phone only gets picked up by a carrier if it meets certain requirements that benefit the carrier and not the customer.

But companies that depend on the carriers are forced to play along — and as a result, they’re not allowed to compete on equal footing with giants like Apple and Samsung. The HTC One X is a high-end flagship device designed to compete squarely with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S III, but Verizon and Sprint aren’t carrying it: instead, Sprint offers a variant called the Evo 4G LTE, and Verizon is selling a downgraded device called the Droid Incredible 4G that simply doesn’t match up to higher-end competition. How is HTC to compete for Verizon customers with a weaker device? Why should HTC depend on struggling Sprint to market and sell a custom phone when it could just leverage its existing One X campaigns to take on Apple directly?

And because success in the wireless marketplace can only come with carrier support, innovation is stunted as companies design their future products around what they think carriers might want, not where the market or consumer behavior is heading. “Companies build phones that the carriers ask for instead of taking risks and testing new concepts in the marketplace,” says Vizio’s McRae. “The result is a collection of handsets that are fairly homogenous from a small number of brands.”

It’s worth noting here that not all carriers are equally closed. T-Mobile plays nice, by and large. AT&T is also at least somewhat flexible (though it’s tougher to get one with 4G connectivity from a non-approved device). On the other end, Verizon will not let any phone onto their network that isn’t branded for them and they place significant demands on what they’ll activate.

In addition to the innovation issue, there is also the customer freedom angle. Which is to say that the carriers are erecting their own barriers-to-exit. Even if I relocate to an area where T-Mobile is an option, as a Verizon customer I will have to replace all of my phones and tablets to make the transition. That’s a bigger barrier than any contract I’ve signed. It’s not just that my specific phone cannot work with AT&T’s network, but that I couldn’t purchase – and Samsung couldn’t make – one that would allow me to do so. Now, maybe in a competitive market such phones still wouldn’t exist, but cross-network compatibility is not a novel concept and it’s the carriers that have a lot of incentives to prevent it from happening. It doesn’t matter whether T-Mobile plays nice if nobody else does. An open phone is just a T-Mobile phone by default, or a crippled AT&T one.

There are a couple arguments against forcing carriers to open their networks to non-approved phones. The first is one of free markets, the second one of quality assurance.

The free market argument goes that if T-Mobile is playing nice, but Verizon isn’t, if this is important to consumers they will flock to T-Mobile. The market will work itself out. Or, alternately, the government simply shouldn’t get involved because it’s simply not the government’s place. The problem with both of these arguments is that we are facing a natural (though government-assisted) oligopoly. The capital costs are prohibitive for a new entrant to set things right. T-Mobile is open in part because they lack the capital costs to be a technically competitive network. Their policies are, I suspect, borne more of necessity and desperation than actual goodwill. Since we’re stuck with only four carriers, there is a public interest argument for disallowing competitive behavior that is made more strong by the fact that they exist on the shoulders of government-assigned frequency spectrum. It’s hard for a really free market to exist in this sort of environment.

The quality assurance argument is relatively weak and ultimately can be worked out. The argument here goes that Verizon disallows unauthorized phones because it reflects poorly on them if someone buys a cheap phone and thus gets crappy service. This is true, but only to an extent. This, however, applies to a whole bunch of areas where we do trust consumers to know the difference. If I buy a crappy television and DirecTV’s signal looks poor, that may reflect negatively on DirecTV but we wouldn’t allow DirecTV to demand that only their approved TV sets can be used with their service. If they tried to do that, we would probably respond to them the same way we responded when landline telco tried to do that.

I am sympathetic to Verizon et al demanding that phones they don’t approve of can’t be branded with their name. I’d even support some limitations on how those phones can be advertised (perhaps the requirement of a disclaimer stating that while the manufacturer makes the claim that it works on Verizon’s network, Verizon makes no such claim).

There is a third argument, but it’s a non-starter. That argument goes that if people can take their phones from one carrier to the next, it will kill the subsidization model where people pay a steeply discounted price for a phone with the condition of a two year contract. If only this were true! I hate the subsidy model. There are better ways even for cash-strapped customers who cannot easily afford the full price of a new phone. But the primary stick of the carriers is not locked phones, but rather early termination penalties. All they need is for those to reflect the subsidies, or go the T-Mobile route and have people purchase the phone in installments (all payments due upon service termination).

The solution, as far as I am concerned, is that the providers must provide handset makers the technical specs for compatibility with their network and are forced to either rely entirely on a SIM card for operability, or alternately that they have an automatic registration system for devices.

Lenovo is looking at entering the American market. Lenovo is the current maker of ThinkPad computers, of which I am a devotee. Whether Lenovo can succeed here on its merits is an open question. The ThinkPad brand is better known than the Lenovo brand and other computer makers – such as HP and Dell – have tried and failed in the North American market. But whether they succeed or fail should not depend on the customers, not the cooperation of four corporations here.

* – Unlocking means breaking the lock that connects a specific phone to a specific carrier. Often confused with unlocking, jailbreaking and rooting a device removes the barriers that prevent people from making unauthorized customizations of the device, ranging from installing carrier’s software to installing unauthorized or system-modifying software.

Some counties in Colorado are unhappy with the state’s leadership and are doing something about it:

If all goes well for the denizens of Weld County, Colo., come November, there will be an item on their ballots asking them to vote on a new brewing issue: seceding with eight other Northern counties from the state of Colorado and forming America’s 51st state, Northern Colorado.

Apparently, they’re not bluffing. On Tuesday, Weld County’s commissioners raised the issue quite seriously at a bi-annual meeting of the state’s county commissioners. Sean Conway, one of Weld’s five commissioners, said the idea had first been raised about two to three months ago by a group of concerned citizens. […]

When the group of voters first approached Conway and his fellow commissioners about seceding, Conway thought they were “a little out there.” But once he looked into it, he said secession began to look like a possibility.

There are between eight and thirteen counties, total, that are looking into this. Eight are listed in the article. If these eight cities formed their own state, it would be the 42nd largest state in terms of area (behind West Virginia, comfortably larger than Maryland). The population, though, would be 51st, with a little less than 3/5ths of the population of Wyoming.

Notably, three quarters of Northern Colorado’s population would be in Weld County, which is in Denver’s MSA.

With regard to the dissident county’s complaints, opinions will vary on their validity. The less interesting thing to me is whether I (or you) agree with Northern Colorado or Colorado proper on issues such as energy exploration and gun control, but the logistics of carving out a state from a state.

Getting the agreement of the seceding counties, the state of Colorado, and congress makes this rather unlikely. Such splits are difficult because it’s rarely the case that both parties are equally fine without one another.

Though not quite the same thing, San Fernando Valley sought to secede from Los Angeles and though their residents voted to make it happen, the city disagreed because, hey, SFV does some heavy lifting with taxes and who wants to let that tax-base go its own way?

What’s interesting about the Colorado case is that you could, theoretically, get both sides to agree to it. Michael Cain has commented that rural counties are a drain on state resources. So if the rural counties wanted to go, it’s not for-certain that the rest of the state would want to stop them. On the other hand, perhaps those states are bringing in NMLA funds that the state wouldn’t want to lose.

The biggest obstacle, other than the fact that this sort of thing just doesn’t happen anymore, is the US Senate. You might have a hard time getting congress to give 330,000 voters two senators and a congressman. There is already some resentment in Wyoming’s directions. On the other hand, Republicans might like it because it’s two free senators, and Democrats might be okay with it because it would probably shift Colorado out of competition.

Of course, there would be another potential solution to this. Northern Colorado is adjacent to Wyoming. If Northern Colorado were to become independent, you’d have two adjacent states with the lowest populations. Put them together, they’d be larger than a handful of states. Problem solved!

Except that Wyoming would have to agree. They have a pretty good deal at the moment, with NMLA funds being generously awarded to its sparse population. Spreading that money out among more people might not be a very appealing idea. It’s also the case that they wouldn’t be adding enough new voters to get a second congressperson. So they’d have mild representative dilution.

So, for a lot of the same reason that the most obvious solution to the Washington DC problem, retrocession to Maryland, wouldn’t work, neither would my Greater Wyoming plan work. More’s the pity.

Of course, it’s almost certain that nothing will come of this. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Just like the North/South California split won’t occur, nor the Texas Split.

They would have their own flagship university, however, with the University of Northern Colorado falling in Greeley, which is in Weld County. They wouldn’t, however, have any good postal initials, since NC is taken. They’d have to find a new name. Probably just better to call the whole thing off.

A couple weeks ago, I linked to an article talking about the PPACA’s Exchanges – the mechanism by which those with pre-existing conditions will be insurable. Rick Ungar said:

Upon reviewing the data, I was indeed shocked by the proposed premium rates—but not in the way you might expect. The jolt that I was experiencing was not the result of the predicted out-of-control premium costs but the shock of rates far lower than what I expected—even at the lowest end of the age scale.

Not just that. Claims were being made that rates would be lowered. And for some, they might. Mike Schilling commented:

My company just had our annual health-care enrollment meeting, and it was the usual: less coverage at a higher cost. But with a possible silver lining: since we’re demographically unfortunate (a small company with a high proportion of older employees), moving over to the exchanges might help us a lot.

This all left me feeling great. Even though I came down against PPACA, it was a relatively close call and the exchanges were one of the aspects that I had hope for. I wasn’t stunned to read that costs were coming in below expectations (though I wouldn’t have been stunned the other way, either).

Why do the exchanges matter so much? Because if the exchanges work, it’s game over for the health care debate as far as I am concerned. We have our health care system, and it’s only a matter of figuring out how to transition from employer-subsidy to government-subsidy. Then, bam! We’re done.

So it was a real let-down to read Avik Roy’s piece, pointing out that the numbers suggesting savings were based on faulty comparisons:

[F]or the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.

Under Obamacare, only people under the age of 30 can participate in the slightly cheaper catastrophic plan. So if you’re 40, your cheapest option is the bronze plan. In California, the median price of a bronze plan for a 40-year-old male non-smoker will be $261.

But on eHealthInsurance, the median cost of the five cheapest plans was $121. That is, Obamacare will increase individual-market premiums by an average of 116 percent.

For both 25-year-olds and 40-year-olds, then, Californians under Obamacare who buy insurance for themselves will see their insurance premiums double.

Now, Roy’s comparisons themselves are imperfect. Twenty-five year old, non-smoking men, are not the best basis from which to judge. And for the 40 year old, he’s not clear but it appears he is comparing the cheapest available plan and not comparable plans. On the one hand, the sudden unavailability of inexpensive plans is significant, but on the other it’s not a true apples-to-apples comparison (if I am reading Roy correctly).

But it was enough to convince me that, except for various cases of PECs and cases like Mr. Schilling’s, rates will go up for most people. This was confirmed by the many responses to Roy, which despite their criticisms (and in some cases calling him names) did not contest his central point.

Ezra Klein argued that stated rates were misleading because some people paid more and some couldn’t get coverage, and that people will get subsidies. He seemed to concede the point that rates will go up for most people, but that this is a necessary sacrifice. Whether that’s true or not is a value judgment. There’s nothing at all wrong, in my view, taking the view that higher premiums are worth it for more consistent coverage.

But that wasn’t what we were hoping for, that wasn’t what was sold to us, and that wasn’t what the initial reports had lead me to believe. So I remain disappointed.

Roy responded, pointing out that the subsidies won’t take care of it. He further argues, along with Will Wilkinson, that the rates for the young and the healthy actually matter a great deal. Because if it’s not considered affordable, they won’t sign up. And if they don’t sign up, we don’t avoid the death spiral that the mandate was put in place to prevent.

Now, that the exchanges didn’t work as well as I had hoped is not really an indictment of PPACA. It may negatively affect my opinion of the law, but I wasn’t a supporter anyway. And that the exchanges didn’t work in this context doesn’t actually mean that we couldn’t try to run a system off a similarly market-based idea. It’s possible that if we put all the healthy working people that are currently on employer plans into the general market, that rates could go down.

Unfortunately, the confirmation of that I was hoping for did not materialize.

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.

“I hope that if Chris Christie some day runs for the Republican nomination, that he doesn’t lose any weight. I mean that because the United States culture continues to be replete with negative images of heavy men and heavy women especially. […] I’m not saying we need another William Howard Taft, but I actually think it would be healthy for the United States. I mean, we live in a country where Bill Clinton was talked about as a fat man, which was absurd. […] I hope that, in the future, if Haley Barbour or Chris Christie, they run, and they run as geniunely heavy men.” –Robert Farley, Bloggingheads.tv.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been in the news lately with his disclosure that he had weight-loss surgery. Marc Ambinder, who has gone through it himself, gives some good background on the whole thing in The Atlantic.

To their credit, more of Christie’s critics than I would have expected – particularly his critics on the left – have expressed support or indifference. Which is, to my mind, as it should be. A fair number of people, however, are holding on to some pretty ugly prejudices.

My primary objection to this has little to do with Chris Christie, and more to do with fat people in general. The thing is, if you mock Chris Christie for being fat, you’re not just mocking Chris Christie, you’re mocking fat people. The vast majority of it comes back to the notion that fatness is a mockable trait. Acting as though his obesity makes him inherently weak, or simply judging him as a lesser person – and less deserving of the office of governorship or the presidency – simply reinforces it. Other than the broad “I do not want an aesthetically displeasing person to run as president, the criticism often attempts to turn on a number of factors, all problematic.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about health. Is it? Would you have truly voted against Jed Bartlett’s re-election campaign? Beyond which, contrary to what Connie Mariano says, we really don’t know what Christie’s health is. The loss in life-expectency of an obese person compared to a non-obese person is 3-12 years. Hillary Clinton is fifteen years older than he is and Joe Biden is twenty years older. Statistically speaking, there isn’t much reason to be confident that Clinton and (particularly) Biden will outlive him. A larger concern tends to be health while alive. Christie could end up in a wheelchair. Are we prepared to say that we can’t have a president in a wheelchair? He could end up faced with fatigue. Old people have been known to get fatigue, too. And leaving all of this aside, Christie isn’t some statistic. He’s a person whose body may be dealing with the obesity well or may not be. If he runs for president, we will get more information about Christie’s actual state-of-health.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about discipline. Who wants a weak president? Am I truly supposed to believe that Bill Clinton’s inability to control his sexual urges was a puritanical non-issue, but Christie’s inability to control his food take is somehow relevant? This assumes, of course, that Christie’s food intake is occurring in a vacuum. Weight is a complicated thing. We don’t know how much he eats. Chances are it’s more than most, but even then you end up in a situation where one guy eats whenever he’s hungry and ends up looking like Barack Obama and another person eats whenever he’s hungry and ends up looking like Chris Christie. It’s… dicey, to actually attach a greater degree of moral worth and strength to the first person, for simply having less of an appetite? You’re still knee-deep in a lot of genetics here.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about how he’s handled the issue. The primary criticism being that Christie’s temper has been known to flare with this issue. Or that he’s uneven, between downplaying and laughing one minute to being angry the next. Well, how he responds to an issue that isn’t an issue shouldn’t be an issue, really. Our relationship with our body is a complicated thing. The expectation of some – explicit or implicit – is that he damn well better feel a healthy dose of self-loathing over this. But there is no appropriate response, ultimately. Self-loathing is deeply unattractive. Laughing it off is laughing off “a health crisis.” And getting angry at Mariano? Well, it wasn’t dignified, but neither is the “Fatty McFatterson gonna die” that he responded to. To which someone might respond “But this is part of a pattern with Christie.” Fair enough, and I’ll touch on this later, but find a better example than this one.

It’s not about appearance, it’s the hypocrisy (he’s a bully). Except that tying this to his weight only really works if weight should be considered a vulnerability that someone should be bullied over. Otherwise, he’s a bully or not whether he’s fat or thin and that’s condemnable or not on that basis. That Christie couldn’t lose the weight without surgical help is actuall par for the course for overweight people generally, only a sad few of which will ever permanently lose weight and most of those through surgery.

It’s not about the appearance, it’s about access to health care. Okay, now we’re at least dealing with relevant issues. Tread carefully here, though. It only works if you’re treating it the way you would treat a run-of-the-mill heart attack or somesuch.

It remains to be seen the extent to which weight will hurt Christie. Oddly, it could actually help him with women. Which would seriously drive some people nuts. Not unlike those conservatives who argue that Obama got a free ride because he was black. I am, ultimately, skeptical that it will. I think there’s a difference when it comes to a governor (or senator) and a president. This is a case where I really think our biases will get the best of us.

Now, I titled this piece “Fat Man For President!” But I have no strong attachment to Chris Christie. Merely that I agree with Mr. Farley on the prospect of a fat president than this guy or that one. And, while I wish Christie the best with his goal of weight loss (regardless of why he wants to lose the weight), I have to confess that a little part of me would be disappointed if he pulled a Mike Huckabee.

That I view him as one of the better candidates on the Republican side says more about the Republican field than it does about Christie. And while I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for him for governor or senator, I think there are a lot of legitimate questions about whether or not he is temperamentally suited for the presidency. And for the more liberal, of course, I understand that there are a lot of concerns about him that have absolutely nothing to do with his weight. I am not saying that there aren’t a lot of legitimate reasons to oppose Christie’s candidacy. There are. Stick with those.