It’s taken for granted among some that preventative care is one of the keys to reducing medical costs. The problem is that the evidence for it is suspect. That’s not to say that preventative care is a bad idea as an ounce of prevention can be a pound of cure in the health sense. In the financial sense, it often just means a lot of money spent on prevention and when prevention in achieved you live to need more health care another day. Further, discovering something beyond the point of being able to do anything about it means that no money is spent trying to do something about it. Lastly, we talk about preventative care as though it is something that is up to hospitals and doctors and insurance companies, but some of the most effective preventative care out there is how well you take care of yourself.

The average (British?) woman dates 24 men and spends over $3000 finding Mr. Right. You know, the more of these statistics I read, the less awkward I feel about my romantic past. I didn’t date 24 women, but I don’t think I spent remotely near $3000.

Why women apologize more than men.

Things you didn’t know about sports.

Inside Canada’s black market tobacco industry.

The net worths of US Presidents. With some major outliers (Lincoln, perhaps Harry Truman), it seems that most successful presidents were successful at being wealthy, too.

Is college worth the investment? Some interesting charts. I’m not surprised that BYU ranks so high as it is very affordable for Mormons and you can’t match the networking opportunities short of the Ivy League. I am a bit surprised that so few colleges have no rate of return (when student loans are factored in).

The City of San Fransisco is looking at implementing a bait car setup. For those of you that don’t know what a bait car is, it’s a car that is left with the keys in the ignition (sometimes running), theoretically in a part of town where car theft is a problem. Now, most anybody here if you pass a car with the keys in the ignition, your response is to maybe say “idiot” and walk on. A car thief, of course, thinks differently.

Hit Coffee has been pointedly critical of a lot of police behavior on this subject and that… and so it continues!

I mean, you look at a setup like this and say “How could it go wrong?” Nobody accidentally steals a car the same way they might accidentally speed or accidentally run a red light. It’s not something that is going to affect people who aren’t, well, criminals. On the face of it, the only real objection I might have is whether or not this is the best use of resources. But even then, the cars themselves are often donated by insurance companies. There’s still the manpower issue and all that, but this is actually one of those cases where they don’t have the financial incentives that they do with traffic tickets. I mean, these aren’t people that are just going to pay a fine and move on to get caught another day. They’re charged with felonies. They’ll cost the system far more than they will pay back.

And yet… somehow, the police department in Austin, Texas, managed to screw it up. There was a case where a couple noticed the car sitting near his house and their first response was… to call the police. It seemed odd to them that someone would leave a car there with the keys in the ignition and all. Their imaginations were running away with them, but their first instinct was one of civic duty. The officers who showed up expressed no interest and said that as long as the car was legally parked they should just ignore it. And maybe they should have, but after three days or so they became concerned and their imaginations got a bit carried away with some of the oddities of the car (broken window, rope, men’s work boots, bikini top in back. They decided to investigate. They were arrested thereafter and charged with burglary of a vehicle.

Now, the two could be lying, but their police call is a matter of record and it seems pretty clear they were investigating rather than thieving. Ledford, the man in question, has it right when he said that maybe he’s guilty of trespassing but not burglary. Even so, the evidence that they were acting on anything but good faith is pretty slight. Obviously, you don’t want people going vigilante, but when people see something curious and they’ve already tried to contact the authorities, do you want them to just ignore it for fear that they might be criminally charged for their concern?

So why did Austin charge forward with this? I can think of a couple reasons. First, perhaps they were worried that Ledford was going to muck up their investigation. But the criminal charges were completely unnecessary. Instead, I fear the reason is that once you have a setup like this going with thousands of dollars put into it, you have to get results wherever you can find them. I have similar concerns with some checkpoints run by officers in departments that I expressly don’t trust (a relatively small number of departments, in the overall, to be honest). Here they are getting grant money as well as some free equipment. It may not be enough for the system to pay for itself, but the need for results is still there if you want to keep getting the money that you can (it’s not a cop’s job to try to keep expenditures down).

San Fransisco is apparently lining up with TruTV (formerly Court TV) in order to put their findings on television. On the one hand, it leads to somewhat questionable motives. On the other hand, the SFPD would probably be embarrassed to charge Ledford if he was a TV star.

They convinced Ledford to plead guilty of something irrelevant. I can’t remember what because it post-dates the article and I don’t care to listen to the whole NPR sequence where I first heard it.

In a tangent on my post about lateral upgrades, Rob mentioned that it took Apple to realize that people might want laptops in some color other than black or gray. David commented that there are people that will never get a ThinkPad (The Trumwill Choice) because of their unattractive exterior.

I want to push back, but I really can’t. Not to denigrate the virtues of their OSes or the non-superficial aspects of the products themselves (they have their merits), but Apple has pretty clearly demonstrated that they are correct. But I want to push back due to both aesthetics and the unimportance of aesthetics. On the aesthetic end of things, I actually like the way that the ThinkPads look. I like it to be boxy and unshowy (and unreflective!). Aesthetically, my favorite smartphone far-and-away is the Droid, which gets knocks on its appearance. My current smartphone is smoother around the edges and I guess looks “better”, but if I were choosing based on looks alone instead of the things that Windows Mobile can do that Android can’t, I would go with the Droid.

But mostly I want to object because I don’t understand why it should really matter what the exterior form is so long as it is unobtrusive. And so I look at these devices that intentionally try to look interesting and neat and good and just roll my eyes. I noticed this most recently when I was putting together my newest computer. It used to be that computer cases came in beige and that was pretty much it. At some point there was a transition to black, which I mildly prefer aesthetically but don’t really care. My only real complaint about that transition is that it made my old CD/DVD drives more conspicuous because they were beige while the rest of the computer black. Then silver came along, which is fine though I still wish they would just stick with one color because now there are three colors that I have to coordinate. Not to make my computer look good, exactly, but to make it look, well, inconspicuous, which to me is all that should really matter.

I miss the good old days when a computer case was meant to house a computer. There were no pointless LED lights and colors on it to make it “look better” and crap like that. The computer is not the centerpiece of my computer room. It’s something that does computing.

I suppose I am not entirely immune. The last time around I went ahead and got a black case rather than have a patchwork beige-silver-black computer. But it wasn’t a choice I should have had to make, dag-nabbit. If everything was just beige, I could simply get the case that works.

On the other hand, if my laptops came in different colors, I suppose I wouldn’t have to use electrical tape in order to be able to tell them apart…

They left out what I think might have been the best one (or is it two) in one of the best episodes of the series. Liz is preparing to go to a high school reunion and thinks back to how mean everyone was to her. Later in the episode, another set of memories by her peers paints a rather different picture. I particularly appreciated it because I think a lot of us who were unpopular in our younger years often forget to take into account the role we played in it. Specifically when we were so used to being rejected, we would sometimes pre-emptively be antagonistic against people that might have actually been reaching out to us.

I may have posted on this before. If so, I apologize for the redundancy. Every now and again I hear (generally urban, generally liberal, almost always one or the other) types talk about how the suburbs are unsustainable in the long term and when energy prices start rising, people are going to move back to the city. They won’t have much of a choice.

This could be, but it isn’t nearly so imminent as many believe. They tend to look at things through the lens of two options. The option of living the right way, in densely populated cities, and the other, wrong option, which is the current suburban model. The latter, they say, will be unsustainable in the long term and therefore we will Manhattanize while the suburbs become slums as is the case in Paris and many other world cities. Often though not always attached to these beliefs are the following assumptions:

• People don’t actually want to live in the suburbs. They live there because the suburbs are subsidized by public policy. Because…
• Suburbs are dreadful places to live. They often make statements and suggestions that are empirically untrue such as that the suburbs are socially isolating. In fact, suburbanites are more likely to know their neighbors than urban apartment-dwellers. What is lost in distance is made up for in continuity. Also, parents with children are more bound to their neighborhoods and more likely to want to make sure they know who their neighbors are so that they know their kids are safe. It is possible (maybe probable) that you put these same people in a downtown condominium together you will get even better results, but it is not the case that suburbs are inherently isolating in a way that our cities are not.
• If they do want to live in the suburbs, it’s for stupid reasons like racism or because they’ve been duped by capitalism. Nevermind the advantages of larger houses and larger yards and the peacefulness of being at a little distance from one another. No doubt some of the rationales can be tied to racism if looked at in a particular way (they’re worried about crime and/or want good schools, ergo they hate minorities), but it’s a rather myopic view in my opinion. But they kind of get away with saying it because most of the logical responses to it are politically incorrect and not things that people like talking about.
• Living in cities is more environmentally sound. This assumption is not particularly faulty except to the extent that suburbanization in some parts of the country lead to irrigation and forest-planting that turn deserts and otherwise barren places into towns where developers believe that people want to live. But on the whole, the urban planners are right insofar as something can be designed that’s easier on the environment than the current model. But as The Onion has pointed out, people want public transportation and the like for other people.
• People are irrationally addicted to cars. Once you put them in walkable neighborhoods, they will prefer them. They have studies to back this up and often their own personal experience. But… cars are convenient, man, and people like “walkability” in the same way that they like “lower taxes” or “more government services.” People like walkability, but once you start talking about the costs involves (taking away their cars, living in a smaller place) I think you start to see a different picture.

So while people say “they won’t have a choice,” they are often operating under assumptions that minimize the resistance to re-urbanization that would develop.

But underneath it all, I believe people will have a choice. Some choices that are not great, but choices nonetheless. It strikes me as far more likely than everyone packing up and moving back into the city that the features of the city will instead follow them to suburbs. As it stands now, there are a whole lot of people in the suburbs that actually don’t pay all that much in gasoline costs. My father commuted less than five miles to work every day. One of my brothers does the same and his wife commutes less than twenty. I barely knew anyone that actually commuted to the city. My other brother commutes over an hour, but he doesn’t commute to the city. Rather, he commutes from one suburb to another suburb.

And that is the case far, far more often than people realize when it comes to cities like Colosse that cover a wide geographical area. Nearly every job I’ve had has been in the suburbs. In Colosse, I ended up driving from the outskirts of town to the suburbs or from one suburb to another. In Estacado and Cascadia, I actually drove from a city core to a suburb or exurb. My ex-roommate Hubert commutes from one suburb to another, well over an hour away. When people start really feeling the pinch, one of the things you’re going to start seeing is people relocating to live closer to the suburb that they work. Right now it’s lost time and some lost money, but once it starts hitting their pocketbooks more heavily, that’s what you’re likely to start seeing.

None of this is to say that nobody commutes to the city. I know a number of people that do (including Web), even if they’re outnumbered by the suburban workforce. Besides, you start driving on an inbound freeway during rush hour, the fact that a lot of people live in the suburbs and work downtown is patently obvious. But as people start feeling the pinch, what do you think is more likely… people giving up their space and their yards and all that to spend ten times as much on half the space (the strength of the suburban housing market keeps urban housing markets more manageable than they otherwise would be) or more businesses opening up satellite offices in the suburbs or relocating there entirely? You have to make the assumption that people would really prefer to live in the city for it even to be a contest.

It does strike me as likely that more people would indeed move closer to the city, but nowhere near enough to make the suburbs some sort of wasteland ghetto. It also seems likely that a number of people will start doing things that urbanists and liberals both love like carpooling and utilizing public transportation. Commuter rail will probably garner support, for instance. And park-n-rides will probably increase ridership significantly. Maybe private busing* companies will be able to turn a profit by keeping poor people off their buses*.

There is at least one major hole in my argument, though. Energy prices are not limited solely to gasoline. In addition to commuting expenses, in places like Colosse you can also have extensive electricity bills and the like because keeping these places hospitable during the summer can be expensive. In this sense, you might start seeing a decline in the size of the average house. Or you might start seeing smarter air conditioners where the goal ceases to be keeping the whole house cool and instead becomes keeping portions of the house cool. On the other hand, household energy is also a lot more amenable to alternative forms of energy that will start to look a lot more attractive when/if peak oil occurs.

Of course, this is a different subject entirely that I’m not going to get into, but my views on peak oil are rather out of the mainstream. It really strikes me as one of those things that is going to be “right around the corner” for my entire lifetime and probably my children’s. So this is, to me, a mostly academic argument. Or an argument about what happens if we start leaning more heavily on heavy commuters through gasoline taxes and the like. I am actually quite amenable to gasoline taxes and tolls as a way of paying for the roads and to reduce wasteful driving. But I don’t see it doing what a lot of people argue it will.

When I look at rapidly escalating gasoline prices, though (either through taxation or supply/demand) it’s not actually our driving and housing habits that I think will be most important. Rather, the bigger issue, I think, will be that commodities will suddenly start becoming noticeably more expensive due to increased shipping costs. This has its pluses and minuses. Even here, the urbanists argue that their way-of-life will be vindicated when places like Walmart won’t make sense anymore. For better or worse, I think the opposite is true. As gasoline prices increases, it will be the Walmarts of the world with their own distribution networks that will likely be at the greatest advantage. And the sort of one-stop shopping that places like Walmart and Target supply will probably become more rather than less desirable compared to having something shipped (really expensive) or driving all around town to get this and that in lieu of being able to get most of them from a single location.

* – Gawd I hate the spelling of these words. It should totally be busses and bussing.

I’m back at the Copper Cafe. I decided that it was finally time to leave the dog at home, in the yard, alone. To make sure she doesn’t go crazy. I figure that going to Redstone at least gives me the ability to get back quickly if she escapes and someone calls the number on the tag.

I’m here less than half an hour and apparently the Christian-Marxist-Greens are holding their meeting and I’m already getting distracted. This is the second time in a row our paths have converged. To no great surprise, at least a couple of them are college professors. One used to live in Colosse and another in Soundview. They’re discussing the merits of democracy. One of them is trying to reconcile Marxism and democracy. Another is arguing that real democracy doesn’t include votes but rather is a state of consciousness and therefore a nation that looks after its own is more democratic than is a country like the United States wherein we vote but the government is unresponsive to our needs due to the corporate interests.

Next door is a really interesting house. Well, kind of a row-house that was converted from a restaurant or cafe of some sort. It has a really neat patio. Until you look in the windows (or notice the absolute lack of signage) it looks to all the world like a the competing cafe it probably once was. On the other side of the Copper Cafe is an actually residence that’s split into what was split into what must be two pretty small abodes.

The Copper Cafe has no air conditioning, which in the current weather is quite pleasant. This was not the case a couple months ago.

Per Phi, premarital sex causes divorce! Well, it correlates with it, anyway. Basically, there is a positive correlation between the number of partners a woman has had before getting married and the likelihood of a divorce when married. Am I surprised? Not particularly. The virgin-married tend to be particularly religious, are actually observant of their religion, and likely to have significantly more impulse control and self-discipline than others. Of course, I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised the other way, either, given the correlation between young marriages and failure rates.

Here’s where you can say “Ah, but correlation does not equal causation!” While true, this is a bit of a copout. The correlation itself is significant especially when observed with overall trends of divorce rates and premarital sex over the decades. If the main goal is to prevent divorce, the casualization of premarital sex is pretty likely contrary to those aims. For the broader public, though, I question how realistically you can expect people to wait until their mid-to-late twenties before having sex. Some can do it. Most won’t regardless of the public pressures to do so. In order to attack B, you have to address A. It’s possible that without sex people would marry younger, but you have to re-order things around like the Mormons do in order for it to work. Hard to do outside a relatively insular religion.

But what does this mean, practically speaking? It might mean that, contrary to my outlook when I was single, that you should seek out people with fewer sexual partners. Or not have sex yourself. I have stated in the past that when I was single I would become concerned upon finding out that a person I was dating was a virgin. At least a couple were. The question for me is whether they were so due to a deeply held religious conviction or if they were off-put by the idea of sex generally. I was concerned of a woman in the latter category pretending it was the former. However, in the event that I was convinced otherwise (and in one case I was) I wouldn’t let the lack of sex prior to marriage stand in my way. Logistically speaking, though, my theory from having been burned is to look skeptically at women that are great for finding reasons not to be intimate with you (not just sex in this case). In particular, beware those that are “putting sex on hold for a while.” That’s something women often say when they are just trying to justify no sex with you. No sex with you is, of course, their right, but everybody needs to be clear on the “why” and not say “it’s not you, it’s me” when that’s not what they mean. Women may have to fear retaliation, but stringing a guy along (even if not being forthright about why she doesn’t want to be with the guy) is not a winning or fair strategy, either.

Of course, I am talking about two different things here. Back to the subject of genuine virgins. The biggest problem I faced was that those I knew were deeply religious and since I am not that is a problem in its own right. Carla met me at the apex of my religiosity, and even then I felt like there could be some problems in that area. And so if you’re a secular guy, your options are kind of limited as far as that goes. The middle-case scenario almost is somebody who has never had sex simply because they’ve never had access to it. Even that presents problems, unless the underlying reason they had such trouble with men (extreme introversion, anti-social tendencies, excessive weight) has been taken care of. Since men are less particular about sex (as opposed to actual relationships, where men can be just as particular or moreso), the reasons for a (non-religious) virgin woman are fewer than the inverse. The best-case scenario is a woman that has never had sex because she won’t have it outside a relationship and it’s the relationship she’s had trouble obtaining. I’ve not seen it since early college, but presumably it’s happened somewhere.

James Joyner has a good roundup on Google’s work in creating an autotaxi, a subject I have posted on before. It’s not exactly the same because my scenario involve “antcars” which were all entirely driven by automation while these have manual override, but you don’t get one without getting the other first.

A few observations:

• One of the links talks about who the big losers would be and singles out truckers. I would add another huge, huge loser: Public transportation. Other than being unable to afford a car (not applicable to most of the population) or traffic being so bad that it’s not worth it (pretty rare), one of the huge benefits of public transportation is that you don’t have to pay attention to the road. With autotaxis, you would get that benefit while also being able to go wherever you want and you would get to avoid the kinds of people that take public transportation. When I had jury duty, I took the commuter bus from Mayne to downtown and most of the riders were white-collar individuals. Most. However, throw in autotaxis and most of those people would probably prefer that to driving to the bus station, waiting for a bus, and then walking from their stop to their final destination (or worse, having to change buses).
• In my antcar post, Peter commented that these things would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. I think in the autotaxi phase this is true (by the time they become antcars, this has presumably been taken care of). It stands to reason that even in the event that the technology is invented here, we may be the last country to have widespread adoption. The makers would charge huge prices in preparation for the eventual lawsuit. As one of the cited links mentions, we are always much more anxious to blame technology when there is any ambiguity and the Toyota carnival is the perfect example of this.
• I stand by my scenario for antcars insofar as I believe that if these things ever achieve widespread adoption, you can very much expect the government to demand that records be kept for later subpoenas. They will probably justify it on safety grounds, arguing that it’s important to know what your car was doing in the event of an accident. Or something. They’ll almost certainly find some reason why it is technically necessary for some benign reason. Sort of like how Microsoft build IE into the fabric of Windows so that they could later claim that it can’t come not-preinstalled. The government will want it, but the makers probably will too in order to fend off future lawsuits (someone blaming the auto-drive for manual error). The only people against it will be the consumer, and what’s that good for?
• As you might have been able to tell from my antcar scenario, I think that Joyner’s question of how long human drivers will be allowed on the road once the safety of the computers surpasses that of human drivers is spot on. Once that threshold is reached, I really don’t know how long it will be until at least some people start agitating for it. Probably the generation that starts immediately with the autotaxis will be the generation that won’t see mandatory antcars as no big deal. Until then it will be the subject of contentious debate.
• Could the antcar ever comes to pass or autotaxis become completely automated and so ubiquitous that most people don’t need driver’s licenses? Driver’s Licenses are currently one of the primary incentives to get IDed by the government. What then?

My former boss Willard passed along this on Facebook:

My name is Michael Otterson. I am here representing the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to address the matter of the petition presented today by the Human Rights Campaign.

While we disagree with the Human Rights Campaign on many fundamentals, we also share some common ground. This past week we have all witnessed tragic deaths across the country as a result of bullying or intimidation of gay young men. We join our voice with others in unreserved condemnation of acts of cruelty or attempts to belittle or mock any group or individual that is different – whether those differences arise from race, religion, mental challenges, social status, sexual orientation or for any other reason. Such actions simply have no place in our society.

This Church has felt the bitter sting of persecution and marginalization early in our history, when we were too few in numbers to adequately protect ourselves and when society’s leaders often seemed disinclined to help. Our parents, young adults, teens and children should therefore, of all people, be especially sensitive to the vulnerable in society and be willing to speak out against bullying or intimidation whenever it occurs, including unkindness toward those who are attracted to others of the same sex. This is particularly so in our own Latter-day Saint congregations. Each Latter-day Saint family and individual should carefully consider whether their attitudes and actions toward others properly reflect Jesus Christ’s second great commandment – to love one another.

I find it important that they do not just reject violence towards homosexuality, but also non-violent bullying as well. From the same source, I was quite surprise and happy to read this:

The Church said the Salt Lake City Council’s new nondiscrimination ordinance “is fair and reasonable” and balances fair housing and employment rights with the religious rights of the community.

Otterson told city council members: “The issue before you tonight is the right of people to have a roof over their heads and the right to work without being discriminated against. But, importantly, the ordinances also attempts to balance vital issues of religious freedom. In essence, the Church agrees with the approach which Mayor Becker is taking on this matter.”

I disagree pretty strongly with the Church on gay marriage, though I know many of you agree with it. Regardless, the position on housing and jobs is a position that the Church did not have to take. Kudos to them for doing so.

One of the things on my to-do list was to subscribe to the local paper, the Callie Register. The Register is actually a weekly paper (we have a daily, too, but that’s more of a handbill than a paper and you can’t subscribe to it), arriving mid-week every week. I may also subscribe to the paper in Redstone. Haven’t decided. Here is what I learned about my new home town:

• Crime is uncommon enough that each and every infraction can be listed in a weekly paper. Infractions including speeding tickets. Names are named. I suppose that’s a decent way to keep folks in line.
• The most high-profile news item involves a system of powerlines scheduled to go through Dent County. Everybody here is against it. Oh, and a slaughterhouse proposal. Everybody is against that, too. Oh, and tearing down an old warehouse. Opinion on that one is mixed. The locals have become fond of the graffiti.
• I need to learn the structure of the Little League system because right now that’s about half of what the Sports page is about.
• Callie thinks it has a parking problem. I suppose by some standards it does. I know that more than once I have been surprised at how glad I was to have a small car. Of course, part of it is that the notion of walking a few blocks in a town this size seems kind of weird. Even so, by this city boy’s standards, there is no problem.
• Local farmers are looking to cash in on the “grass-fed beef” craze. Apparently there is a pretty ridiculous mark-up. That can’t last for too long, can it?
• I’m going to have to learn more about farming if I am going to follow current events.
• In an off-year, primary election with no competitive senatorial or gubernatorial primaries, 48% turnout is considered “low” in Dent County.
• Almost all of the political letters to the editor are written by three people, two conservatives and a liberal. Neither deviate from Talking Points.
• One of the things I had in mind for recreation when we moved here was bowling. Then we got here and the bowling alley was shut down. The good news is that it looks like it’ll be opening sometime late this year or early next. It was apparently foreclosed on by the bank rather suddenly. There’s a big to-do about people that had things stored in there (bowling shoes, balls) not being able to actually get their stuff back.