While driving through Shoshona on The Great North By Northwest Jobs Tour, Clancy and I got pulled over for speeding. We had just stopped to refill the gas tank and I had handed the keys over to her. I hadn’t conveyed to her the rather low speed limit in town and so there were were on the side of the road with flashing lights.

Further complicating matters was that we had a taillight out. Though we didn’t know that to be the case, it wasn’t a surprise. I’d had that light replaced the week before and the guy that replaced it said that it was going to happen again because a leak was allowing water inside. If I’d had the receipt, I would have been able to show the cop that we’d just had it replaced and so we were quite surprised that it went out again (no mention of the leak, of course).

Oh, and we had no proof of insurance.

The cop told us to watch our speed and gave us a warning for the taillight and the speeding. He did give us a ticket for the insurance, but also told us that if we could just prove that we were insured it would be dismissed. He told us that we looked like good, upstanding folks, so he was going to cut us a break. We thanked him profusely.

Later on the trip we were in a bookstore on the Shoshona/Cascadia border that the punner in me wishes was called Borders but alas was their main competitor. We were waiting to hear back on whether or not we would be driving directly back to Gemini Falls or going home. So we decided to hang out at the bookstore. Clancy brought in a book she’d been reading. She asked Customer Service if she needed some sort of tag for her book since she brought it in, but declined and the lady at the checkout didn’t feel the need to check up on that because, well, we looked like good people.

As a smoker and serial-loiterer, I sometimes get run off by local establishments. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. It tends to happen most when two factors are in play, one of which is that I am not dressed nicely. It got to the point that if I knew I would be smoking a cigarette at a convenience store I would actually dress up for the occasion. Half Sigma, I think it was, wrote a short post a while back about a criminal-type who managed to avoid suspicion primarily by dressing in a suit.

I am a relatively fortunate guy. I was born white into a house with solid middle class values. I was taught (though it didn’t always take) how to dress up or down for an occasion. I was taught to be polite to cops and polite to people in general. That appearances matter. Though this is belied a bit by my loitering, nonetheless I was taught that it is best not to look or act the least bit suspicious. While it is everyone’s right to act suspicious, just because something is a right does not make it a good idea and people can make trouble for you if they feel its worth their own trouble.

It’s enough to make one wonder the extent to which this is a healthy outlook for a society. I’m sure an indignant, younger version of myself would have felt that it was not. Stereotyping is bad and all that. Just because a kid is dressed like somebody that makes trouble does not mean that he should be treated that way.

The older I get, the less convincing I find that perspective. Even if you are doing nothing wrong, you are providing a degree of cover for those that are doing wrong. If criminals all start wearing plaid tomorrow, it would make the job of police officers a lot easier! Making their job easier not only results in less crime, but it also involves them spending less time bothering good, upstanding folks trying to suss out the criminals.

I’m not advocating laws being passed to ban plaid or anything like that. Nor do I think that being deferential to a police officer should be one of those things forced with the strong arm of the law (except as required). And I don’t think that wearing plaid should, in and of itself, be probable cause for anything. The same goes for mouthing off to a cop (within reasonable limits, of course).

There is a saying that just because something is a right does not make it right. The next step is to say that just because something is a right does not make it morally neutral, either. It may not be illegal for a man with an unpleasant build to wear a speedo to the beach, but that doesn’t mean that doing something he knows will make others uncomfortable is not self-centered and distasteful.

On the subject of deferring to law enforcement personnel, it would of course be much easier to do that if you can trust them. There are parts of Delosa and Louisiana and other southern states where I would never, ever let a cop look in my car without a warrant. There are other circumstances with any police department where I would be a lot more reluctant. Often, police departments bring this sort of resistance upon themselves.

This is one of those areas where I think a good amount of disservice is done with traffic enforcement. Speed traps are a great way to raise funds, but they’re also a good way to create mistrust between the police and the citizenry. It makes more of our encounters with cops than not an adversarial experience. Cities, counties, and states have rights about what kind of speed limits to post. They also have the right to shorten yellow lights at intersections. And the right to park bait cars. But just like the actions of the citizens have inconvenient ramifications sometimes, so do actions of the authorities.

-{Take care to note that other than in the rhyming title, no mention of race is mentioned here.}-

It seems that every so often I hear that the subscription model for music is dead. They could be right and they could be wrong. I don’t know. But the reasons they give are often… curious. The biggest is the question of “why rent music when you can buy it?” and absolutely fail to address the most obvious answer “Because I don’t want to have to buy a song to listen to it.” They talk about how if they stop buying music, at least they’ll have something to show for it. For me, at $13 a month, why should I want to stop buying music.

The argument is not dissimilar to saying “Why get cable when you can just buy DVDs?” The answer is because they offer two different services. I could be wrong, but honestly, I think that there is room enough for both. I think that the rental market will actually only get stronger as we can stream (and temporarily save to play) music in more and more places.

This is where I think DRM could (finally!) prove to be a very, very helpful thing. Consumers hate DRM because it’s putting a limitation on what you believe you have bought. Vendors like the control.

Where I think the disconnect primarily exists is that vendors like to pretend that they’re selling the product (and they price accordingly) whereas customers object to the idea of renting something at the whims of a big corporation with a pretty shoddy track record.

What I would like to see happen is that the vendors own up to the impermanence of DRM-crippled art. They should make the DRM restrictions tighter… but should charge less for the product. And they should call it the rental that it is.

The most recent example is the eReader, most popularly the Kindle. Amazon is in a tight spot because in order to get the publishers on board, they have to crippled their wares. But this inherently creates transient ownership of the product. They absolutely, positively cannot change the latter. But if they take ownership over the latter, we might be getting somewhere.

What I would like to see is Kindle and the publishers come up with a library model. Or a Movie Shack model. If they acknowledge the transient ownership, it’s possible that they could get the publishers on board with lowering the price. It longer competes with an actual book sale.

Ideally, they’d do something like what Rhapsody does and offer a subscription rate. You can rent all the books you can read for a flat monthly fee. Then they’ll allocate the money by which rentals were the most popular.

There is simply no way that I would buy a Kindle with their current model. And I can’t imagine the publishers signing on to any sales model that would be enough to generate my interest. But I could definitely see buying one for Clancy for rentals.

My first close friend of the female persuasion was Andrea Carmine. It was sort of an accident how I became friends with her. Well, it asn’t an accident at all. It was a failed attempt at manipulation.

We were in the same theater class and I developed a crush on her friend Charlene Kopfer. Charlene was tied to Andrea at the hip. Andrea was pretty outgoing and we had a connection in that we both knew a girl named Patty Charles. so I befriended Andrea to get access to Charlene.

Does that ever work? Not for me.

Andrea and I had a surprising amount of chemistry. Her outgoingness and my reservedness complemented one another quite well. It didn’t take long for rumors to start. Almost entirely among people that didn’t like people like us.

When we had to pair off for duets in theater class, I was of course hoping to be paired off with Charlene. However, since she I had yet to get past Andrea to her, it Charlene ended up partnered with Janet, another girl to sort of join our group of four. Andrea and I were spectacular together, earning the only standing ovation from the teacher.

This is unrelated to most of the story, but there was a case where the four of us were going to rehearse outside of school at Charlene’s house. Charlene’s mother was very protective and was uncomfortable with her having “a boy” over (even if there were going to be three girls). Charlene comforted her mother by saying that I was a conservatively dressed kid that drove a minivan for goodness sakes. Mrs. Kopfer was convinced.

At the time, I had longish hair. I’m not sure that Charlene knew this because because I typically saw her in the morning when it was wetted down. And even outside of the mornings, I typically kept it close to my head and tucked away. And while I did drive a minivan to school and to a lot of other places, that was because my folks were uncomfortable with leaving our convertible in a parking lot. On weekends, though, I generally drove the convertible. I have sensitive eyes, so I typically wear sunglasses. And I have a leather jacket. And when I drive the convertible, my otherwise well-placed partially-long hair gets pretty wildly disordered. So when I showed up at their doorstep, Mrs. Kopfer saw a tall, wild-haired hooligan with a leather jacket and sunglasses hop out of a convertible. Charlene was pretty upset with me, which was the most emotion I’d gotten out of her at that point.

Then came the next round of duets and this time I got partnered off with Charlene. It was a disaster. Charlene was completely uninterested in rehearsing at all. She was uninterested in doing much of anything except talking to Andrea and Janet. That she was romantically uninterested in me would be an understatement.

That was fine, though, because my interest in her was dwindling, too. She was quite immature, still hovering a junior high mentality. She never learned her lines and when we finally did our presentation I had to feed her almost every line. She got a “C” for failing to remember her lines. I got a “B-” for failing to feed her the lines with sufficient subtlety.

Unattracted to Andrea and feeling a particular contempt for Charlene, I eventually asked out Janet. She somewhat graciously declined.

One of my favorite bands of all time is The Eels. If you listen to pop radio, you may have heard a song or two of theirs a decade or so ago. As is often the case, the best songs don’t make it onto the radio. The Eels are the brainchild of Mark Oliver Everett, the son of a notable physicist. The subject matter typically explores common depressing topics such as mental illness, unrequited love, and nihilism, but does so with a dose of originality and creativity often lacking from self-absorbed musicians. If you’ve heard one, it’s probably Novocain for the Soul, which was sort of their breakout song:

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“The NFL commercializes everything. No team can reach the other’s 20-yard-line without our getting a “Red Zone Update” named after some laxative or motor oil. The almost theological role of beer would require an essay of its own; we won’t even broach it. The dumbing-down is not just a side-effect in a profession where brawn matters. It is actually part of the ethos of NFL football in a way it is not in other sports. (“Duane, the key for this Tennessee defense today is gonna be to keep the Dolphins out of the end zone.” “That’s right, Darrell, and you gotta think Miami’s gonna wanna putta lotta points on the board.”) Those who credit feminism for the fact that 60 percent of undergraduate degrees now go to women should examine the role of football-watching before leaping to conclusions.” –Christopher Caldwell

Long before I moved to Estacado, I used to go to the Tumbleweed Anime Convention (which was partially how I fell in love with the state to begin with). Helpfully, it was held at a hotel at the airport. However, because it was on airport grounds, such petty things as “Freedom of Speech” did not apply. They took great pains during orientation to say that any joke involving bomb threats or physical harm would result in your arrest no matter how clearly it was intended as a joke. We were on Tierra de Federales and had to behave accordingly. As far as I know, nobody was ever actually arrested.

Though there were obvious reasons for it, brave young dumb kids that we were we always thought that the policy was stupid. Of course, that was before 9/11. After 9/11, the young people have opted not just to do away with the invincibility of youth, but with common sense as well. A professor at UC-Davis was arrested and held for four days for a metaphor that went over the heads of some of his students.

A University of California, Davis, police declaration supporting the arrest of James Marchbanks describes the fear three students reportedly felt when he presented an envelope holding end-of-course evaluations by saying, “I have a bomb.”

“There was no expression of a smile or indicating he was joking,” a student told campus police, according to the declaration. “My stomach dropped and I felt my life flash before my eyes.”

But a letter reportedly signed by 13 other students in the class says Marchbanks was clearly using a figure of speech to present the documents that might “bomb” his career.

You think?!

Despite its relatively low profile outside of California, UC-Davis is a really good school filled ostensibly with really smart kids. And yet… goodness gracious. This goes beyond being cowardly and to just being stupid. Is this what colleges have come to? The inability to differentiate between metaphor and reality? Granted, this is theater and dance class and so you’re not expecting the world’s most analytical minds, but this is at a university where 90% of the student population is in the top 10% of the graduating class! But I guess the need for drama can trump common sense.

The above video has been making its way around libertarian circles regarding UPS’s attempts at getting the government to force FedEx to abide by more similar union agreements. As it stands now, since UPS relies more on ground and FedEx primarily on air, the former has much more stringent labor standards.

As I watched the video, I remember the UPS strike from several years back that threatened to derail our then-vibrant economy. It got me thinking about the position that businesses are in. Giving ground to the unions often results not in a better working atmosphere but instead in more contention down the line. I actually supported the UPS workers at the time because their demands seemed rather reasonable (and UPS was wanting to renegotiate in the opposite direction). But it’s worth noting that FedEx, despite generally conceding less to their workforce (as far as I know, correct me if I’m wrong) never had to contend with a strike.

What it makes me think most of, though, is sports. The most powerful players’ union in existence is the MLB union. They were pioneers in free agency and have managed to head off numerous attempts at salary caps and revenue sharing that would have made it difficult for big-bank teams to pay outrageous sums to players to stock up on talent. As far as athletes go, baseball players have it good. They’re less at risk for injury than other sports and (partially because of that but partially for other reasons) they have careers that last the longest and leave their athletes in the best physical condition.

My personal thoughts are on the matter are pretty straightforward: so long as the player is generating enough revenue to justify the salary, he has a right to ask for it. Teams colluding to keep salaries “manageable” is problematic. If the goal is league parity, you can accomplish that through revenue-sharing and by reserving a share of the profits to players. But keeping player salaries down to enhance profits is a problem when (much moreso in other industries) players generate them. Of course, it gets a bit stickier when the teams that pay these outrageous salaries then turn around to municipalities and say that they can’t afford to stay in town unless a new stadium is built, but that’s a decision for the municipalities to make.

Yet I find myself wholly unsympathetic to the players any and every time there is a strike. The reasons for this have little or nothing to do with baseball economics. Rather, it’s that the position of weakness that baseball programs are in is considered “lesson learned” for other sports. The lesson? Never, ever let your players union get any more powerful than it has to get. Don’t give in no matter how reasonable the demand and no matter what the public thinks. The result will not be more amiable relations between labor and management. Give them an inch, as the saying goes, they will take a mile.

A lot of studies have come out recently on the dangers posed to football players in the regular course of a season. Though they are well-padded, the result is that they use the pads to make hits that they wouldn’t dream of making without the pads. The result is that physical damage (including brain damage) is endemic. It’s all truly horrifying stuff.

Further, football careers tend to be very short. This is often because of self-induced retirement or being cut, but is often due to injury. Professional baseball and basketball players have an average career length of 5-6 years, but more importantly, when they get out they are not nearly as likely to have been as physically pounded as players in the NFL. It’ll be easier for them to find something else to do. And they’ll make more each year they play*.

I really don’t care all that much about basketball, but I definitely want football players to get more than they’re getting right now. It’s hard because a football team is so much larger than a baseball or basketball team, but I believe that there is a moral obligation there. But the constant backs-and-forths in Major League Baseball makes sure that will never, ever happen. They know that the more ground they give, the more that will be expected of them in the future and the more likely a strike is down the line.

As an issue of fairness, FedEx probably should be under whatever labor regime burdens UPS. However, it’s worth pointing out that FedEx rates among the top 50 companies in the country in employee satisfaction in 2008. UPS does not appear on the list in the article, though their mutual competitor DHL is bar-none the worst in the country. I wonder what labor agreement they operate under?

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen were kind enough to give me a platform to explain my opposition to a college football playoff system. A follow-up discussion occurred at the Fourth Estate.

The LoOG title suggests that it’s a defense of the BCS, which I am frankly not in the mood to defend. I’ll take the BCS as an alternative to a cumbersome and season-marginalizing playoff, but there’s a lot to dislike about it. I’m in the “mend it, don’t end it” camp.
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A story in the Los Angeles Times reports that more than a quarter of U.S. households use banks little or not at all. They use pawnbrokers, payday loans, and those automatic check-cashing places instead. Of the 25.6 percent, 7.7 percent have no bank accounts at all, and the rest are “underbanked.”

Why do I care? Because it’s a big deal that one in four households – not just individuals, but entire households — in the U.S. are that flaky. I file this in the same category as the information that nearly half the nation’s infants receive Women and Infant Children benefits (in California it’s more than 60 percent, so my kids are in the minority), and that one fifth of the people in Los Angeles County are on welfare and/or food stamps (this does not count unemployment or Social Security), and one out of 100 people in the U.S. are apparently in jail or prison at any given time. It’s too many. And they’re not spread out evenly — they’re concentrated in places where the privileged minority from which is drawn people who write surveys and write Times stories doesn’t have to deal with them. So they can afford to make kindhearted assumptions.

The information comes from an FDIC survey. It doesn’t appear the survey, or the article, considered three of the best reasons for keeping one’s money out of banks:

1) Your bank account can be levied upon by creditors. For example, if the district attorney’s office is after you for reimbursement for the welfare payments your child receives, they can get an order taking it out of your bank account without warning.

2) Banks don’t give people accounts who rip off banks. So if, for instance, you’ve had overdrafts you haven’t made good on, or have forged checks, you’re barred from having an account, and not necessarily just with the bank you cheated. I’m not sure how the banks find out — maybe they run criminal records, maybe there’s just a “bad” list they put people on.

3) Law enforcement can track you down through your banking.

No, the story reads as if traditional banking is an injustice perpetrated by the banks upon the naive and unlucky:

“Stubborn infrastructure” at financial institutions, as well as the cost and range of their services, are to blame for the high rate of unbanked and underbanked consumers, said Red Gillen, senior analyst at Celent, a Boston financial research and consulting firm.

I don’t know what he means by the “range of their services” being a problem. But how much does it cost to have a checking account, like $15 a month? That’s less than an employed person responsibly running a household would lose to fees from automated check-cashing centers and money orders.

Note that the story doesn’t say how many of those completely unbanked folks live on public assistance. I’ll bet it’s a majority. They get a check once a month, and maybe also have an Electronic Benefits Transfer card they use for their groceries and Subway sandwiches. Less hassle to pay the check-cashing fee once a month, and have the rest available in cash so no one can track how they use it.

And I’ll also bet the vast majority have children under 18. So, the numbers mislead us into thinking the problem is smaller than it is, because the percentage is disproportionately represented in parenthood. Look how huge, for example, that WIC statistic gets when it gives us the percentage of infant recipients, versus the percentage of total households. How many law-abiding, self-supporting people have kids anymore?

Despite not actually being from Canada, I found the video to be interesting. One of the points of emphasis is that despite the TV fees that Canadians shell out, Canadian television is largerly composed of imported American television shows. That’s not to say that there are no Canadian TV shows out there, but that they are comparatively few. And, if the video’s producers are to be believed, a whole lot of american shows.

Not to be the ugly American, but… how big of a deal is this? I am not wholly unsympathetic in that I have myself argued for an increase in the number of television shows that take place outside of a few select areas (NYC, Boston, LA, and Chicago). But despite Canadian protests to the contrary, American and Canadian cultures are very similar, on the whole. When it comes to importing television shows, Canada probably lose the least in translation.

Not to be too ugly an American, but what they lose in homegrown television shows it seems to me that they gain in having a culturally similar neighbor exporting a much larger number of shows often with much higher budgets to entertain them.

I’m not an expert on Canadian/American differences, but when it comes to TV it’s not the case that I’m speaking from ignorance. In fact, I’m coming at this as someone that has watched Canadian TV in the past. When I was young, I would periodically run across these TV shows that I had never seen before and had never heard talked about and then at the end I would see a CBC insignia. It was only later that I discovered what CBC was. Earlier this year I ran through the entire Da Vinci’s Inquest series and introduced myself to Flashpoint, both of which are Canadian series.

In the case of Flashpoint, it was picked up by CBS for a while. And unlike when US channels pick up British shows to redo them, they just ran the episodes straight. I actually wish that American television should do that more often. If there’s a good Canadian TV show, I’d love to see American TV pick it up.

On the other hand, I guess I can understand paying TV taxes for the sake of Canadian entertainment and then the TV stations buying US shows cheaply and pocketing the difference. Of course, the entertainment subsidies they have are an issue in themselves. One of the reason that an unusual number of music stars come from Canada is that they force Canadian radio to play Canadian artists, which gives them fertile soil to cultivate successful acts. But for a variety of reasons, their television has not penetrated our market like their music has.

It’s actually one of those things where I wonder if they might be better served if they put less emphasis on Canadian shows and join our media structure. That they create their own programming is probably one of the reasons that Hollywood almost never makes shows placed in Canada. Ordinarily, I would say that they probably wouldn’t do it anyway, for the same reasons that they don’t place shows in Kansas City.

But what they’d lose in Toronto, they’d make up in Vancouver. A completely disproportionate number of American television shows take place in Los Angeles. Part of that is urban coastal bias (the same reason that a lot of shows take place in NYC), but part of it also is the fact that since it is filmed in Los Angeles it might as well take place there. Opening up Vancouver to more US filming could lead to vancouver joining LA as one of the most common backdrops of television shows. Then again, there’s nothing to stop them from filming in Vancouver now and simply having it take place in Seattle. But while Seattle is a relatively common location, and they have not done so. So much of television’s orbit hovers around Hollywood and Los Angeles (unnecessarily, in my view) that in the end, they’re probably better off doing what they’re doing.