In a discussion about fast food, the In-N-Out Burger chain in California came up. I hear Californians sing its praises all the time. But I also hear people say that Californians only like it because it’s the home team, so to speak. I’ve never eaten there, so I don’t know how good their food is. But the whole discussion reminded me of something I have sort of noticed as I’ve moved around from place to place. Local establishments sometimes get a real pass on quality. I really noticed this when we moved to Estacado. There are a few places in Santomas that everybody says we must eat there. When I do, I find that it’s… pretty typical. Clancy and I were constantly disappointed with the food selection in Cascadia when we lived there and no place disappointed us more than the ones that were billed as local institutions. None of them were really bad (okay, one was), but there was really nothing remarkable about them. Sometimes it’s just the same food with a $2 markup.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. The first is a matter of acquired taste, which requires no real explanation. Second, the positive associations with the place that are not culinary in nature become transferred to the food. You go somewhere that is convenient, you have a good time, you think of the place positively, and you forget that the food is no better there than at the local IHOP. The last possibility that comes to mind is simply hometown pride. You like the food because it’s local.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these. I’m sure if I look back at some of the places that I thought of as institutionally great, it has more to do with the associations and disassociations. I associate it with a good time. I disassociate it with the formulaic makings of chains. And of course it gets some advantage of being different but also some of the advantage of being familiar. I have really grown to appreciate this as I have moved around. I spent my last several weeks in Cascadia eating at various non-chains specifically because they were non-chains (we’re going to put regional chains under the same category as “non-chains” for the purposes of this post). Was there food any better than a national chain I could have been eating at instead? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But they were definitely places that I knew I would not be able to eat at anymore once I got to Callie. Places that made me appreciate Cascadia.

I have trouble getting through to my father on this point. He and I have the tradition of Saturday Morning Breakfast. We uphold it whenever I am in town, though we don’t limit it to Saturdays. It used to be that we would go to McDonald’s one week and then Happy Burger – a regional chain – the next. Back and forth, back and forth. However, when I go back now, I don’t want to eat at McDonald’s. I have McDonald’s everywhere else I go. Nor do I want to eat at Denny’s, where Dad likes to go for variety and a good deal. I want to eat at Happy Burger. Now, Happy Burger actually is better than McDonald’s, regional pride aside, but it’s not nearly as much better as I tend to think it be. It’s something that makes me appreciate being in Delosa.

While on break, couple of employees at a US Sprint store (or kiosk) took off after a shoplifter of a nearby Apple Store and were fired for their trouble:

Sadly, it seems someone at Sprint corporate was not fond of their heroism or the way they had boosted business. Unbeknownst to the two Sprint sprinters, the company has a rule about employees not intervening in shoplifting. This was something they only discovered when they were given their marching papers.

Though stunned, they still don’t seem to resent Sprint. They just wish they hadn’t been let go for ensuring a shoplifter didn’t get away. It wasn’t as if the chase happened on Sprint premises, and the two were on a break.

Still, they seem remarkably sanguine in the circumstances. They have created a Facebook page, on which McGhee wrote: “I want to tell everybody out there that we do not want you to hate Sprint and their service, we want people to continue to be Good Samaritans and look out for each other.”

The two already have more than 870 Facebook friends and are looking for work at a difficult time, particularly for Shoemaker, who has just got engaged.

Well, that’s their story anyway. Sprint won’t comment.

There are basically two reasons why Sprint would behave in such a peculiar manner. The first is that there is a company policy against the pursuit of shoplifters intended for when they are on-duty and they refused to carve out a common-sense objection. The second and more likely is that this policy exists for liability reasons and even though the employees were on break, they were still on the clock and therefore had something happened to the employees, the thief, or a bystander, they would have been liable.

And this is, apologies to Sheila, Kevin, TL, and any other lawyers reading this blog, why people hate lawyers. As much as I want to come down on Sprint on this, does anybody doubt for a second that a lawyer finding out that they were on the clock (even if on break) would not consider suing Sprint? Because it didn’t happen on Sprint property and because they were not acting under the explicit or implicit direction of Sprint, they might have a harder time of it than a similar incident that occurred at Best Buy, which I will get to later. Why risk it, though? A failure to fire these heroes here could help another plaintiff’s attorney in a future case where another Sprint hero acts against company policy by saying that the policy wasn’t enforced and thus Sprint is liable. Better not to risk it and fire a couple of disposable employees.

Even in the current economy, I suspect that they will be getting job offers soon.

There was a similar story about Best Buy from a couple years ago. Some companies, like Best Buy, seem to attract stories like this one. They were caught with a memo outlining who were and were not “desirable customers” and encouraged employees to give the latter an unpleasant experience. They rigged the internal computers to go to a fake Internet site that showed deals different than the ones that people saw on the real Internet and expected to get in the store. They had an employee that called the Secret Service because they did not believe that there was such a thing as a $2 bill. And they’re the kings of the Mail-in Rebate Scam which I consider to be a bad business practice all-around. And, of course, they fire employees for trying to stop thieves.

At least in the Best Buy case, BB has an argument that they were company employees acting on company time under company direction. Their own manager got hurt in the scuffle. Even if the Corporate HQ people in Minnesota wanted to cut the kids some slack, they wouldn’t have had the maneuvering room that Sprint had to carve out an exception.

But what I find interesting about these cases, and leaving liability issues aside, is the notion that such things are better left to the people whose job it is to take care of them. More than one commenter on the Sprint article said that everybody in retail knows you’re supposed to leave that sort of thing to the security guards (according to the boys, the security guard was requesting help). Of course, because of liability issues again it’s often that security guards themselves are not supposed to intervene. Better left to the police. That’s an argument you hear regularly about gun control, too, which police generally support. “Leave it to us,” and “don’t get a gun because somebody might get hurt.” That’s not to say that it’s not often sound advice most of the time, but even so I find the whole idea a little unsettling.

In the greater scheme of things, shoplifting is not all that big of a deal. Letting shoplifters go may encourage more shoplifting, but people don’t generally get hurt too badly. I don’t know if it’s just my testosterone-fueled id, but that, too, doesn’t sit right with me. I mean, I can understand Best Buy saying “our stuff isn’t worth that” but what about if it’s someone’s shopping bag that’s lifted? This is of course obscenely hyperbolic, but if a Sprint employee is liable for intervening in a mall against a thief who stole from another store and liability law says that this is right, are we actively encouraging social disinterest?

Or is it in its own way the opposite of “Leave it to the experts.” A mall guard is liable for chasing down a shoplifter. A kiosk employee is liable. So the only person left to do it is… somebody with no connection to anything whatsoever. At least they’re (usually) protected by Good Samaritan laws.

The subject of Internet universities has come up on Hit Coffee recently and I plan to more completely explore the subject later. In the meantime, here’s an interesting article on how brick-and-mortar universities may evolve. My main point of contention is that, as things stand, universities don’t have a whole lot of incentives to stop the spiralling costs.

Cellular Coverage and Service Areas. It is what you think it is, which is really helpful if you’re considering carriers. It’s really surprising how much of the country AT&T does not offer any service to. More surprising how distant a fourth T-Mobile is in terms of coverage.

A worthwhile column on a smoking ban that takes up an underemphasized point: a smoking band that is unrealistic is actively counterproductive.

Guys often complain about being footed with the bill on dates. It’s worth remembering that it ain’t necessarily cheap for women, either. I suspect that readers may be more interested in parsing not the $3,000 number but rather parsing the number “24”.

A look at a dispute on red light cameras in Tampa Bay. On one hand, you have a study pointing out that the safety improvements are marginal. On the other hand, you have someone else saying “Nuh-uh!” Meanwhile, in Italy, there are prosecutions for red-light camera fraud.

Speaking of traffic lights, an interesting look at using traffic lights to cut fuel consumption.

An interesting interview with 24’s Gregory Itzin. President Charles Logan is one of the more interesting characters produced by the show. If they had added just a little more moral ambiguity, he could have been one of the best characters in television.

It’s not enough what Powerpoint has ruined business, now it has ruined the military, too.

Incontrovertible proof that Batman would always defeat Superman in a fight.

This has been mentioned a couple of times around here, usually in the comment section, but I thought I would devote an entire post to the subject. If you are paying for insurance on your cell phone, stop. If you are offered insurance on your phone, decline. Optionally, give the sales person a dirty look for asking. Not too dirty, though, because he’s probably required to ask.

The basic premise behind cell phone insurance is the same for any other insurance on a physical item. You pay a monthly fee and in return, if something happens to your phone, they replace it. Actually, they won’t necessarily replace it. They will replace it with a phone of “equal or greater value.” And you’ll have to pay a deductible that could be more than the cost of replacing the phone on your own.

The problem with the phone of equal or greater value is that you have no control over what kind of phone they will replace it with. Sometimes, without realizing it you chose the specific phone you did for a reason. It felt good in the hand. It had a particular feature or game on it. This is if you’ve got a regular phone. If you have a smartphone, chances are the particulars on the phone (slide-out keyboard or no, operating system, etc) were chosen with some degree of care. The phone you get is anybody’s guess. If you wanted one with a good camera but they decide that a bad camera plus a more storage space (that you would have gotten in the first place if you needed it) means “equal or greater value,” you’re stuck. Even if you actually get a better phone, you can still get burned. Those extra chargers you bought for your previous phone? Incompatible because they switched brands on you or your band changed their proprietary interface.

I had a Nokia phone that I liked just fine until I dropped something on it and it broke. They replaced it with a Motorola. The chargers were incompatible, but more than that I just didn’t like the thing. I can’t even tell you why. My dislike of it was almost immediate. I would not have bought it in the store. But I had no choice. When it died six months later, it was a happy day. Even though most phones come with a 1-year warranty, it apparently doesn’t count if it’s a refurb, which is what you typically get through the insurance policy. I didn’t care, though, because this gave me the ability to buy a phone that I actually wanted. Nokia had upgraded their chargers, though, so I had to buy chargers all over again.

Here is what I should have done: forget the insurance. If my phone breaks, I go out and I buy another one. You can get used cell phones really cheap on eBay. Yeah, it’s used, but so was the phone you broke. If you’re not a smartphone guy, you can get a new phone for less than $30 (no contract), which is less than the $35 deductible. Or you can get the exact same model you had before so everything works.

If you’re buying a more expensive phone, it may be more tempting because you’re going to take a bigger hit if you have to replace it. You’re not going to be able to buy a smartphone for $30. But the more you do on a phone, the more important it is that you have the phone you want. At the bottom end, the difference between one phone and the next is relatively small. Even though I never liked the Motorola phone, it never occurred to me to just junk it and replace it. Give me a smartphone that can’t do what I want it to do or doesn’t have the features I want and I would do just that.

When they give you a new phone, they explain that they don’t have your current model “in stock.” They do this even if your current phone is still being sold by the provider! What I’m relatively sure they do is order a bunch of phones in bulk of one model per price area and simply use that to replace any phones in that price bracket. Economically, it makes sense, but they’re not up front about it and the result is costumers thinking that they’re buying something that they’re not.

My story may be an unusual one, but I don’t think it is. The same thing happened to Web and a couple other people I know. In fact, nobody I know has ever had insurance replace their phone with their phone.

Save the money and simply prepare yourself to take the hit. If your phone breaks, look at it as an opportunity reassess your cell phone needs.

It’s hard to believe that L.A. Unified wasn’t already testing all students for giftedness, but it wasn’t. And it looks as if that resulted in certain poor and heavily minority schools having virtually no students identified as “gifted.”

The L.A. Times reports that the district’s new superintendent is requiring every second grade student be tested, starting this year. This is huge. It sounds as if he actually believes in the concept of intellectual giftedness, and cares about programs that support it.

Across the district, white students — 8.4% of L.A. Unified’s enrollment — make up about 23% of those designated as gifted. And Asians — 3.6% of the district — make up 16.4% of the district’s gifted students.

Most students come to be tested through one of two routes: A parent requests it or the school takes the initiative. And one or both haven’t been happening at many schools like 99th Street, which is 75% Latino and 25% black.

Part of the reason, said L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, is “insidious racism.” But another crucial factor in Los Angeles, he said, is that programs for gifted students have long been associated with integration efforts. Getting the “gifted” label made middle-class whites and Asians eligible for special programs designed as incentives for them to remain in public school.

Cortines, who came to the district in 2008, wants to identify as gifted at least 6% of students at every school. Administrators began targeting some schools, an effort that quickly saw results. The number of black students identified as gifted increased more than 9% over a six-month period.

Maybe “insidious racism” is a factor, but I suspect the administration at the schools in question is not mostly white or Asian. I suspect the main reason gifted minorities get overlooked is that they are in poor, low-achieving schools, and most educators in those schools don’t want to bother identifying gifted students and giving them special attention. There’s no incentive for them to do so. On the other hand, if they don’t get enough low-achieving students up to the minimum testing standards, they run the risk of having the feds take over the school.

School districts get no extra dollars for identifying higher numbers of gifted students. Instead, the state allots funding for the gifted based on district enrollment. For L.A. Unified, that allotment has been shrinking, to about $4.6 million this year. Most of that has gone to IQ testing, administrative costs and training for teachers. About $25 per gifted student has gone to schools, officials said.

The ongoing budget crisis actually created a disincentive for finding gifted students. As partial compensation for cutting school funding, the state allowed districts to use the gifted-student money for any purpose.

Another reason is that many educators think there’s something unsavory about identifying the intellectually gifted. They think it’s elitist, maybe even racist. That’s because as we in this blogosphere know, kids from poor families and kids from certain minority groups get lower scores on intelligence tests and aptitude tests, as a group. So to be fair and sensitive, we’re supposed to say those tests don’t matter — at least we say that when we’re dealing with those groups. Clearly the educational establishment acts differently toward the middle-class schools full of white and Asian kids.

Meanwhile, society continues to make important decisions based upon those tests, such as whom to admit to college. And some of the intelligent individuals from those groups will get shafted, because they were always lumped in with everyone else from the group.

Plus let’s face it: Some people just find the gifted annoying. They don’t want more of them around. It’s a lot more acceptable to say, “Intelligence tests are racist and elitist,” than to say, “I just can’t stand eggheads.”

———————————————————

Here’s a post by “Audacious Epigone on the estimated IQ of teachers. It’s not high — about 107 for K-8. So at least according to this, the average teacher would not be considered intellectually “gifted.”

I read a study recently, to which I can’t find a link now, that the lower-scoring members of the teaching professions are the ones most likely to teach at the poor schools. So if the teachers themselves aren’t gifted, how eager are they going to be to identify a subset of their students as being smarter than they themselves are?

My first day was relatively uneventful. I had to leave at a particular time and of course got a call five minutes beforehand asking if I could pick something up to take up to Ridge. I made it out in time and indeed got to drive 10mph below the speed limit the whole way with twenty minutes to spare. They apparently give us a lot of time to get there. The twenty minutes turned into forty-five because the guy I was meeting was late. As it happened, there was another guy at this particular government installation who was waiting for his wife’s ex-husband to drop off his kid for the weekend. We chatted a bit and I fiddled with my phone.

I was a bit more pressed for time on the road to Bass, so I actually drove the speed limit there. I would have considered driving faster, but the roads were twisty-turney and it required driving through Redstone County, which has some pretty aggressive traffic enforcement. When driving through on my way to Alexandria last week, they had a speed limit drop straight from 75mph to 35mph for a construction zone. Cops were of course waiting right behind the hill where the speed limit falls. They are obviously very concerned about public safety, though there were no construction people for the first two miles of the Orange Cone Zone. It’s not the only time I’ve noticed Redstone’s penchant for making the road ways safe. The four or so times we’ve driven through it, I’ve seen more cops on the side of the road for that county than all of the other Arapaho counties I’ve driven through combined.

Living in a smaller town means getting used to earlier bed times and close times. Only one of the four convenience stores in Callie is 24-hour (one closes at midnight, one at 10, and the main one at 9(!!). There is a gas station and a convenience store in Bass. One closes at 6 and the other at 5. Fortunately, I got to the former and got an ice cream sandwich to soothe my aching throat. Unfortunately, when I went back to get some milk to wash it down, I discovered their closing time. No more convenience stores until my eventual return to Callie. My Bass contact never showed, so I ended up waiting there for an hour.

I got lost getting out of Bass. How I can get lost with a GPS in a town of something like three square blocks is truly a talent of mine. Well, “lost” may be an exaggeration. I just couldn’t figure out which road I was supposed to go down for the direct route back to Callie. The GPS wanted me to go back through Ridge. The estimated time it gave me for what I thought was the road was twice as long as it should have been, leaving me to believe I was heading down the wrong path. Turned out the GPS thinks something is up with that road because it was the right way and just driving the speed limit had me knocking a minute or two off my ETA every minute or two. I am wondering if maybe it includes inclement weather in its estimations because it does not strike me as the type of road that would be a really high priority for the plows. Alternately, maybe it assumes you’re going to get stuck behind a slow driver.

Garrison was not in the cards today. I called Alexandria to find out the number of my contact in Garrison. When I called said Garrison contact, she told me she had nothing but might have something for me tomorrow. So I went straight back to Callie and that was more-or-less my day.

Cell phone reception was as expected. There was some iffy service between Callie and Ridge. At least I assume so because the phone never rang and I had a message waiting for me when I got to Ridge (the guy saying he was going to be late). I gave the Bureau my Google Voice number because I didn’t know what my new cell phone would be. The good news is that I get the transcribed message. The bad news is that listening to the actual message is more of a hassle than it would have been if I’d just given them my regular number. Reception went out on my way to Bass and never came back, preventing me from calling the woman who stood me up. It came back up about 15 miles outside of Callie. So I am out of reach for most of my trip.

The audio entertainment was finishing up the BBC production of Terry Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!” The audiobook was better. Either they changed up the plot or there were some things I definitely missed the first time around. I find that I don’t listen quite as closely to Pratchett as I do other audiobooks. In fact, I am most inclined to put Pratchett in when I am not in the mood to have to follow every word. He goes off on a lot of tangents. Some of them are really quite humorous, though I find if I think I missed something funny and go back, it’s sort of like having a joke explained to you. Not as funny.

After finishing that I moved on to the fourth Jason Bourne novel. I knew that the original author, Robert Ludlum, died and the Bourne books were being written by somebody else. I didn’t realize, though, that Ludlum only wrote three of them. This is the first not-Ludlum one. Honestly, I may like the new guy better. Less melodramatic. This audiobook was done by a different company and so the voice actor is different. In fact, it was done by the same company that did the Ender audiobooks and one of the various narrators of those books is the narrator of this one. It’s kind of confusing. Then again, a similarity in narrator style had me thinking of Ender while listening to Barack Obama’s autobiography despite the fact that the voice actor does not remotely sound like Barack Obama. So I guess I’m easily confused.

In the end, I got paid over a hundred bucks to deliver two envelopes. One of which was an employment document originating from me. Your tax dollars at work.

I commented before on a thread on Ordinary Gentlemen about high speed rail. An oldish post on League of Ordinary Gentlemen got me thinking about recursive taxation. That is to say, taxes that depend on people on the exact sort of behavior that they’re trying to discourage (or stop encouraging).

When I mentioned that I believe that the roads ought to pay for themselves with gasoline taxes and tolls, a fellow by the name of Travis replied:

But that’s a trap, because the fewer gallons of gasoline sold, the higher the fuel tax would have to be in order to cover the costs of maintaining highways.

If gasoline went to $7 a gallon tomorrow and people all of a sudden bought much less of it, it wouldn’t materially affect the costs of maintaining roads and highways. There might be marginally less wear and tear on the roads, but the price of the raw material (asphalt) would increase sharply, as would the cost of operating gasoline-fueled maintenance equipment. Most other costs (policing, plowing, etc.) would be unchanged. Ergo, the tax rate would have to increase in order to continue funding current operations.

Conservatives often point out this sort of thing when there are proposals to tax some unpopular sort of behavior to fund something popular. The quintessential example of this is cigarette taxes to fund education. You tax cigarettes to raise money for education, but when people start quit smoking (which was stated as half the point) the lawmakers start getting antsy because they were depending on that revenue. So suddenly a tax that was supposed to hit smokers now has to be passed on to everyone else. Or you have to raise the cigarette tax again. Then more people quit (presumably — hopefully) and you have to keep doing it. It’s the danger in taxing something you want to discourage. On the one hand, it’s win-win because you get money while discouraging people from doing bad things. But it’s also lose-lose because it proves ineffective at one of its two mutually exclusive goals.

Taxing gasoline to pay for roads is not necessarily the same thing. The stated goal is not so much to take people off the roads but rather to make them pay for the roads. But a lot of people want gasoline taxes to reduce carbon emissions and it does sort of apply there. In either case, though, it’s hard to imagine that the government won’t become accustomed to the money it’s pulling in (unless the tax states that it must be revenue-neutral). And as Travis points out, with pay-for-the-roads taxation in particular, it does really actually need that money to maintain the roads.

Well, it mostly needs that money. While there are a degree of static costs, there’s also some variability. For instance, if people started driving less in response to the tax, we would not be needing to build and expand nearly as many roads as we are now. That’s money in the bank. There would also be some reduction in the wear and tear that the roads take as a result of drivers (but no reduction where the weather is responsible). But we wouldn’t be closing roads altogether and so we would still have to be paying for their maintenance even if fewer people are driving or people are driving less far or less frequently.

However, even in that case, if people are genuinely cutting back on their gasoline consumption, and even if we have to perpetually raise the taxes to close the hole, people will not actually be spending more on gas plus gas taxes. The weekly and monthly expenditures would be relatively constant and would, in fact, go down.

The following is taken from a hypothetical situation I posed in the comments:

If I am driving 55 miles to and from work each day (110 total) and paying $4.00 a gallon, $2.00 of which is going towards taxes, and I’m driving a car that gets 20mpg. I’m paying $110 a week for gas, $55 of which is going towards taxes.

So I decide to move closer to my job. Now I’m only driving 27.5 miles to and from work each day. Now I’m only paying $55.00 per week in gas. Happy day.

Uh oh, the government has a shortfall because too many people did exactly what I did, which is cut gasoline consumption in half. So now the gas tax is $4.00 instead of $2.00 (and gas is now $6 including taxes). My new weekly expenditure goes back up, but not actually to where it was before because while taxes have gone up, the cost of gas excluding taxes has remained constant. Now it’s $82.50. The government is still getting its $55 in taxes, though.

Even so, I decide to get a more fuel efficient car. Now I get 40mpg. I’m actually paying less per week than I ever have before ($41.25).

But once again, too many other people cut down on their consumption and the government is facing a shortfall. So once again the gas tax is doubled ($10/gallon now, $8 to taxes). Far from being right back where I started, I’m now paying $68.75 per week in gas, though the government is back to getting the $55 it needs from me to keep the roads up. Heck, let’s say that instead of purchasing a hybrid I purchased a compact that gets 30mpg. So I haven’t even kept up with the average consumption reduction and am paying more per week in taxes than I ever have before ($73.33)… I am still actually paying less in gas than I was at the outset ($91.67 now).

Now, some people are not going to be able to make the reductions that I (hypothetically) did. Others are going to be able to reduce it by more because they’ll take public transportation or move within walking distance of work or get a motorcycle.

But if reductions are not made then you don’t have to raise the tax. For those that want to ween us off of gasoline consumption, this is not ideal. But if the goal here is to make the roads pay for itself, you’re succeeding.

In the event that people can continue to make reductions, though, you can keep raising the gasoline tax as much as you have to because people will still end up paying less. More per mile, but less per week. You’re giving the same amount to the government(s), but you’re giving less to the oil producers.

This all assumes that the government needs a constant amount. I don’t think this is the case because there would be less demand for new roads, so I think that amount would go down. There will still be some ebb and flow because new roads need to be built to accommodate a growing population, but that growing population will be paying into the till as well.

This all also assumes that gas prices remain constant. That’s a little less likely because gas prices never stay constant. But that doesn’t really factor in all that much anyway because this tax itself should not cause gas prices to go up any more than they otherwise would. If anything, it’d be the opposite because there’d be reduced demand and the producers would have less leverage to control pricing.

If gasoline prices do go up considerably, it would be because of a reduced supply. The primary result of that would be for consumption to go down that much more quickly. I’m skeptical, but reasonable people disagree. If that happens and we’re not ready for it, the condition of our roads will be the least of our problems.

Of course, none of this is to say that the above scenario is ideal. Chances are that there were reasons that I lived as far away from work as I did and that I drove the car I did. My new place closer to work may be more expensive or it may be smaller. The hybrid may cost more to repair. The costs of goods and services that unavoidably require lots of driving in heavy vehicles would go up.

This isn’t even to say that gas taxes are the best way to get drivers to pay or that we should reallocate tax burdens towards drivers and those that directly and indirectly use our roads. In the case of how we tax drivers, I tend to prefer the gas tax to toll roads and GPS-mileage taxation because the logistics on the former can get very cumbersome and the latter is an unwelcome government intrusion that would be ripe for exploitation. But there is a good counterargument in that if the goal is to charge drivers then it shouldn’t matter as much if they are driving a hybrid of an SUV (yeah, the latter cause more wear on the roads, but I doubt they do twice the damage) if one is indifferent to environmental concerns and does not see a need to reduce carbon consumption. In any event, the above argument-counterargument about recursive taxation would apply to toll roads and GPS stamps as well. On whether or not we should push the transportation tax burdens on those that most frequently use them, but such taxes often tend to be regressive and perhaps it is best for everyone to pay for the roads with more progressive income and property taxes.

Though I’m not sold, all of those arguments make sense. I’m really not writing this to sell anybody on tax burdens and driving, but rather to point out that the recursive taxation argument is not a good one.

This is an old story about the school that sent laptops home with kids with the webcams turned on, but one that recently came back to my attention. I am not easily surprised, but it surprises me that this was actually considered a good idea.

I find it utterly bizarre how dressing a guy in a penguin suit can actually make me want to try your beer.

We need to be moving in the opposite direction of this, liberalizing the sale of cars across state lines. Not applying the stupid car model to wines.

Doctors pursuing politics in record numbers. No big surprise, but most are Republicans. The political distribution of the docs that I know through Clancy is actually a relatively even alignment and may even veer slightly leftward. I suspect that the higher up the specialist chain you get, the more Republican you get.

We’ve talked off and on about Pre-existing Conditions here at Hit Coffee, so I thought I would pass along an editorial by the (rock-ribbed conservative, it should be noted) Investor’s Business Daily that contains some pretty uncomfortable tidbits about what happens when you force PEC coverage.

I am an anti-fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, but a couple of interesting and positive stories coming out of Lincoln. First, defensive superstar Ndamukong Suh pledged a boatload of money from his first contract back to the University. Former Husker Cal Nicks, known throughout his collegiate career as a troublemaker, actually went back to the university to apologize for being an arse.

A look at the shortage in rural health care providers. It really almost doesn’t matter what system we operate under. This is not a problem that’s going to go away. Even if we flood the market with new docs, rural America will be among the last places that they’ll go.

The anatomy of a bogus degree mill (mills, actually) and how an irate professor put a stop to it.

I find various mentions of how insolvent the suburbs are and how all the suburbanites are going to have to move into cities perplexing. Not because I am confident that the suburban model will work out in the long run (well, I guess I am a little bit, but I recognize that I could be wrong), but that the same government that wouldn’t let General Motors fail will let the entirety of suburbia fail.

The latest Toyota malfunction. The part in question is much more prominent on some badges such as Scion and Lexus than others, though. I don’t know. I think this is something else we might be able to pin on the drivers.

Five myths about green energy. Least surprising? The jobs part. Most surprising? Our relative progress in “going green.”

OneSTDV (“Stan”) has a good post followed by a good discussion when it comes to college choices. He weighs the importance of location (not important), size (important, bigger is better), social life (get drunk, make friends quickly), and academic prestige (overrated).

Here are a few contributions I have on the subject:

Honors College: He’s absolutely right about the honors college. Bar none that was the best decision I made prior to enrolling at Southern Tech University. The classes were far better and more interesting. Most importantly, though, was the social aspect of it all. Honors dorms. Somewhere between a third and a quarter of my classes were honors classes and somewhere around 100% of the college mates I still keep in touch with were fellow honors students.

One person in the comment section told people to beware of honors colleges as “Political Correctness Factories” and another said “Even crappy state schools like Arizona State have hundreds of National Merit scholars.” In the case of ASU and the like, yes they have many National Merit Scholars. Want to know where you are most likely to find them? Which dorms you are most likely to live with them in?

This advice is particularly pertinent if you’re going to college where you’re going to be on the right side of the bell curve. Southern Tech is a good, but not great, university. But I would say that the average SoTech Honors College person is going to be brighter than the average student at much better universities. I’m not saying that there weren’t some people that snuck in (given my academic profile, I may have been one of them), but it’s a reasonably good way to have some of the benefits of a more selective and expensive university without the drawbacks.

Location/Region: Steve Sailer of all people actually makes a really good point: Region matters. If you have the money, it might really be worth your while to go off to school in the part of the country where you would prefer to live. The connections will be important. I find it noteworthy that a lot of people I met at Sotech who were from out of state settled down in Colosse.

Male/Female Ratio: The first commenter says this is important. Peter says that it’s not because they’ll all sleep with alphas anyway. The dial leans towards Peter on this one, though not because of the Alpha Beta Theory. I think that more important than gender ratios is culture. Schools that heavily skew towards males tends to fall into one of two categories: Agricultural and Techie.

The thing you have to worry about with an ag college (typically non-urban land-grant universities usually named Something State University) is not so much the gender ratio but the culture attached to it. A sort of conservative culture where men are men and nerds are weenies. Even if the numerical odds are not stacked against you (and many of these colleges have reached parity) the culture may well be. Investigate.

Techie schools are going to have the odds stacked even worse against you and a lot of the paltry female population will be Asian (and no Asian-American). However, while for those girls that remain the odds are good the goods are odd as they say. It’s not all that hard to come across as considerably better adjusted than a lot of your peers. It’s sort of like how anime conventions used to have terrible male-female ratios and yet my friends and I each had some measure of success at one. It wasn’t about ratios, it was about competition. We showered. They didn’t. We won.

Likewise, schools with really good male-female ratios can be no good at all. If you go to a wealthy private school, you can run into a situation like this:

It also reminds me of a particular private university in Colosse, Gulf Christian University, known for its snobby women who only date rich men. There’s an email joke that makes the rounds every couple of years that lists jokey complaints from attendees of all of the local universities in the form of “What I want to know is…”. GCU’s entry was something along the lines of “What I want to know is why in a university that is 75% female it’s the other 25% that can never get laid!”

GCU is not a very religious school except for its name, so it’s not that if you’re wondering. If you don’t have what the women at a particular college are going to be looking for, it doesn’t matter how much the numbers slide in your favor. I think it’s also the case at many schools with more female than male students you’re going to have a lot of the females being older women going back to school.

Size: I agree with OneSDTV on this one. Bigger is generally better. I think this is particular true for nerds and less conventional people. If you’re the type of person that can fit in anywhere, it doesn’t make as much of a difference. But I think there are generally more upsides and fewer downsides to a larger school. And even if you discount socialization, if you go to a small school with a really good X Program, what happens if you change majors?

Making friends after freshman year: My experience contradicts Stan on this one. The friends I made in college were spread out over years. If you live in the dorms, college isn’t like high school where you’re surrounded mostly by people in the same grade as you. Every year a new load of freshman roll up into the dorms and you can make friends with them (and that’s excluding transfers). My former roommate Hubert dated a Freshman in each of his first three year at Southern Tech. My ex-roommates Dennis and Karl were below me. Hubert himself was ahead of me. It’s a lot more flexible.

That being said, making friends is one reason why it’s less desirable to spend two years at community college and then transfer in. Stan is not totally wrong. It’s best to get settled and hit the ground running. You’re not doomed if you don’t, but having to jump in halfway into your college career is not preferable.

Academia: This is kind of a tricky topic and I suspect it varies from one situation to the next. My impression in the northeast is that where you went to school matters a great deal more than where it does in Delosa, where I am from. And California may be another place where it has such a clear demarcation between the have (University of California at _) and have not (Cal State – _) universities. And people that are wanting to enter extremely competitive fields. I also would not forego a chance to go to a bona fide Ivy League school. Other than that, though, I agree with Stan. Particularly with the “Honors College” caveat.

Interestingly the data on this is a bit conflicting. Black Sea points to a study that suggests that people that could have gone to an Ivy League school but didn’t ended up just as well. Superdestroyer points to another that says that’s not the case. I’ll have to look closer into this.