Bloomberg is getting some approval for his desire to prevent people on food stamps from buying soft drinks:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought federal permission on Wednesday to bar New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks.

The request, made to the United States Department of Agriculture, which finances and sets the rules for the food-stamp program, is part of an aggressive anti-obesity push by the mayor that has also included advertisements, stricter rules on food sold in schools and an unsuccessful attempt to have the state impose a tax on the sugared drinks.

Public health experts greeted Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal cautiously. George Hacker, senior policy adviser for the health promotion project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said a more equitable approach might be to use educational campaigns to dissuade food-stamp users from buying sugared drinks.

“The world would be better, I think, if people limited their purchases of sugared beverages,” Mr. Hacker said. “However, there are a great many ethical reasons to consider why one would not want to stigmatize people on food stamps.”

The mayor requested a ban for two years to study whether it would have a positive impact on health and whether a permanent ban would be merited.

I cannot say that I share Mr. Hacker’s concern about stigmatizing food stamp beneficiaries on two fronts. First of all, I don’t see how preventing them from getting any particular type of product “stigmatizes” them, unless “stigmatize” should be redefined to “not get whatever they want.” Second, if it does stigmatize people on food stamps, I really don’t care. If they need it, they won’t care. If they care, they probably don’t need it. Of all of the things I am worried about, someone feeling put upon because they can’t use somebody else’s money to buy a product they want but do not need is not something that really concerns me.

That being said… seriously? I have no philosophical objection to this idea, but do you really expect it to do much of anything? Either they want coke specifically or they want something sweet. If they want coke, they’ll buy it with whatever money they have. The thing about coke is that it is cheap. If they want sweet, they can get something else sweet and will be consuming the sugar through other means and they’ll still probably be doing it on the taxpayer’s dime. And how do you define soft drinks, anyway? Ban coke, okay, but what about Sunkist? Sunny Delight? Cranberry juice? Do you base it on sugar grams per mililiter? Carbonation? What? And if you’re penalizing soft drinks for being too sugary, what about candy?

Which I guess means in a way that I agree with Hacker. Except that I think that the only thing this law actually accomplishes is to register your disgust with poor people drinking bad things on your dime. It’s one of those things that allows us to feel superior to those poor dopes. A way of saying “Take that!”

So, in short, I can’t say that I object, but it strikes me mostly as muscle-flexing and ineffectual finger-wagging.

This is perhaps my favorite new comedy (of four candidates: M&M, Outsourced, Better With You, and Stuff My Dad Says). The show revolves around Molly, who is an overweight teacher, and Mike, who is more overweight cop. It’s a meet-cute in TV form. A love affair with fat people who meet at Overeater’s Anonymous. It may not sound… errr… attractive, but in my mind it is what makes the show interesting and unique. Not just because it features overweight people, but because the fact that they’re overweight changes the entire tone of the show. In most singles comedies, the characters seem to have one romantic opportunity after another. Even if their lovelife is the subject of humorous ridicule, they still do better than I ever did. Because of this, the characters are rarely all that invested in any particular romance. Or rather, they don’t need to be all that invested. If it doesn’t work out, they’ll find someone beautiful within the next few episodes. Or if they don’t, it’ll be because of some neurosis or because they’re still hung up on whoever.

With Mike & Molly, it’s entirely different. Both of these characters are well aware of their limited options. Not even in the Drew Carey Show sense wherein Drew’s weight was made fun of and he was nervous around women but he usually managed to land hotties. The fact that these characters have such difficulties for such obvious and unavoidable reasons informs everything they do. It makes them nervous for good reason and the nervousness manifests itself in all manner of humorous ways. I make the show sound almost dark. And it would be if it weren’t for the character’s personalities and the fact that they found one another. The rest is about not screwing it up. I can relate. Ross and Rachel can afford to be genuinely stupid and break up over stupid reasons and expect to land on their feet. These two can’t.

The show isn’t perfect. My main criticism is that some of the supporting cast is rather weak. Molly’s sister in particular is a rather pointless character. She’s “hot” and stupid and self-destructive, presumably to contrast with the responsible and warm Molly. The effect is that the two don’t seem remotely related at all. I think that they would have done far better with a beautiful but well-intentioned sister who just doesn’t understand that life is not as beautiful for unbeautiful people. Mike’s partner is also a bit off the deep end, though for some reason it bothers me less.

The song that put her on the map:

The followup single that never got the attention that it deserved:

I probably shouldn’t have watched the show in the first place since its success was always looking dicey and I hate it when shows get canceled before they get going. I wasn’t surprised that Fox’s Lone Star was the first victim of the new season. From the start, the question was supposed to be “Who is the audience here?”

The basic premise of the show is that Bob Allen is a con-man who moves from town to town bilking the local residents out of money to invest in land that Allen doesn’t own. His current target is the city of Midland, Texas. Meanwhile, he’s running a long con in Houston where he married the daughter of the owner of an energy business. The con in Houston is going well in that he is about to be appointed to a high position in the company where he would have the access required to bleed the accounts so that he and his father can retire comfortably in some country with no extradition treaty. Allen’s problem is that he has fallen in love. Twice. A wife in Houston and a girlfriend in Midland. The show is about his attempts to hold on to both and try his hand at actual business management for the company in Houston.

This kind of show is right up my alley. It’s sort of Profit meets Dallas. But it’s not a show up many people’s alley. No matter how attractive, charming, and good-hearted the lead, the fact that he’s a bigamist by the end of the first episode (marrying the girlfriend in Midland) isn’t likely to sit well no matter how many people on the Internet swear that this is the kind of arrangement women want. But since it’s focused on love affairs, it’s kind of off-putting to men, too. If you find yourself rooting for the protagonist, you kind of feel uncomfortable about it. But without him (unlike with Profit) there is no one else to root for if you’re against him and they make him such a charming and warm guy that you’re disinclined to root against him anyway.

None of this was really a problem for me because I like a degree of ambiguity. But I am not really the typical viewer. Ambiguity is fine, but you need someone for those with a more clear moral compass to root for. They should have focused on the Houston plot, which was the more interesting (though the girlfriend/wife in Midland was the more interesting of the two leading women). Alternately, they could have stuck with him as a con-man and had an alternate protagonist in an investigator trying to trap him (like Profit did). But in the end I think they tried to do too much. Which is a shame because, with the plot they had, it was the best-written new show I have seen in quite some time.

A little while back, Nanani took me to task on how on one hand I poked fun at old ads talking about wizbang technology and then right after comment about how our technology today is so wizbang that there’s nowhere to go from here. I was actually making a comment about the technology from five years ago, but in actuality I think we are reaching the point with some technologies that we’re really beyond the point that the vast majority of the computing public is going to need to advance. Not indefinitely, of course, as technological progress always marches on. But I think that the march is going to start really moving in a direction other than bigger-faster-better. And the advances in the PC world are going to be sideways things that are only “better” insofar as they are more convenient and/or easier to use.

In fact, I think we’ve already past that point. I’ve alluded to it several times but I’m not sure if I’ve addressed it head-on. The most recent desktop CPU I’ve bought has processors running at 3GHz, roughly (I’m too lazy to look it up). That is actually the slowest (or maybe second slowest) speed of my last four processors. Of course, there’s a pretty crucial difference. The new computer is a dual-core and the others are not. That means that the new computer has two processors working together. But you can’t add that up and say “so it’s like 6GHz” because it doesn’t actually work that way. Rather, the enhancement comes from the fact that it can more easily do more things at once. This is especially convenient for a guy like me that has numerous windows open (19 at the moment), but it’s not quite the same as “faster”. Better, but not faster. Cooler, but not necessarily necessary for the average user.

A better example is netbooks, which run slower on single-core processors. Not just single-core CPUs, but ones actually slower than the Pentiums that were available years ago. But netbooks have their own appeal in the form of portability and better battery life and price. This, to a lot of people, is more important than bigger-faster-better the same way that having two 3GHz processors is better than one 6GHz processors. These things are only true because processors have gotten faster than we need them to be.

The same goes to hard drives. Most people need a pretty limited amount of hard drive space. Entry-level HDs on bargain computers actually contain enough HD space for a pretty huge music collection. Most people don’t collect videos yet. But if they do, they’re still more likely than not covered with the 2TB drives available today. They’re covered with half that, most likely. The only real exception is hoarders. But the technology has surpassed the need and this happened some time ago. That’s why the focus is on better and not bigger hard drives. Solid-State Drives, available at sizes a fraction the size of regular ones, are becoming increasingly available. The people don’t need more space, but they need the drive integrity that SSDs offer. Also, portability has become an important thing with pocket drives (not to mention thumb drives).

Now, processors will keep getting faster and hard drives larger because there is a non-trivial segment of the population that will have increasing needs. Businesses can never have too much HD space. Certain tasks can never have too much processing power. But what we see from here is an ever-increasing divide between what the power-user needs and what the average user needs. Since the R&D money has already been spent, the huge hard drives used on corporate servers will be made available to everyone else. But people won’t need them. Almost nobody is anxiously awaiting a 3TB hard drive. The 1TB drives just go in computers cause it’s an impressive number and it’s available and cheap.

This sort of thing does require something of a mind-shift among buyers who are used to things being rated by numbers. That’s something I ran into years ago when it came to CD-ROM speeds. I told people “For what you (and 99% of the public) do, you don’t need a 24x CD ROM. You really don’t. It’s faster, but without purpose outside particular tasks. A 12x will do you just fine. They’d end up getting the 24x anyway because they had internalized that CD-ROM speed matters (and when you were talking about 1x vs 2x or 2x vs 4x, it did!). Then, of course, burners became commonplace and that was a place where speed really did (and does) matter.

All of this really puts the computer industry in a bind because it’s getting harder and harder to convince people to upgrade every three years or so. I am convinced that they used to intentionally short RAM on stock models because they always lowballed that very important component and it made computers seem obsolete (and thus in need of replacing) sooner. But with RAM so cheap they don’t even do that anymore. Another catalyst for upgrades, the latest and greatest Windows OS, is also something of a moot point because Windows 7, as neat as it is, does not actually represent importance in upgrading over XP as did XP over 2000 and (particularly) 2000 over 98. Half of the buzz that Win7 gets is that it’s not Vista and so looks really good by comparison, but most people still don’t need to upgrade. Thankfully, they made it really pretty, and that helps.

This is one of the reasons for Apple’s recent success. This is something that they get. They don’t need a better product. They need a more pleasant one. And they deliver it. One of the big ways in which sideways upgrading has manifested itself is through fragmentation. Apple is jumping onto this with Apple TV and the iPad. the iPad is only for a subsection of the population, but it is the perfect item for these people. Those of us that want something different scratch our head and ask why they didn’t make it so that it can do this or do that and what is it supposed to replace anyway… but it doesn’t have to replace anything. That’s the genius of it. People don’t need to replace their old laptops cause their old laptops work fine. So they created something new that their laptop can’t do. I’m old school enough that I prefer devices that can do more, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that there are huge profits to be made in things that can do less but are more reliable and easy/fun to use in that more limited capacity. They can blow off the bargain-shoppers who want to limit how much they spend with the Mac and blow off the business/serious users with an iPhone that is not remotely as professionally-friendly as the alternatives and blow off the geeks that want to tinker away to get it exactly as they want it. We’re moving towards specific products for specific people rather than the bigger-faster-better that can do more.

I don’t fancy myself much of a futurist, so take my predictions for what they are worth. But this is what I see happening all around us. You should always be careful before saying “the assumptions of yesterday must be replaced” cause that’s the sort of crap that caused the Bubble of the ’90’s, but the assumptions of yesterday must be replaced. Actually, they already have been. Moore’s Law remains in effect – more or less – but has become increasingly irrelevant.

I’ve been catching up on The Modern Family from last season. One of the characters is the perfect characterization of the Doofus Dad with the Henpecker Mom. I find that it doesn’t bother me as much for the reasons that Sheila has laid out. In this case, his part is because his part is by far the more humorous and fun and interesting. If I were an actor, I would much rather be him goofing around and trying and failing to be cool than her constantly rolling her eyes.

I caught part of the first episode of Outlaw, Jimmy Smitz’s new series about a supreme court justice retiring at a young age so that he can affect change rather than be a neutral judge. I say “part of” because I turned it off after 15 minutes. It takes an exceptionally bad show to turn me off so irrevocably so quickly. The format of a former conservative realizing the error of his hold ways in new and inventive episodes week after week made itself extremely quickly apparent and holds little interest.

Last year I complained about how so many shows took place in NYC, LA, somewhere else on the coast, or in Chicago. This year we’ve got one new show in Las Vegas, one in Detroit, and two in Texas. Progress, I think.

I have got to figure out something to do about sneakers. I’m wearing them again because of dog-walking duties, but I still gravitate towards the old pair that I’ve had since high school. Somebody, somewhere must have made a comfortable shoe for my large feet.

I finally found the old scale. It was hiding under the seat of Clancy’s car. The good news is that if the new scale is correct, I have lost 65 rather than 57 pounds. The bad news is that if the new scale is the more correct one, I weighed more than I ever thought before I started losing the weight. I lean towards the new scale being the more correct one because smaller scales (as the old one is) tend to underestimate my weight because my feet hang off the end. Clancy leans towards the old scale because it more closely matches the one she has at work.

Somehow a small pile of dirt found its way on the floormat by my computer in the office. I have no idea how it got there. It predates the dog, which would otherwise be the likely culprit.

I upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP on my laptop. A site crucial to some work I was going on the laptop has been down, so I figured it was a good time to back everything up and F&R everything. It doesn’t look as pretty, but it’s amazing how much faster the computer is with XP. The only downside is that, for some reason, it keeps moving to the cursor every few minutes. No idea why it’s doing that.

I really get a kick out of Google’s add algorithms sometimes. Bob Vis and I go back and forth on the con jobs that some for-profit universities with questionable accreditation are running and of course the ads on GMail become littered with ads for the for-profit universities we’re badmouthing.

As I’ve been contemplating the problem of the Obion County Fire (mentioned here and here), I’ve come to the conclusion that this is ultimately a systems problem. The South Fulton Fire Department developed a system that was so untenable that a good portion of the time they refused to stick to it. In the past, they had let people slide on the annual fee and taken care of their houses anyway. In this case, they didn’t. In my mind, this selective enforcement of the rules is the biggest error they made.

I mean, the imagery of watching a house burn while protecting the house next door simply doesn’t set well. But forcing fire departments to take care of emergencies that they do not have jurisdiction over and are not being paid for isn’t right, either. Yes, the landowner said that he would pay whatever the cost. Even leaving aside the question of Free Riderism for a moment, the fire department had no way of knowing whether he would even be able to. Transplanted Lawyer and Peter mention that they could arrange something where you put a lien on the house, but as far as I know they do not presently have the power to do so. Maybe they should be given that power. Or maybe they should have a county-wide fire department.

And non-payment is a real problem. According to the County (which is not the entity running the fire department in question, so this is not an arse-covering thing), municipalities recover their fees (in addition to the annual $75 fee, you get charged $500 to get them to come out) less than half the time. That’s one of the reasons that many municipal fire departments, including South Fulton, instituted the annual fees to begin with. In order to recover costs, they add an annual fee of money they get upfront.

The problem with this arrangement is that incidents like this are entirely forseeable. Responding regardless of whether they are up to date on their dues leads people to ignore their dues. This is, of course, where the Free Rider problem comes into play. Why pay the fee if they’re going to respond anyway? As with most forms of insurance and warrantees, most people who pay in don’t get their money’s worth. Most people paying the fee won’t have a fire. Not paying the fee makes sense. This is where South Fulton’s inconsistent application of policy is so problematic.

The most obvious solution to this is to implement mandatory coverage and/or taxes, which is what most places seem to do. South Fulton does not have the ability to tax non-city residents, but Obion County could make accommodations or could start their own fire department. In fact, some tried to do just that, but the idea was shot down. The people of the county, through their representatives, chose precisely the incomplete system that let Cranick’s place burn.

There was a system in place. A bad system, in my estimation, though I am not a resident of Obion County and maybe there are good reasons for it that I am not seeing. But… they took their chances and decided that mandatory fire protection was not the way to go, and so Cranick’s house burned to the ground. South Fulton bears part of the responsibility for coming up with a system that until Cranick even they couldn’t live with. Cranick bears part of the responsibility for failing to pay his dues. Most of the responsibility, though, is the system that decided that houses burning to the ground was an acceptable outcome for the sake of lower taxes or personal choice/responsibility.

Over at MSNBC, coverage of some disgusting behavior by some disgusting individuals masquerading as “first responders”:

Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he “forgot” to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee.

Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out.

His offer wasn’t accepted, he said.
…
“They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn,” Cranick said.

South Fulton’s mayor said that the fire department can’t let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.

As we’ve discussed earlier, the problem with people buying in “only when needed” on certain items like health insurance is ongoing. Will proposes a graduated-coverage solution for “previously existing conditions”, wherein people are given incentive to have continuing coverage.

This isn’t quite the same, but at the same time, it’s a point where the behavior of certain entities – hospitals, police, firefighters, certain mayors – goes beyond what I think any sane human would consider reasonable. Was Mr. Cranick un-covered for the year? Yes. Could the firefighters have come out, put the fire out, and then assessed a reasonable fee – at 20x the $75 fee it’s only $1500 to save his irreplaceable family items and pets? Absolutely.

Instead, the firefighters – apparently by order of their chief, if not the mayor – actually stood by and did nothing while a man’s entire life and family pets burned to ashes.

I don’t really have much else to say on it. I’m at a loss for words as to how not a single firefighter would say “hold the phone, put the fire out, figure out the money crap later.” It goes against any code of ethics I’ve ever seen, and it strikes me that whoever made this decision and held the firefighters to it probably should go up on animal cruelty charges as well; they had every ability to save the lives of the family pets, but deliberately decided not to do so, for whatever reason.

My faith in human nature just took another dent.

I noticed on Saturday that a college football game I was trying to get was inexplicably unavailable, but had no idea why. Now I do. Dish Network claims that Fox is increasing carriage fees by 55%. Fox disputes that figure, but they’re not saying how much of an increase that they are asking for except that they are asking what they determine to be a “fair market value,” whatever that means.

This puts me in a bit of a spot because I had subscribed to the “Multi-sport Pack” in large part because of the Fox Sports regional networks, which have now been pulled, and some of the other channels they’re now giving away for free until this gets settled. Further, I am on one of the higher-tier plans due to two networks (FX and Versus), one of which has been pulled. There is also some concern that the local FOX affiliate could be pulled, though Dish says that is not the case for my affiliate. I decided to cancel the sports pack but have left the programming plan in place. The customer support guy waived the programming reduction fee in light of the circumstances. Ironically, the fact that I no longer gets the regional networks makes Versus more valuable to me, so the reduced programming in its own way ensures that I am going to stay on the more expensive plan at least until the end of the football season (though presumably they will have everything resolved by then.

I personally don’t have a dog in this fight, not having a particular affection for either of the entities involved. So while I was initially tempted to try to exact a pound of flesh from Dish Network for the inconvenience, I’ve decided to let it go. If they win the fight, it keeps programming more affordable (one would think), so I guess I am moderately in their favor. And, of course, I have little choice and they know it as we are under a two-year contract. Of course, had I known this was coming (and if it is not quickly resolved) I would have gone with DirecTV. The News Corporation, which owns FOX, has a majority stake in DirecTV. That means that not only is FX available right now, because of the relationship it is available on its cheapest tier (FX is on the most expensive for Dish). And, of course, DirecTV has another particular channel that Dish does not offer at all.

I also suspect that if I weren’t under contract, I would probably be canceling Dish Network as we speak. Just about every reason I went for them is moot. Now I know where they could put their Dish, I could get MTN (the channel Dish doesn’t offer), and I could be with a company that I have a longer relationship with. And, perhaps most importantly, I would have the FOX regional networks for this college football season when it matters the most. The fact that I am so willing to junk Dish Network does not speak well of their bargaining position. My parents left cable for DirecTV years and years ago when they got into a sparring match with ABC and its various channels. I don’t know that the cable/satellite companies ever really win these fights. I guess I’m kind of hoping that they do. But I hate being held hostage in the meantime.

A while back I commented on Redstone and compared it to Fort Beck:

It reminds me of all I liked about Fort Beck, where I lived in Deseret, in comparison to Mocum, where I worked. Mocum had the whole “Mormon town” thing that was problematic to a Gentile like me, but in addition to that and despite the better amenities, the better economy, the more educated population, and a number of other factors I never warmed to it the same way I warmed to the usually disdained Fort Beck. Fort Beck and Redstone are both disdained by their respective states, but in my view both had more personality than the places populated with people disdaining them.

One of the things these two towns have in common is that they are both blue dots in seas of red. Redstone in particularly is a Democratic stronghold owing back to its mining days and the unions that protected the minors’ interests.

Fort Beck is historically blue-to-purple owing primarily to unions as well, in this case railroad and manufacturing unions. However, unlike Redstone, Fort Beck is trending purple. It started shortly before we moved there. Beck County was host to what were known as the Beck County Eight, a group of six state reps and state senators that were members of the Democratic supra-minority in the state legislature. Deseret is a very conservative state and so this was a significant portion of the liberal delegation. However, that started to change as the Mormon population increased and as union power waned. So all six were considered vulnerable in the 2004 election.

I didn’t have a TV with any reception during the 2004 election, so after dropping off at the voting booth I needed to find some place to watch the election returns come in. I chose the diner that happened to be the location of the election party of the Beck County Democratic Party. I didn’t know this at first. I jut happened to strike up a conversation with another guy at the bar who happened to be a firey liberal. Then another guy joined in and he was to the left of the first guy. I was feeling positively rightwing. Eventually I put the pieces together.

At some point a little later in the evening I saw a man being interviewed by the local TV network. I asked Bill, the guy sitting next to me, who the interviewee was. Turns out it was State Senator Don Edwards, one of the Beck County Eight. When Edwards was done and the TV cameras were gone, he sat down next to Bill and they started a conversation. Bill commented that some mutual acquaintance of theirs (a Republican, I gathered) said that he was confident that all of the BC8 would be wiped out.

To which Edwards replied, “If they’re going to vote against themselves like that, this shithole deserves what it gets.”

Not how you expect a state senator to refer to the town which he represents.

Bill’s Republican acquaintance was wrong, the Beck County Eight were not wiped out despite Bush taking the state by a nearly 40% margin. Instead, they became the Beck County Seven, with Edwards being the only Democrat to lose. Notably, this was not because he was in a more conservative district within the county. The districts are overlapping and the same voters who returned 7 of the 8 were the ones that left him out. Perhaps it was not the first time he expressed contempt for his constituency.