I like the ACLU in theory, and I want young people to learn how to read, but stuff like this gives me the jeebies. I don’t mind special assistance requirements, but the “reasonably expected to enable the pupil to bring his or her reading skills to grade level within 12 months”? Yikes. Output-based rights freak me out.

Samsung flew some bloggers to a trade show and threatened to leave them there.

Texas and California are both looking at high speed rail, but in very different ways. I am personally a lot more comfortable with the Texas model, though I do have to concede that the California one is much more likely to actually get built.

While Obama and Romney criticize one another over the auto bailout, it’s worth noting that their plans weren’t all that different.

A look at the (some)Times-Picayne. The first major daily to stop being a daily.

New York is trying an output-based program to get juvenile delinquents on the right track. An experiment is going in Haiti with personal poverty coaches.

Derek Thompson writes more on our current baby bust.

Another reason why it’s insane to live in New York City.

Are big business in India insufficiently powerful?

The slut/stud gap is apparently closing.

Conservative publications need more articles like this. I took advantage of some airline miles and got subscriptions to both conservative and liberal magazines. The latter were better, by a mile. The former focus too intensely on the Go Team political ramifications of everything. So good on the Weekly Standard for running this, demonstrating the complexity over scoring political points.

According to a new report, Utah is the nation’s most generous state and red states are more generous than blue ones. Of course, this includes church donations. It would he helpful if it didn’t.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the story of a reserve police deputy who whistleblew and was let go for it.

Homicide rates in Juarez are plummeting as someone finally won the war. Matthew Yglesias points out that when drug cartels are actually cartels, public safety wins.

The government (working on behest of Amazon) and publishers (working with Apple) have apparently reached a settlement. I haven’t been following this very closely, and I’m not sure of all the legalities involved, but I do like the result and think that it will be better all-around. My price point is a pretty firm $10, so this may lead me to purchase more ebooks.

Apparently they’ve finally made a Flying Star Wars Speeder Bike. Also, progress on driverless cars in California!

Montana’s first registered marijuana “caregiver” died in federal prison last month.

Josh Barro describes this election as the Poor vs Old election. It’s interesting how, just twelve years ago, Democrats were competitive with the aged vote. Now the GOP has to figure out how they’re going to replace them. And, of course, hoping they live until November.

Shelby County, Tennessee (home of Memphis) is trying to identify the authors behind anonymous comments on the paper’s website.

First they came for the cigarettes, then the soft drinks, and now baby formula.

To carry on a theme from a previous Linkluster, a woman in Phoenix was ordered not to give out water in 112 degree heat because she lacked the proper permit.

Dana Albert writes about Lance Armstrong and Eminem. There have been a ridiculous number of pro-Lance advertisements on local TV. Either they do it nationally or they consider Arapaho to be a winning market to run the ads. It appears to be working enough that there are letters to the editor in local papers on the matter. To be honest, I care less that Lance Armstrong cheated than that they moved heaven and earth to never actually prove it. I am inclined to give him a pass for the same reason that I give ARod a pass: the methodology in which exposure occurred is more repulsive to me than the underlying crime, in both cases committed by countless others.

Obama’s Race to the Top penalizes smaller school districts. These are the sorts of things that lead beneficiary small-population states to look askance at the federal government. Policies are often geared towards assumptions that don’t apply out here.

A man in Florida stole a doctor’s ID and practiced for a year.

My father-in-law embarked about three years ago on finding the perfect cell phone arrangement. He had one plan with one company and his wife had another plan with another company. This cries out for a “family plan”, but he wouldn’t go forward with that until he could find the right one, which didn’t exist. He just couldn’t stomach the cost.

The first thing he did was go with a prepaid variant of US Sprint. This, despite the fact that Sprint had no coverage in one of the two towns where they live. He thought this was something that you work around. I tried to convince him that it’s not worth it saving 10-20% on a cell phone you can only use half the time. He went forward, but within a few months realized that this was not money well-saved.

The story has a happy ending as he has gone with a prepaid setup that uses Verizon’s network and now he gets coverage on the campground in Genesis. He finally found something that I had actually believed probably didn’t exist: a way to beat the cell phone companies.

The NYT has an article on the superiority of the sort of monthly plans that the in-laws have:

Prepaid phone plans, where you pay the full price for a cellphone and then pay lower monthly rates without a contract, seem to offer what most budget-conscious people want. So why haven’t they really caught on?

Contract-free phone plans account for only 23 percent of the wireless customers in the United States phone market, according to the research firm Ovum. The rest are subscribers locked into contracts and paying higher monthly fees.

That’s despite the fact that prepaid phone plans are generally a better deal for most people, who can save hundreds of dollars over the course of two years compared to a contract plan.

The iPhone with a two-year contract on AT&T, for example, costs $200 for the handset and then upward of $90 a month for the plan; over two years, including the cost of the phone, customers pay at least $2,360. With a prepaid plan on Virgin Mobile, which is owned by Sprint, the iPhone costs $650 for the handset, and then $30 a month, including unlimited data (the type of data plan that people are happier with, according to J.D. Power). Over two years, that would cost about $1,370.

The Verizon-to-Sprint comparison is problematic for many (just as my in-laws discovered), but I suspect you are talking about some real savings despite that unless you are an avid user. Certainly for more than a quarter of the market.

As long-time readers know, I am skeptical of the US’s contract-based/phone-subsidized model in many respects and so articles like this just warm my heart. There is an argument to be made that the contract/subsidy model is actually better for less well-to-do customers insofar as they are the ones most likely to have trouble affording the phone in the first place. I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that the end result has not been making the acquisition of cell phones all that much easier, but rather enticing more and more people onto plans that they cannot afford.

But here’s the thing, though: Like “cutting the cord” for cable and going with all of the free options, can these plans continue to exist as affordably as they do if more and more people switch over to these sorts of plans? I might consider them to be a net bonus – even if I myself am not on one – even at higher rates simply because I like the “model” better. On the other hand, I found myself thinking that people on these plans shouldn’t necessarily be encouraging people not on these plans to get on them.

We will probably stick to our regular Verizon plan. We’re under contract and on the whole as we move from one place to the next it makes more sense to us not to play games with our cell coverage. I may revisit the issue in two years.

This seems kind of like a cool idea: put a swimming pool in NYC rivers.

It’s lengthy, but 7S magazine has an interesting article about Marfa, Texas, out in the western desert. This leaped out at me because my wife once looked at being a doctor there. It’s apparently undergoing an intense upheaval due to an influx of wealthy people. Sort of. Also, a look at how West Texas is going to be handling this oil boom differently than the last. (h/t Mr. Blue)

It turns out, poor and middle class Americans have little say in government policy. Serious props to the (liberal) writer for acknowledging that a society in which these people did have more say is not necessarily one liberals would prefer.

The case for committing the seven deadly sins.

How lengthy clinical drug trials are stifling cures. You hear this a lot, but the author has some actual proposals beyond the “damn bureaucracy!” vaguaries.

A lot of teenagers listen to their music on YouTube. That’s not surprising. More surprising is that half of them still buy CD’s.

If stories about corporate sex parties in Germany interest you, click here (no pictures). I’m too square, I guess. The thought of being at one of these things creeps me out.

College graduates are apparently joining the military in record numbers.

In Washington State, a man was jailed for attempting to cash a Chase check at a Chase bank.

Gallup has a list of the approval ratings of many industries. I’m not surprised that oil and gas are not popular, but I am a little surprised that they’re dead at the bottom, below banking. Also below banking: the federal government.