In six months, dad, you’re probably going to lose your kids for good. I think you do suspect this, but won’t admit it to yourself. And you don’t want me to tell you why. They’ve been gone a year already, yet you don’t really want to know why.

I can tell this because you make it extremely unpleasant to interact with you. That is what scammers do. When you’re in a situation where you have some power, this may be very effective. It’s called bullying. People want to avoid the conflict, so maybe they get nervous and don’t scrutinize you appropriately, and your bad check or stolen credit card is accepted. Or maybe they give you the refund you want, even without the required receipt, so you’ll go away. But you are not in a one-on-one conflict. Your adversaries are not your equals, and they have very little duty toward you. You are fighting a court and a powerful government agency, backed closely by the police. Your arguments are worth nothing against that. And I’m your only friend in the fight. You shouldn’t want to make me avoid you.

Yet you make it miserable to talk with you, so I do the minimum. I’m just your lawyer; all I have to do is give you adequate legal advice and make sure you don’t get screwed legally. You decide what to do with that. Confronting you with stuff about yourself that you don’t want to hear, well, that goes beyond adequate. I didn’t have the energy or the time yesterday to deal with you arguing and yelling at me for an hour, which is the minimum it would have taken to have even a small chance of getting this through to you. So I’m in that gray area where I know I did my job, butI still feel bad because I know you’ll still fail. I don’t like my clients to lose, even when they’re assholes.

And that is the number one reason why the social worker will not recommend you getting your kids back and the court will follow that recommendation, regardless of what your lawyer argues at trial, regardless of what complaints about the system you have when you take the stand against your lawyer’s advice and ramble on over sustained objections. ( “Motion to strike after ‘Yes.'” “Sustained. SUSTAINED. That means the witness needs to STOP TALKING.” Bailiff approaches menacingly.)

There are a few reasons, and they build on each other to create something we call the totality of circumstances. In summary:

1) You’re a hothead.

2) You’re a hothead who smokes pot.

3) You’re a hothead who smokes pot and has a criminal background, and misses lots of drug tests and skips lots of scheduled visits with your kids because of things that are always someone else’s fault, and is 30 and has never held a job, and has absolutely no shame about telling a social worker that you need your children back so you can get the welfare turned back on. You make this demand to a social worker in your children’s mother’s publicly subsidized Section 8 apartment, where you shamelessly acknowledge that you live illegally because your criminal background precludes you from living there, but there’s no way anyone’s gonna come between you and her. NO WAY! GOT THAT? And during this conversation, your video game station is turned on. Yes, you have a video game system, a newish one, while you are moaning that you have to sell plasma to get by and have no time to do your weekly drug tests and visit your kids AND go to rehab classes three days a week.

If that’s too complicated, I’ll boil it down further: You are the kind of person that taxpaying citizens consider the scum of the earth. When you’re that kind of person, you don’t get to smoke marijuana and parent, even though the voters of California have (graciously! compassionately!) empowered a doctor to defy federal law and grant you a certificate that protects you from criminal conviction for possession (and he/she can do this for virtually any ailment you claim, even if it’s something ridiculous like having eating problems when you’re obviously obese).

And your children are under the control of a system that can, and does, kick parents like that out of their children’s lives permanently. Even when the kids love them and want to go home, like yours do. Under the law, you don’t have to beat your kids to lose them. You just have to be, well, crappy. Legally, it’s called “the nexus,” meaning a connection between substance use and risk of harm to the children. But what the nexus often means is, “you’re crappy, so you don’t get to.”

General crappiness, coupled with almost any illegal activity or use of a mind-altering substance, is enough. That’s the real trouble with medical marijuana. It’s not the bulletproof vest people think it is, not when you have kids. And that’s the problem with you, dad. You either can’t see, or refuse to see, that you’re one of those people whose ice is too thin to stomp around on. I wish I could figure out how to explain it so you’d understand. Lots of crappy people love their kids, and their kids love them back. But the law won’t protect both your family, and your way of life.

Casual sex is good if you’re depressed, but bad if you’re not.

Why weed is cheaper west of the Mississippi.

A regular topic of conversation of Hit Coffee is red light cameras and yellow light durations. Despite claims to the contrary, longer yellow lights hold violations down five years later. Also, a non-partisan group releases a report highly critical of red light cameras.

Speaking of traffic violations, variable speed limits are something that make sense in theory, but in practice is problematic. To their credit, even the cops don’t like this one. Not that it’s stopping anybody…

Why workers are losing the war against machines. Losing your job in the Great Recession will cost you $112,000.

Via Abel, a bias-confirming article on employers and how they shoulder some of the blame for their inability to find employees. As we have tried to gear colleges and such towards vocational training, we’ve spoiled employers into thinking that they shouldn’t harbor the training costs.

In our rush to vocationalize college, maybe something got lost along the way. Here’s a counterargument.

Scott Adams broaches a subject I’ve talked about here and there but never done a full-fledged post on: the subjectivity of fairness.

An interesting look at Ron Paul. The bit about refusing to take government money is interesting. It seems to me that it’s unnecessarily taking it too far, but this is Ron Paul we’re talking about.

EDK writes on Forbes about the changes we’re going to need to make for a better environment and to deal with Peak Oil.

The car culture we’ve cultivated since Eisenhower’s highway project won’t survive when gas prices get too high, and even the electric car requires power generation, which requires coal.

It’s not likely that solar and wind can power the vehicles of the future unless those vehicles drive a lot less. Alternative modes of transportation, such as rail, are a key ingredient.

Redesigning our cities to be more dense, walkable, and green will be another key. And the political forces arrayed against solar quite literally pale in comparison compared to the thicket of political resistance to improving zoning laws, increasing dense urban development, and putting an end to the suburban model of city planning.

I have to confess that I do have a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction to proclamations that the solution to a pressing problem (or more than one) are to redesign a society in a way that we would prefer society be redesigned even without the pressing problem(s). There seems to be an astonishing correlation between those who believe (a) suburbs are culturally dreadful places and (b) they will just have to change their ways because of such-and-such problem.

In a previous piece, I asked what if suburbanism and increased oil prices are not incompatible? Because they might not be. Granted, our current car culture is environmentally wasteful and may indeed be unsustainable. But this treats the question as an either-or. We can still be reliant primarily on automobiles and still consume a lot less resources than we presently do.

The issue with the car culture is not entirely one of a lack of density and public transportation. People can choose to live closer to their jobs, for instance, and still drive. Decisions within the car culture are presently being made with comparatively inexpensive gas in mind. As gas prices go up, people may start making different decisions. Those decisions may be something other than holing up in a condo or row-house less than half the size of their current abode.

The last three places we’ve lived have all been chosen specifically to be near my wife’s work. Walking distance, really. But she drives. And if gas were $20 a gallon? She’d still drive. Walking takes too long and biking isn’t an option for much of the year due to ice (at her previous jobs, ice wasn’t an issue but personal safety was). And $20 a gallon doesn’t add up all that quickly when you’re refilling your tank once every couple of months.

My commutes have, historically, been much longer. If gas had been $20 a gallon, that would have factored pretty heavily into my decision to work. I might have been more eagle-eyed towards finding work near me, but more density wouldn’t have been all that favorable to me seeing as how I worked and lived in different towns. For three straight jobs, I did this.

A lot of long (and therefore gas-eating) commutes are not the subject of the typical suburb-to-city (which is to say, sprawling-to-dense) situations. And when you can live within a few miles of your work, you can afford some pretty expensive gas. And, if we run out of gas, electrically powered cars fueled by other fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, or whatever.

When we talk about the things that make our day-to-day cost of living, one of the big ones is real estate. Sprawl, for all of its faults, can help keep real estate prices down. Maybe you can ease housing costs in the dense areas cheaper with ever-more and ever-higher construction, but I still maintain that there is a really strong chance that the price tensions will result in less density as jobs relocate and satellite offices are opened up in places more near where people actually live. And rather than a thousand corner markets opening up, people may instead make monthly trips to Walmart where they can get everything in a single trip.

In conclusion, tough decisions are going to need to be made. A world in which people have to live closer to their work would result in sacrifices. But those sacrifices are not necessarily the ones that urbanites are expecting or hoping for.

It raises my hackles when I see a title “The PC is dying” even when followed by “but very, very slowly.” No, the PC is not dying. It will probably never die. It will simply become a device for certain kinds of productivity tasks. Not all devices need to be portable. What’s ironic is that the whole “cloud computing” thing which has been right around the corner since I was in college but is only now coming to fruition, is something that makes having a desktop in addition to a portable device more easy. I say “ironically” because it’s the same techie tastemakers who have been pumping cloud computing who are also pumping the Death of the PC.

Richard Florida, not known for having anything but disdain for anywhere but hip coastal places, puts his prejudices aside and writes a good piece on the rise of the high-tech south.

Happiness looks good on a woman, but not on a man. I actually find this a little puzzling, because giving off an aura of happiness seemed to help me socially, with both genders. Then again, maybe it was just the absence of gloominess. Or alternately, the happiness came off as pride, which looks good on a man and bad on a woman.

Lecturers Against Online Learning. I understand some of the concerns, but as long as we’re encouraging everybody to go to college and we’re charging so much for the privilege, we have to find more economical ways to deliver the product.

Felix Salmon makes the case that we should abolish the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. It’s kind of funny (not “ha ha funny”), but it wasn’t long ago that everybody thought that these things were the best thing ever, especially when combined with No Prepayment Penalty. It turns out that it played a significant role in all that transpired in the housing market. When interest rates fluctuate, fixed-rate mortgages is all-upside for the consumer. If interest rates go down, they can refinance, if they go up, the bank is stuck.

When we talk about American car companies, we’re still talking about truck companies.

Why so many cars are white and silver. As someone for whom white and silver are my least favorite car colors, I always wondered about this. I thought it was because it was cheaper. It turns out it’s because it allows them to do some enticing stuff with the paint. I still don’t understand why gleamy silver is better than a real color, even if not in a gleamy shade.

It’s common in the US for people who are waaaay up the economic chain (and some who are down it) to claim or see themselves as being “in the middle.” It turns out, it’s not just an American thing.

Why funny TV commercials work.

Via Microsoft’s help page:

* Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not a built-in feature of the Disk Management snap-in.

* Many MS-DOS-based and Microsoft Windows-based programs refer to specific drive letters for environmental or other variables. If you modify the drive letter, these programs may not function correctly.

With this in mind, why in the world would Microsoft ever, ever have Windows assign the boot drive as anything other than C:? Seriously, because now Windows is installed on the G: drive and I have a lingering suspicion that a lot of applications are not going to like the C: being a removable disk drive for SD cards. How hard is it to make sure that Windows, when there is no other OS installed, always has the drive it is installed on as the C: drive?

In any event, a valuable lesson learned. Historically, I disconnect all other drives when I am reinstalling Windows. But I couldn’t remember why I was doing it other than the vague fear of a drive getting formatted over. Well, now I know why I am going to need to do this in the future, I guess. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why I did this before.

Bank of America has backed off its debit fees. Awesome! Because now we can rest assured that they will simply accept a $2,000,000,000 loss and wouldn’t think of finding new and inventive ways to charge customers that to avoid the transparency that caused this backlash to begin with.

Conspiracy Alert: Whistleblowers and experts on the BP oil spill are dropping like flies, or in one case getting gobbled up like shark food.

A run-down of the anti-drug policies in major sports program. Interesting, Florida actually distinguishes between marijuana and real drugs.

Charlie Sheens new show actually looks kind of interesting. Better on paper than Two And A Half Men, at any rate. Does it stand a chance?

Righthaven, the BS legal group whose job it was to extort websites out of a lot of money, continues its descent. US Marshals have been authorized to seize their assets. It seems to have never occurred to them that somebody would fight back.

Speaking of lawyers and such, is there any reason why almost all of the articles I read about ADA-abuse are from California?

Long-time readers may remember when I was following the story of the death of Katie Granju’s son Henry. The dealers that sold him the (belatedly) fatal dose have been arrested for trafficking.

North Dakota is hiring! The downside is that you would have to live in North Dakota, and not the urban part, either. We have a numerical jobs problem in this country, but we also have a serious allocation problem. There are parts of the country where there are decent jobs and a low cost of living, but where people simply don’t wish to live.

Anything comment with the “coaching” on it will be automatically deleted.

Because I really, really hate coaches.

Okay, not really. We’re just getting nailed with a spammer.

I prefer the drug spammers. It’s easier to blacklist words of obscure drugs that few use than a word that everybody uses.

Anyway, hopefully this will pass soon and we can talk 24/7 about coaching again. Or the spammer is a live person and they will get creative and I’ll have to not announce which words I am blacklisting.

I thought I posted on this when we did it last year, but once a year this group of alumni from an outside school rent our back yard so that they can have a party for the annual football game. People come in from all over. they serve tacos and pot-luck. I am invited to participate, but these are people who only see each other once every now and again and I don’t know any of them. Players and cheerleaders from the other school also partake (hence the post’s title).

Last year they were very good about cleaning everything up. This year, they were the same. They did all that could be expected. However, inevitably food gets spilled. So in the week or so since the game, every time we let the dog out, Lisby sprints towards the places where they congregate and eats whatever has been left behind.

It is, obviously, not good for her at all. And after a couple of days, she felt the effects. You could hear her tummy gurgling. You could see a disconcerted look on her face. Clancy and I kept wondering if maybe she learned her lesson, but she would go out there and keep eating whatever she could.

We kind of roll our eyes. Except that for several days after Halloween, I lived off chocolate. We had a lot of leftovers. My system is not used to such copious amounts of chocolate. And so, I got sick. Did this mean that I stopped eating chocolate?

Well, let’s just say: like dog, like owner.

I don’t even know where to begin.

The method of discipline involved moving magnets up and down a spectrum (up for good, down for bad). The hassle this caused cost me 20 minutes in the morning and then another 15 during spelling time. At first, kids were being “helpful” by moving magnets up and down based on whether their classmates were doing good. This was followed by kids moving up their own magnets. Tattling is always a headache, but this just formalized it. Worse, the more I had to monitor that, the less I could monitor the classroom, all of whom were on the play carpet supposed to be reading. But they weren’t reading, therefore more magnets were being moved.

Then there was the pencil-sharpening debacle, another 15 minutes. Everybody in the whole daggun class had an unsharpened pencil. The bickering at the pencil sharpener meant that I had to just sharpen them myself. At some point, I am pretty sure kids were just breaking their pencils because the sharpener was where the action was.

Elementary school kids are actually generally quite good about participating. Particularly when it comes to the Direct Instruction stuff because they love yelling out the repeat-after-me’s. From a teaching perspective, I don’t like DI because it just feels stupid and rote, though ideologically I don’t have a problem with it because it’s really supposed to work. But I could barely get half of the class involved.

Early grade schoolers are also surprisingly good about ceding to authority, generally speaking, but I was almost at the point where I was just going to pick up the kids and physically put them at their desks. Except for the degree of trouble it would have gotten me in.

Apparently yesterday there was a big thing about bullying, so accusations of bullying were flying everywhere. About a half-dozen kids all just left after lunch to go to the principal/counselor/nurse. I had to get the other teacher involved to straighten that all out.

There was one case of bullying that I almost had nailed. The kids were playing dodgeball and a kid was crying on the ground due to some other kid’s “unfair” balltoss. I didn’t see that, but the kid he was pointing at then proceeded to throw the dodgeball straight at his head while he was one the ground. The crying kid ran away. When I finally found him, he refused to identify the kid that did it. I would have come down on the bully anyway, but it was one of three kids (all with shaggy blond hair, all wearing NFL-logo jackets) and I wasn’t positive which one it was. I needed the bullied to point him out and he refused to do so.

Speaking of which, dodgeball really is a mixed blessing. I am strangely happy to see it, but it does involve a lot of injuries and a lot of crying. With the exception of the above, the crying tends to be temporary.

One kid is so excitable that they have to put her in a jacket lined with metal to keep her from running around everywhere.

One little girl (actually, one of the good ones) got a papercut. I basically told her to tough it up (I couldn’t see the cut, no matter how hard I tried). Five minutes later she was bawling. So off to the nurse she went. After which, other kids started trying to injure themselves so that they could go to the nurse, too.

I actually had a frame of reference here. One of the girls in this first grade class was in the first grade class I taught at “the good school” (Rushmore). She was held back for a questionable reason: she was doing fine, but her Irish Twin needed to be held back and so the parents held them both back to keep them together. The difference in behavior between first graders and second graders is negligible and favorable to the former, so she wasn’t an outstanding student because she was more “mature” than her classmates. She was just a diamond in the rough. At Rushmore, she was a middle of the pack student that I really only remembered because she would keep hugging me. So in the context of Rushmore, she was average. In the context here, she was far and away the best student I had. Only one other came close.

I found it noteworthy that all three of the students I was “warned” about by the other teacher were male. The worst offenders were almost all female (one of the three she pointed to were an exception).

I’m going to have to come up with some better classroom management strategies. Not all of my grade school assignments are going to be at Creston and Rushmore.

I’ve taught previously at this school, Church Elementary, with a couple of pretty decent classes.

Notably, however, when I was last at Rushmore, one of my students was the daughter of Church’s principal.

“The main thing is to keep them from killing each other. If they learn something along the way, even better.” -The other first grade teacher.

This sounds interesting, but I’m not sure. It’s about how to eliminate left-turns. Which sounds great to me. I’m not sure, though, because of the conscipuous lack of diagrams showing me what exactly they’re describing. Come on, this is the Internet. You can use pictures!

Farhad Manjoo questions the conventional wisdom about letting little kids watch TV. Russell Saunders defends it.

Glen Whitman argues that hot flight attendants were an odd result of airline regulation and it was deregulation that caused flight attendants to be like everybody else. Megan McArdle argues that it was feminist shaming, unionization, and anti-discrimination law.

If you accidentally ding a Ferrari, you’d better hope you’re insured or you’re going to have to put out a pretty penny. Unless you’re the Justice Department, in which case you can just total it.

The State of Texas adds 15 new law-enforcement agencies per year.

Plans in Mexico for an underground skyscraper. I actually think this sort of thing is cool. Others have pointed out that the reason they’re doing this – excessive regulation – is rather uncool. I agree, but windows are for chumps. Ironically, I’m pretty sure our regulations would prevent such a thing from ever being built here. Insufficient fire escapes.

Despite their appeals to very different audiences, rap and country often go over variants of the same subject-matter. I once considered using this angle on a piece in the college newspaper about those criticizing rappers. Describe an artist with violent content, leading people to assume it’s some rapper, then reveal it to be Johnny Cash. I decided better of it, however.

Losing your virginity at a younger age does not appear to make you more of a sexual risk-taker later in life.