Longtime readers of mine know that I am not particular concerned with the representation inequalities of the US Senate. One of the weak spots with it, though, are the great plains. The confluence of interests creates a degree of solidarity among its representatives that does not exist as much among the lowpop states that are separated by mountains, national parks, and culture. The population centers of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and (to a lesser extent) Kansas are all along a single freeway. There are some exceptions, like Wichita and Rapid City, but it’s really quite notable. They are also farming states with a lot of travel between them. To a much greater extent than Idaho and Montana (or even Eastern Idaho vs Northern Idaho), what’s good for South Dakota is good for North Dakota, and vice-versa.

There are a lot of oddities in how the states were drawn. There was a lot of chance involved (the border between Montana and Idaho was the product of a disgruntled judge). In some of them, there’s the question of what exactly they were supposed to do. Like Idaho, Nevada probably shouldn’t be a state because you have two cities more economically tied to their California brethren than one another, and a lot of open space. There’s no easy answer there. Combining Wyoming with Colorado or Montana would have been problematic, so what the heck are you going to do with Wyoming? Montana is kind of a mishmash of places, a confederation of small cities and country that create their own balance (assisted by the fact that the largest city is sort of removed from all of the others).

The Dakotas, however, were an unforced error. Combining them would have left a state that would have remained reasonably governable, and the separation of them left four senate seats where two might have been more appropriate. It would be large, but not too large. North Dakota and South Dakota each are population-centric in Fargo and Sioux Falls respectively, which is often problematic (having the capital removed helps, though, and SD does have Rapid City) and having the two of them live under the same tent, the same way that Montana balances its larger (small) cities with others, strikes me as beneficial.

We also might be looking at Kansas and Nebraska for potential consolidation, though the population imbalance might be a problem. I consider this less of a problem for the Dakotas. Though South Dakota is more populated by 140k or so, it is also the more geographically diverse and therefore might be less likely to vote as a single unit in the same way that Kansas might.

Note: I could be way off on this one. I sort of feel the same way about some of those northeastern statelets and have been told, by more than one person, that they couldn’t possibly live together under a single tent. They’ve got a lot of history under their belt. So, too, do the Dakotas, which would make a merger rather difficult.

Yahoo recently hired a pregnant woman to be their new CEO. This is generating a fair amount of discussion on the subject. The best so far is from Forbes.

[Marissa Mayer]’s a CEO and can give herself work-from-home days if she needs to. She can hire a nanny, a nurse, a courier, a cook. She can set her company policy so that infants are allowed in the workplace (which has benefits like higher morale in the office!). Her hot-ass husband is a venture capitalist with a flexible schedule who can take the kid to doctor appointments and whatnot.

You know who’s not a CEO? Almost everyone else. Marissa Mayer is an outlier, and while her actions may make splashy headlines, her situation doesn’t apply to the rest of us. […]

Things have improved immensely since the early ‘70s for college-educated women like me: In 1971, 27% of working women with B.A.s were able to take paid maternity leave; by 2006, that figure was 66%.

For women whose education topped out at high school, though, 16% had paid maternity leave in 1971. And these days? Why, would you look at that: The number hasn’t improved at all.

The vast majority of women going back to work after two weeks have nothing in common with Marissa Mayer. They’re dragging their weary butts back to work, and wrapping up their boobs because there’s no place to pump at work. They’re getting paid by the hour.

Clancy has quite a bit of vacation and sick leave saved up, so we’re not going to be taking as much of a financial hit as a lot of people do when it comes to maternity leave. Even so, it’d be nice if Clancy had been able to take her vacation days and get some time to take care of the baby after it is born. A lot of other countries apparently manage this, but not ours.

Having said that, there are some real concerns that would come along with it. The Forbes author gives an anecdote about how she declined to take advantage of something she was legally entitled to. Similarly, I know a pregnant woman who is under a degree of pressure not to take advantage of her due maternity leave. She talked of taking eight weeks of leave, and the response was along the lines of “We’ll see.” She was legally entitled to it, but an uncooperative employer can make life difficult for you if you take advantage of it. And if you force, force, force it upon them and go after them for anything that merely sniffs like a punitive response, you have essentially added a asymmetrical cost to hiring women.

Another female acquaintance, in response to Mayer’s hiring at Yahoo, mentioned on Facebook that she got her current job while pregnant. She said during the interview “I don’t know if you realize I’m pregnant or think I’m just a porker, but I’m only somewhat porker and very pregnant.” (You’d have to know her to believe as I do that yes, she would actually say this in a job interview.) She got the job. Would she have gotten the job if it meant that she would be gone for 12 weeks and that they’d have to pay her and a replacement? I don’t see employers as being that far-sighted.

So where does that leave us? The government could take care of paying the parents. A social evolution where men were just as likely to take the time off as women could negate any discriminatory effect. Alternately, if you had generous leave that was so limited that men would almost have to take the time off, you could relieve the discriminatory effect. Of course, then you would be discriminating against one-parent households. Unless you said that a single parent gets twice the leave, which then penalizes women who married their child’s father.

One other possibility, I suppose, would be tax credits to corporations with family-friendly policies. That would encourage more companies to offer paid maternity leave, but would let those that are worried about it off the hook. That would, of course, be yet another line in the tax code. There would also likely be some employers that would take the credits and then apply pressure on employees not to use them. Intuitively, it seems like the abuse would be less than simply by demanding maternity leave for everyone. Of course, you’d have to strike the right balance between “enough of a tax credit to encourage employers to do it” and “not too much of a tax credit to where they have to do it whether they intend to comply or not.”

Theoretically, science is science and political motivations should be set aside. In reality, it almost never works that way. Whether we accept scientific conclusions or not depends, in good part, on whether the results conform to how Americans should or should not live.

Global Warming wasn’t the imminent catastrophe when I was growing up than it is now. Yet, almost everything we’re talking about doing because of global warming, were things that we were taught to do before global warming was the primary ecological threat of our lifetime (or was framed as such). I do not consider this a coincidence.

A long while back, I was advancing my theory that increased gasoline costs might actually lead to a solidifying in the suburbs if employers end up relocating closer to employees rather than vice-versa. She exclaimed “That would defeat the purpose of global warming!”

The purpose of global warming, in her mind, being a rationale through which we should be rearranging society. I’m not arguing that’s what global warming is about for all or even most of those who are saying that we need to combat it. I do think, however, it is a lot easier to accept the science when the result is people living in a way that you think they ought to. I do not find it to be a coincidence that those who believe in the imminent disaster of global warming are also inclined to believe that Peak Oil is right around the corner. One way or another, we’re going to get them out of their SUVs dagnabbit, our of their suburbs, and living the way they ought.

Not a single word of the above has any effect on whether (a) AGW is occuring and will continue to do so or (b) whether we need to do something about it. It is or it isn’t, we should or we shouldn’t. It does, however, complicate the discussion. It prevents us from approaching global warming as a thing and outside of the political lens.

CAFE standards are not a particular effective way to combat global warming, in my view, because it focuses on one aspect at the expense of another. The mileage your car gets only matters if you hold the number of miles driven as a constant. The end result is that we punish people who have low-mileage cars who drive short distances while we let skate people who have high-mileage cars but actually burn more fuel. I went through far, far more fuel in my compact than I presently do in my crossover SUV. I say all this to say that when I say all this, it comes across as “I don’t care about the environment.” It’s a political issue that I am on the wrong side of. The goal – at least for some – is not just to get people to use less gas (though I agree that’s a big part of it) but also to drive the right kind of car.

I support carbon taxes. Or rather, I support the right carbon taxes. Ideally, comparatively revenue-neutral ones. Ones that take the money raised and disperse it back. Not put aside for grants, not going to education. Not going to health care. Not going to toxic waste clean-up. Winners and losers should be picked precisely on how much carbon they are responsible for. In one hand, out the other (more or less). From there, let people drive whatever car they want, live in whatever kind of neighborhood they want, and make choices on that basis.

This, to me, is far preferable than using global warming as a rationale to change our lives or push is in specific ways. Not only because the freedom of personal choice, but because it’s most conducive to finding a way to cut emissions while living the way we want to live, which in turn means it will more likely be successful. And in turn, I will have more confidence that it is about reducing emissions than it is about the appropriate cosmetics and living the “right way.”

Given the stakes, we simply shouldn’t care if it’s nuclear power or renewable. We shouldn’t care if people reduce emissions by getting a more fuel-efficient car or by driving less. We shouldn’t care all that much whether they drive less because they moved to the city or because their employer relocated to the suburbs. The degree to which all of these things continue to matter… it becomes apparent as a political rather than purely scientific issue.

Australia recently passed a carbon tax to go into effect. I will be interested to see how it works out. Hopefully that, rather than CAFE, Cash-for-Clunkers, and light bulb bans, will provide the most useful blueprint.

Amanda Marcotte says thus:

I think Goodman actually happened on a couple that’s a great illustration of another, more real phenomenon, which is the impact marriage has on women’s voting patterns. We know that married women are far more conservative voters than unmarried women, and we also know that single men are more conservative generally than single women. One part of this, therefore, might be that in the battle over whose values are going to “win” in a relationship, men tend to dominate and that women are adopting their husbands’ political views alongside taking their husbands’ names. The woman Goodman profiles openly admits that her husband’s views have persuaded her over to the dark side. Since women her age aren’t liberals who married libertarians, I question using her as an example of anything typical to young voters today, much less young female voters who we can still say confidently will turn out in greater numbers at the polls than young men their age.

I was actually thinking about the bolded part the other day. It’s commonly known that married women – and mothers in marriages – tend to be more conservative than single women. It’s hard, however, to tease out why. Some of it would be self-selection, conservative women being more likely to marry and all. There is also the conservatism that more generally occurs with marriage and family, the change of worldview and all that. There are people like my sister-in-law who start attending church when they have kids and religiosity coincides with conservatism.

But I think that there is also what Marcotte herself is observing. It’s something I have noticed in my peers. More have shifted to the left, but those who have shifted to the right are Julianne (who is single) and women who have married more conservative men. My ex-roommate’s wife went from apolitical to his liberalish political preferences almost immediately. I can only think of one case, really, where there as a husband interest piqued or whose politics shifted due to that of his wife.

The real way to test it, though, is to look at what happens when a liberal man marries a conservative woman. Who typically “wins” when there is a winner? If it’s the man, then you’ve really made your case since that accounts for most variables.

In the Himmelreich-Truman household, it’s been… interesting. We were both right of center when we met (indeed, we met through a mutual friend who is a Republican activist), though not necessarily for the same reasons. I am a bit wonky and she is more of an intuitive voter. Over time, we’ve both moved at least somewhat to the left, though there again moving for somewhat different reasons (excluding the gay marriage factor, which we both adamantly support and which is becoming much more of a forefront issue). It may not be a coincidence that we are both looking at the real possibility of not voting for the GOP nominee for the first time in over a decade (well, ever for her – I voted for Clinton).

This is part of a series of recommendations for western states. The recommendations range from serious to more of a rant than anything serious. In the case of Montana and the penny, it’s more serious than not.

Montana should do away with the penny. Unilaterally. Of course, Montana can’t exactly do away with the penny unilaterally, but they can and should be the first state to render it useless. Or, at least, I don’t see why they can’t.

Montana, you see, has no sales tax. Like Oregon and other states, it lacks a statewide sales tax. Unlike Oregon, though, it does not generally have local sales taxes, either. You might think that this means that this obviates the need to do away with the penny, but in reality it only makes the problem more pronounced. In Montana, as with everywhere else, prices are set to ninety-nine cents. You know what this means? Lots of pennies. LOTS OF PENNIES. The take-a-penny-leave-a-penny bins overflow with them. Buy something, get a penny back. Buy two somethings, get two pennies back. You have to buy things in increments of five not do deal with pennies back.

How does this differ from states that have a sales tax? There are, after all, a lot of pennies exchanged there, too! Here’s the deal, though: If you’re in Idaho, and you give a penny here and take a penny there and it all evens out in the end. In Montana, however, the exchanges are asymmetrical. You get a lot more pennies than you give, because when you buy something, you have to count out four pennies (three pennies for two somethings) in order to get rid of them. A good portion of the time, you don’t bother. They keep the penny, you put it in the overflowing penny bin. Whatever. You’re not going to mess with it.

On its face, this exposes the problem with pennies in general and why we should do away with them nationally. But nowhere is this more pronounced than in no-sales-tax-states.

So what should Montana do? Montana should require that all transactions within its state be priced to the nearest five cents. Vendors should be required to round down, or alternatively if they round up they should have to post the rounded price on all single-purchase items (a gallon of gasoline, for instance, would be immune because few ever buy a single gallon).

With this, Montana would hopefully be setting the stage for other states to follow suit. Even though the other states have the sales tax which supplies symmetry to penny transactions, it’s still a counterproductive exercise. The states that have a sales tax can simply redesign their tax to x% plus whatever it takes to get an increment of five.

Now, there are some people who say we should do away with the nickel, too. I am not opposed. One step at a time.

North Carolina has decided that emissions tests ought to be reserved for older cars, either those more than three models years back or with more than 70,000 miles. This sounds logical, but makes me a tad uncomfortable regardless. Mostly because of who is going to be driving the old cars, and who can afford new ones. The tests may have been unnecessary, but there was at least an egalitarianism.

Of course, emissions standards are more generally going to fall on those that can’t afford the latest and greatest anyway. The same applies to safety standards. Even if the folks with new cars had been required to get their car tested, they’d have failed at much lower rates than those prayin’ to the heavens that Old Bessy makes it through another year. If anything, this change merely codifies that distinction, and further recognizes the reality of the situation.

Matthew Yglesias is complaining that too much transit is going towards rural states:

Only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas, and the quantity is dropping, so naturally the U.S. Department of Transportation proudly announced today that “of the $500 million in TIGER 2012 funds available for grants, more than $120 million will go to critical projects in rural areas.”

This has been one of Yglesias’s ongoing things, the overspending in rural America. To be honest, in the case of transit, the Interstates out here are probably nicer than they need to be. They’re repaving the Interstate between Callie and Redstone when, to be honest, I hadn’t noticed the slightest bit of a problem. So I’m not entirely unsympathetic to his viewpoint.

He goes on…

You see this basic dynamic in all kinds of federal grant programs. Typically any kind of rational grant formula would fail to give money to rural areas in a manner that’s consistent with rural areas’ strength in the U.S. Senate. Therefore you end up with either implicit or explicit special set-asides for rural areas.

It’s an article of faith among many that because of that damnable Senate, we overspend in rural areas. There is some truth to it, but it’s actually more complicated than it appears. Per-capita spending in Montana and the Dakotas, for instance, ranges from somewhat to very high (between 12-30% more than the national average). However, public spending in Idaho is comparable to that of California (-10%) and Utah is downright cheap (-20%, only Minnesota gets less) despite the fact that they have two senators just like everywhere else (it should be noted that the Dakotas and Montana have reservations and not-insignificant military spending). Wyoming is a special case, bringing in a lot of money due on account of its natural resources and the NMLA. Take that out (and we should, since that’s merely kicking half of their money back to them) and they’re somewhere below average. If the senate were as powerful as they say in the making of donor states and beneficiary states, this would not really be the case.

He does have a point with the low unemployment rates.

On Yglesias’s other point, we don’t traditionally spend federal funds in accordance with who delivers the taxation. There are some attempts at this, with Social Security and whatnot, and there are government favors that rich people buy, but it’s not our organizing principle. We try to hand it out according to economic need, and per-capita transit (for example) is going to cost more in rural places than urban ones. Complaints that they’re not “earning their keep” are not ones liberals make when applied to people they don’t already disfavor. To be fair, it may be in our interest to invest more in economic hotspots and areas of economic growth with an eye towards spurring people to move there, but rural America does provide our food and they are going to need services that are expensive on a per-capita rate. If we want to reduce food consumption, denying infrastructure investment isn’t a good way of doing that. Eliminating farm subsidies is (which, as far as I know, Yglesias does not oppose).

Disclosure: Well duh, I live in a rural place. This not a permanent arrangement and it’s unlikely that we will end up in a place as rural as we are now.

The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the third, the first is here and the second here. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.

The Company’s execs actually lived in Redstone. Go to the downtown area and you can see their mansions. Nobody who can afford a mansion wants to live downtown anymore, and so they’ve been converted into hotels or subdivided into co-op apartments (it helps that they’re near the university).

Because of this, it was a bit of a surprise to see that they put up the smelters in the city, rather than having them located somewhere else. Smelters are, essentially, smoke-stacks used in the extraction process. They generate a lot of polution. There were a lot of them out in Redstone’s little sister town, Blackrock. Blackrock retained one of them as a monument, but they’re all gone from Redstone, so I didn’t know they had ever been there.

Anyhow, I found it strange that they would put them in town rather than moving them out to somewhere else, since the executives themselves had to breathe the air. I guess NIMBY wasn’t around yet.

The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the second, the first is here. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.

One other interesting thing about it was the evolution of Redstone’s patriotism. Redstone is one of the most flag-waiving, patriotic places I have ever seen out of the south. And when the rubber hits the road, Redstonians, and Arapahoans more generally, enter the military in pretty large numbers. I figured it had to do with the Irish heritage and career opportunities, but there was another aspect to it that I hadn’t considered.

Namely, Redstone had its patriotism beaten into it. The miners opposed World War I vociferously. This opposition did not serve them there. They went on strike and the Washington sent some folks over and forced them to continue working at gunpoint. Their popular image was sunk by their inability to get on board with the war. So, when World War II rolled around, they got ahead of that. They accepted the wage freezes with magnanimity, held parades, and pressured those who weren’t working or essential to join up. The patriotic and military culture has been with the town ever since.

The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). A good bulk of the movie focused on the labor struggles. I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the first. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.

One of the things that stuck out at me was the symbiotic relationship between The Corporation and labor. I, of course, had the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I know what happened to Redstone when the mines shut down. Labor, of course, doesn’t know that. They only know that they’re working in dangerous conditions and breathing dangerous air, for meager wages in the shadow of The Company’s mansions. The Company’s view is not particularly well-represented in the film, but it’s not hard to tell where they were coming from (profits) and had the compulsion to keep wages minimal even though the freight ran smoother when they were able to avoid strikes every three years (if the film’s narrative is to be believed).

The Company went under due to the socialist uprisings in South America, among other things. When they suddenly lost all of their investments, they were bought out by another company. The other company looked at the labor conflicts, the increasing environmental liabilities, and decided to take a pass on most mining in Redstone. When they turned off the pumps of at the last mine, the result was water with so much mineral sludge, the mining of the lake it created is the only mining left in Redstone.

Needless to say, it wasn’t “happily ever after” for the town after that. As bad as the work was, it was still work. As bad as The Company was, they passed on things to the town that they didn’t realize were there until it was gone. The city’s economy, and population, never recovered. The employment prospects there are rather bleak outside of government work.

It’s a more peaceful place, I suppose, with not much to fight over.