People that live in the City of East Oak have a sticker on the back of their cars with the letter “CEO” on it. The primary reason for these stickers are in the case of a flood, only cars with this sticker are allowed in the city and back into their homes. They serve a dual purpose, though, because it lets the Oakfield Police Department, which covers both East Oak and West Oak, know who is and is not a resident of the town. You’re considerably more likely to get pulled over if you don’t have the sticker than if you do, and if you are pulled over the sticker will sometimes help you get out of the ticket.

Some friends and I used to eat at an IHOP in Phillippi late at night on a regular basis. One of the games we would play would be calling “First!” whenever a cop would be pulling someone over on Tannon Road outside. On “Step Nights” it would happen 3-4 times an hour. I was dating Julie at the time and her father was a firefighter that knew a lot of cops. He would sometimes give me a heads up when it was Step Night, which was the term the PPD used when they’d put an extra emphasis on traffic enforcement. The PPD was legally prohibited from having traffic quotas, so what they would do was offer their officers overtime working traffic enforcements on certain weekend nights. They didn’t have to write any tickets, but if they didn’t they wouldn’t get to do the overtime the next Step Night because their overtime was being paid for, more-or-less, by the revenue from speeding tickets.

I’ve gotten maybe a dozen tickets in my life. Nine were while I was dating Julie and seven or so of those were on Tannon Road on a Step Night.

My Webmaster and I are having a conversation on the ins and outs of traffic law and traffic court on my post about wrongly convicted innocents.

Web takes great issue with the current system of traffic courts. I agree with him that it is very problematic (though we disagree as to the prosecutor’s culpability). The main problem is that traffic tickets are as often as not seem to be revenue-generators rather than attempts at keeping the roads safe.

Delosa has a great law on the books that prevents municipalities from getting too much of their revenue from traffic tickets by capping the city’s traffic revenue at 35% of the city’s entire revenue. This prevents cases where towns get to dodge tax and revenue issues by taxing passers-through by way of traffic tickets. The problem with the law is that it has loopholes the size of Alaska.

Delosa allows its residence to take Defensive Driving once a year to get out of a traffic ticket. The accused pays a $75 administrative fee and then $35-50 for defensive driving class. By the end you’re not paying much less than you would be for the ticket, but the advantage is that it doesn’t go on your driving record, so in that sense it’s a bargain. Some industrious municipalities also created something called Deferred Adjudication. If you get DA you pay an “administrative fee”, which is usually the cost of the ticket, and if you don’t get another ticket within 90 days it is dropped from your record (so again, the insurance company never hears about it).

The problem with DD and DA are that since they are “administrative fees” they don’t count towards the 35% revenue cap. Both programs are extremely popular because they are such a bargain compared to the alternative. In effect, though, they actually hurt drivers because it undoes the revenue cap and the ticket that they got off with DD or DA for they quite likely wouldn’t have gotten if the city wasn’t making money from it.

The other big loophole is that only municipalities are subject to the revenue cap. Delosa has several layers of law enforcement. There are city cops, constables, sheriffs, and state patrols. Only the cities are subject to the cap, and only cities have deferred adjudication because they’re the only ones that need it. So while the cities are limited, county constables (whose primary purpose are court bailiffs and court security) make no secret of the fact that their primary source if income is traffic tickets (they also are paid to police municipalities that don’t have their own police departments and enforce toll roads).

I recognize the unfairness that Web and others point out. I used to get really worked up about it, but I don’t as much as I used to. I’ve come to view traffic tickets as road fees of a sort that are weighted towards those that break the law. That being said, I’m very much in favor of closing the Deferred Adjudication loophole that help provide so much motivation for cops doing nothing but waiting for people to go a reasonable speed in a section of road with an unreasonable speed limit. People think that they’re getting away with something with DA, but in the end they’re pulled over more often than they otherwise might be and because it’s so infrequent that tickets appear on someone’s record the insurance companies act ferociously because they know that if you got caught and couldn’t DD or DA your way out of it, you’ve probably been pulled over several times without their knowing about it. In Deseret, where there weren’t nearly so many ways to get out of a ticket, insurance response to tickets was much more mild.

Because of the popularity, though, I don’t expect anything to be done about it. As much as the argument makes sense, it’s hard to convey the abstract truth that telling their insurance companies about their automotive misdeeds and raising taxes (which these jurisdictions would have to do to make up for the lost revenue) is a good idea.

-{This post is a reproduction of a comment I left at Half Sigma involving a misperception about Mormons and caffeine}-

When I was living in the Mormon west, I worked for the bishop (the LDS equivalent of a priest) of the local church. He had a free coke machine downstairs that served caffeinated drinks. Mormon and non-Mormon employees alike partook. I asked Mormon coworkers about the caffeine ban and found out that contrary to popular belief, there isn’t one. At least not as I understood it.

The Words of Wisdom in the Doctrine & Covenants bans “strong drinks” and “hot drinks”, which has been interpreted to mean alcohol, coffee, and tea. It is not universally interpreted to include all caffeinated products such as cokes. Some do anyway because addictive substances in general are discouraged, but there is no hard rule.

Megan McArdle is confused:

The more important question, I think, is why the rest of us don’t spend more time worrying about false convinctions. What I’ve read about the Jeffrey MacDonald case, for example, makes it clear that at the very least, prosecutorial misconduct and dubious forensic testimony played some role in his conviction. This should bother us whether or not he’s guilty, since presumably the kind of games the prosecutors played with the evidence have been inflicted on other, less notorious, defendants who may have been innocent. Yet there’s been little interest from any quarter.

I inadvertently came across an answer to this question when writing the novel last year. A conservative politician named Neil was explaining to his old friend (the narrator) how he became a staunch social conservative over the years. I’ll put an excerpt below the fold, but the long and short of it is that Neil used to be a public defender and came to the conclusion that whether his clients were guilty or not they were usually failures in the system. The wrongly convicted man usually isn’t the banker you see on TV who stumbles across his dead boss and touches the knife and body trying to figure out what happened. It’s more often going to be someone with a long rap sheet that’s been in and out of the system for years. They were people that nobody had any reason to believe.

I think that by and large we don’t see ourselves as being in the position to be wrongly convicted. There is probably an implicit assumption that those that were wrongly convicted were guilty of something or had made poor life decisions that made them look guilty. We believe that police and prosecutors, while they may not always get the right guy for the right crime, only go after the bad guys. We don’t see them going after us. We don’t see prosecutors fudging facts in pursuit of us. We see ourselves behind them, pointing our finger at the miscreant, saying “tut, tut”.

Our belief and faith is often misplaced. For the most part it’s not even conscious. We almost all agree that people being wrongly convicted is bad. We believe that those that have been wrongly convicted should be set free. I think that we’re often reluctant to admit that the system got it wrong in the first place and when we think of “collateral damage” of an imperfect system, we think a lot more of “their kind” going free when guilty than we do “our kind” being targeted.

Even to the extent that we concede, consciously or unconsciously, that innocent people are jailed and even innocent people that are like us from time to time, our chances of being falsely convicted are logically much smaller than the likelihood that we will be victimized by someone that the system cut loose. If we’re going to be negative impacted by errors in the system, it’s far more likely that it will be an error that allowed a guilty man to go free than an innocent man convicted.

Anyhow, below the fold is the dialogue that came to mind when pondering Megan’s confusion. A fair portion of the book is spent criticizing the character Neil and his beliefs. This is Neil’s attempt at explaining himself. (more…)

Many moons ago, the Colosse Spiders basketball team was aching for a new basketball arena. Around the same time the NHL was looking to expand. So the proposed basketball arena was also set to double as a hockey arena. This was meant to up the value to sell it to the public that would have to vote on it, but in some ways it hurt the referendum more than it helped.

There were two prospective owners for the NHL team we were trying to get. The first was Stephen Goldberg, the Jewish New York implant that owned the Colosse Spiders. The second was Miles Carpenter, the owner of the local power company and the minor league hockey Colosse Crushers. Since the new arena was primarily for basketball, Goldberg was in the driver’s seat in the referendum.

Asking that voters pay for a new basketball arena apparently wasn’t enough for Goldberg. He also wanted full ownership rights to the stadium even before the voters had finished paying it off. He wanted to be able to personally pocket naming rights, advertising, revenue from other events held there, and even street parking surrounding it. The big thing, though, is that in exchange for the voters building him a new arena, he wanted it written down that any NHL team that came to Colosse would be his. Essentially, he wanted to freeze Carpenter out.

Carpenter, needless to say, didn’t like this one bit. So while Goldberg, the city Chamber of Commerce, and the city government tried to sell the arena, Carpenter was one of only a couple major figures against it. Radio talk show hosts supplied the ground troops of the opposition, but Carpenter supplied almost all of the funding.

Colosse was the only city of twelve voting that actually had a team threatening to move to reject a stadium/arena referendum. That didn’t hold Goldberg and the Spiders machine back. They vowed to keep putting it on the ballot until it passed. What’s really interesting about it, though, is what happened to Carpenter.

Carpenter was a bazillionaire. He was the owner of the local utility company. He was buying companies left and right. He thought himself to be somewhat untouchable. He was wrong. Carpenter was shunned by the business community. He and (more importantly) his wife were shut out of all marquee social events. The influence he’d used to get his oldest kid into the prestigious University of Colosse was no longer effective as his daughter’s admission was denied even though she had a better academic profile than did the son who got in. His utility company was kicked out of the Chamber of Commerce on a technicality.

As far as I know, nothing he did cost him any money. You can’t boycott the power company, after all. But it was apparently more than he could bear. Two years later, they held another referendum. It wasn’t quite as skewed in favor of Goldberg, though he still got dibs on the hockey team. Carpenter campaigned for the second referendum, it passed, and he was suddenly no longer socially toxic.

I think of the story of Miles Carpenter whenever the subject of peer pressure comes up. Carpenter had it all, but in the end signed on to a deal that denied him one of his dreams simply because it wasn’t worth having it all if no one you cared about liked or respected you. He gave up the millions he would have gotten from the hockey team in exchange for a little social detoxification.

When I was in junior high I started hanging around with a kid that lived around the block with an unsavory reputation. My folks, for the first time ever, prohibited me from playing with him. They thought he was trouble and even at the time I couldn’t disagree. But I loudly declared that just because he does bad things didn’t mean that I would. Didn’t they trust me? They just didn’t understand, which is the last rhetorical refuge for a kid without a valid argument to make.

I first started noticing in high school that it did seem to matter a great deal who you hung out with. Some guys that I was friends with in junior high started hanging out with the wannabee gangbangers. Once they were the smart kids in the regular class like me, but I doubt half of them ultimately graduated from high school. Others started hanging out with “South will rise again” racists. Ditto for that.

Granted, in many cases there were likely other things going on that drove these kids to these groups, though they usuallywere the I-don’t-have-friends sort of problem rather than the I-was-born-a-bad-apple variety. I first smoked pot because I was around kids smoking pot. I taught myself to learn how to like beer because I was around drinkers. These things weren’t the end of me, obviously, but they’re things I would have been much, much less likely to do otherwise.

Much of what I’m saying here will be obvious to a lot of you. What I find most interest about it is how soooo unobvious it was back when I was young. How silly it was. How stupid old people were for believing it. It just didn’t make any sense.

Then I think of Miles Carpenter. If a rich millionaire can’t stand up to the pressure of his social environment, a pimply kid hasn’t got a prayer.

The Onion:

Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years, the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education.

Considering what the (yeah, yeah, fictional) students have to look forward to in life, getting rid of the future tense would be less depressing…

webmaster: ok… ack

webmaster: this stupid nuvaprim fake-fench-accent-you-american-women-are-so-pretty ad… if I hear it one more time I swear I’m going to throw something at my radio

webmaster: which is unfortunate given that I’m listening to streaming online radio at the moment

trumwill: Not familiar with the ad. I suspect I should be thankful.

webmaster: you really, really should

webmaster: it’s an ad for a cream for women to rub on their legs with which to hide wrinkles and spider veins and stuff

webmaster: and it’s got a cheesy, cheesy guy doing a fake french accent talking about how he wants to send a free bottle because american women are “so beautiful” and he wants to make them even more so just like european women… yikes

trumwill: Whatever… as long as they continue to shave their armpits.