The situation with Audible has been resolved. The issue, basically, is that when I signed up for an account, they gave me two. One had an account, one didn’t. When I asked them to delete the surplus account, there was some resistence on the basis that there was no reason to since it didn’t hurt to have the second account, but once I explained the problem with email confusion over the status of my membership, they killed the account.

The situation with the optometrist has not been resolved and has in fact gotten worse. When they finally send the prescription to Walmart, they sent a contacts prescription. I don’t need contacts, I need glasses. I haven’t been able to check with them in order to see whether or not they even have a glasses prescription or whether they were under the impression that it was specifically for contacts. I’m never going to get my new glasses. If I have to get a glasses prescription, I’m just going to go to the Walmart eye center. The most frustrating thing about all of this is that my vision hasn’t changed. This was confirmed on my last visit.

I turned in a pretty lackluster day today substitute teaching. The class itself wasn’t the issue. They weren’t perfect – what second grade class has perfection – but on the whole they were better than expected as students of the school in question and given a gender imbalance (2/3 boy) that always makes me nervous.

But I was exhausted. I have been for several days now. I’ve been getting less than six hours of sleep a night for almost a week not. My days over the last couple have included some exhausting chores (driving a lot of miles in uncomfortable conditions). It was hard to keep moving around the room (and second grade demands it). I had a lot of difficulty retaining any sort of focus.

On the drive home, I was reminded of the things that my wife, and doctors like her, are expected to do on a lot less cumulative rest than I’ve had.

It’s a rather good thing that she is taking the maternity leave she is in light of the newborn coming our way later this month. I hear newborns sometimes cut down on quality rest.

In response to the subject of a post-consumerist society, NewDealer writes:

What is an economy that is not built on consumerism? What is the alternative?

This is a serious question. I am not saying that being a consumer all the time is good but critics of consumerism have yet to come up with an alternative model that I consider to be sustainable and/or pleasant.

Most critics of consumerism seem to be filled with Freshman 101 sort of rebellion. As I once joked about on facebook but got a lot of likes, one day these people “will want nice things to”. In other words, most of them will end up just as middle class as the backgrounds they came from and are currently rebelling against.

The modern notion of a vast middle class is more or less based on consumerism and is a continuation of the Victorian Industrial Revolution’s ability to take former luxury items and make them affordable for the masses. Now we do it with clothing, electronics and vacations and restaurants instead of chocolate, candles, and soap though.

I was listening to NPR’s Planet Money once and they were interviewing a very thrifty woman who basically urged everyone to stop buying anything new (furniture, books, clothing, electronics, etc) and also to stop going to restaurants. If everyone took her advice, the economy would collapse and we would all be more miserable. Plus life would be really boring without restaurants.

That being said, I agree we should think more in terms of sustainability over growth, growth, growth that creates boom and bust cycles. But I will still take post-consumerist talk more seriously when I hear a serious proposal about how to do so in a nation of 300 plus million people. It is not sustainable to imagine every American becoming a hippie on a commune and that is what many anti-Consumerists [seem to] want.

It is comparatively easy to be against consumerism, at least in the abstract. When we’re not careful, we typically mean the poor consumption decisions of others. I mean, I don’t think of myself as particularly consumerist, but I have a whole boatload of electronics that would beg to differ. I love electronics. I don’t know that they make me happier than I would be if they did not exist, but given that they exist I would rather have them than not have them. Is this worthy of criticism? I’m not sure. But I doubt it’s going away.

Of course, the real enemy is status consumption, as far as that goes. This is an area where I do reasonably well. In a way, though, it’s at least sometimes a form of image-making in and of itself. It was hard for me to mentally go from that guy who owns an aging Ford to that guy who has a relatively new Subaru. I bought the latter out of utility, and with more than a little bit of discomfort. That tells me that my previous consumption habits were at least a little bit about self-image. Not all self-image consumption is created equal. Even conspicuously opting out of a material arms race has pluses, and maybe minuses, compared to the waste created by an unwillingness to make do.

The arms race, though, itself has material repercussions. This is where any sort of post-consumerism is going to get really difficult. Our houses don’t need to be as big as they are in the absolute sense. There is utility in having large houses, as well as costs, but one of the driving factors isn’t about absolute size, but relative size. Big houses don’t just give you more space, but they price undesirables out. The comparative importance of this, for a very large section of the population, can scarcely be overstated. There is the natural desire to live amongst one’s peers. There are concerns about crime. There are lifestyle clashes that occur across economic lines. There are schools to consider if there are children involved.

The notion that large numbers of people might opt out of this strikes me as extremely unlikely. The collective action problem here is immeasurable. The most that could be hoped for is to change the parameters. That involves, among other things, having less to spend money on. Or, alternately, having less money to spend. The end result, though, is not a significantly less consumerist mindset, though the end result could be less waste and more “sustainability.” The hard part would be accomplishing this without adversely materially affecting the bottom. I have enormous difficulty figuring out how you accomplish that. I have a lot of difficulty envisioning it.

Does anyone remember that previous Linkluster about the reserve deputy being fired for whistleblowing a case of a divorce lawyer hiring cops to torpedo the spouses of his clients? Well, here’s more on the lawyer, who is apparently being charged with bugging cars.

More on how driverless cars may reshape our transit system. Someone on Twitter made a good point that there is going to be a natural tension here: cars too deferential to pedestrians will navigate roads too slowly (people being more inclined to step in front of an automatic car that they know will stop for them) but if they’re not deferential enough they may be blamed and outlawed.

Life expectancy for less educated whites is shrinking in the US.

As someone whose resume is rarely the perfect fit for any job (thus making me less qualified than someone else who has already been doing the job), I sign on to this completely.

There is a lot about the transition to ebooks that makes me uncomfortable, but one of the real positive things is the ability to resurrect out-of-print books.

How Marvel mastered Hollywood. DC/WB should be taking notes.

Some people are better off now than they were four years ago. Ironically, they live in red states. From a partisan standpoint, this can be spun in the direction of whatever satisfies your biases. Either ungrateful red-staters who refuse to vote for the black guy, or Obama trying to take credit for improvements in states that don’t support his agenda.

How Texas became our export king.

A fascinating look at the Louisiana Tech Bulldog offense, run not by its quarterback but its center. Louisiana Tech is presently 4-0 this season having defeated Houston, Rice, Illinois, and Virginia with nary a game with less than 40 points scored.

This article may be the best thing The Onion has written in a while (and I haven’t even seen Honey Boo Boo): You Do, Of Course, Realize That This Is Going To End Very, Very Badly

First Los Angeles lost the movie business, and now they’re losing TV:

The five broadcast television networks will be rolling out 23 new one-hour dramas for the upcoming season. That would normally be good business for Hollywood’s hometown industry — with bookings for soundstages and plenty of work for the costumers, camera operators and caterers needed to put a show on the air.

But not this year. Just two of the 23 new fall and midseason shows will be shot in Los Angeles County, as cost-conscious producers seek tax-friendly production havens in New York, North Carolina, Georgia and other states.

The exodus has been going on for years, especially in feature film production. But television dramas such as”CSI,””Criminal Minds”and”Desperate Housewives”have long been anchors of Los Angeles’ entertainment economy, helping to offset the decade-long slide in moviemaking. One 22-episode-a-year network series has a budget of $60 million and generates 840 direct and indirect jobs, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

I, of course, consider this an unmitigated positive. I have long complained about the centrality of Los Angeles and New York as TV show locations and one of the listed reasons for it is that the shows are filmed there. More shows filmed elsewhere should mean more shows taking place elsewhere. Of course, if they start filming stuff in Oklahoma City that takes place in Los Angeles, I’m really going to lose it.

From the Washington Post, by way of OTB:

Breaking from two decades of tradition, this year’s election exit poll is set to include surveys of voters in 31 states, not all 50 as it has for the past five presidential elections, according to multiple people involved in the planning.

Dan Merkle, director of elections for ABC News, and a member of the consortium that runs the exit poll, confirmed the shift Wednesday. The aim, he said, “is to still deliver a quality product in the most important states,” in the face of mounting survey costs.

The decision by the National Election Pool — a joint venture of the major television networks and The Associated Press — is sure to cause some pain to election watchers across the country. (For a full list of the states that won’t have exit polls scroll to the bottom of this post.)

Voters in the excluded states will still be interviewed as part of a national exit poll, but state-level estimates of the partisan, age or racial makeups of electorates won’t be available as they have been since 1992. The lack of data may hamper election night analyses in some states, and it will almost certainly limit post-election research for years to come.

DC is excluded, in addition to the nineteen states in black on the map (in case you can’t see it, Rhode Island is one of them). Remember when I talked about pseudostates? It appears that the NEP has found them.

This list includes sixteen red states and four blue ones (including DC). They excluded as many of Obama’s states as they included where McCain got a majority of the vote. This ought to raise some serious alarm bells. I am at a loss as to what, precisely, the methodology here is.

They’re not going for regional balance, as they are excluding the entirety of the south central states and north central great plains. They’re excluding both Mormon states, and both West Virginia and Kentucky.

We could cite diversity, but no Texas.

We could say that “Oh, gosh, those rural states are expensive…” and yet urban/suburban Utah is excluded while Vermont is included.

We could talk about competitive senate or gubernatorial races, but North Dakota is a tossup and was excluded.

Does this matter? I don’t know. But it sure seems to me that exit polls in non-swing states should matter or should not. If they do not matter, I really do not see much reason to include six of Obama’s top ten. If phone polls are good enough for Louisiana, they’re good enough for Maryland. If they’re worried about missing something in Maryland, they ought to be worried about missing something in Louisiana.

I’d like to be able to say “this may discredit exit polls into oblivion” and a part of me wouldn’t mind that for a variety of reasons. The other part of me loves data. People have occasion to sift through it and get some quite interesting tidbits.

So I hope that this is a mistake or misunderstanding or something.

The case against seeing your car as an investment. Like housing, I believe it should be a consumption decision the vast majority of the time.

Apparently, if you can get someone to think that they believe something they don’t, they will defend what they think they believe to the hilt.

I am skeptical of some of the ideas on getting women more involved in the sciences, especially as it pertains to a cultural shift, but things like this represent a real problem.

An interesting look at a rural Arkansas school and what they’re doing to get their students ready for the workforce. I’m not sure about overhauling assigned schools (as opposed to charter schools), though in ruralia there is a degree of either-or involved.

Relatedly, I am skeptical of college-for-everyone for a variety of reasons, but post-secondary education does seem like a good idea and community colleges need to lead the way (rather than simply being feeders and money-savers for four year programs – though neither of those are necessarily a bad thing).

Kiplinger lists the worst college majors for your career. Not a surprising list.

The liberal leftist case for a manned space program.

Some of the underlying assumptions in favor of affirmative action may be faulty.

Baton Rouge’s newspaper, The Advocate, is planning to fill gaps left by New Orleans’s Times-Picayune going to a 3-day schedule by releasing a New Orleans edition. I think this may be the future of newspaper publishing, to the extent that there is one. Regional rather than metropolitan newspapers interweaving regional news and local editions.

I guess I have no taste (as if this was news to you), because I think most of these cars look kind of cool!

I am among those that thought, on the whole, Romney turned in a pretty impressive performance and Obama a lackluster one.

There are three hesitations I have, however. First, I have been wrong in the past (I got two of the three Bush-Gore debates wrong, and one of the Obama-McCain ones – twice I overestimated the Democrat and once the Republican). Romney looked positive reptilian when he wasn’t talking. I don’t know how many noticed or cared, but that is one of those minor things that can color future perceptions. Second, Romney’s domineering of Lehrer didn’t come across as good. I was cringing a bit at the beginning. I don’t know if he got better or I just got used to it.

The third thing may have worked in his favor, though. It allowed him to get words in he otherwise wouldn’t have an ultimately change the format of the discussion… for the better, in my view. This debate was made more tolerable by its freewheeling style. The “two minute answers” would have been more a hindrance than a help, viewing-wiser. Lehrer is getting some criticism, but I’m glad he did what he did (or didn’t do what he didn’t do).

Even if I am right about Romney’s performance and Obama’s, I don’t think this is a gamechanger. If the press gives Romney some good headlines, it mostly serves to keep him alive. The progress made in establishing himself as something other than a right-wing caricature has to be capitalized on. I’m not sure how much faith I’d have in Romney not to screw it up.

I placed the odds of an Obama victory at 20% before the debate, and I’d place it the same now. A bad performance, though, would have shifted things possibly irrevocably in the other direction.

A part of me wonders what conversations went on behind closed doors in the Romney campaign. There was some talk at the Leaguecast of whether his apparent shift will hurt him among conservative voters. I actually wonder if the goal of the campaign now is not to convince those voters (or more specifically, the donors) that he’s in their corner, but to convince them that he can win. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were pleased with what they saw, if it pans out.

Scotch helps presidential debates go down.

Back in the 90’s and early aughts when I was collecting comics, prices were in pretty rapid rise. The publishers always blamed the increased cost of paper. So when they were $1.25 when I started collecting and $2.25 when I stopped several years later, it was all about the paper. Comics cost upwards of $4 a piece now. Now, you can get an ecomic, and it will cost you… about $4. Dang the rising costs of paper.

Peter Osnios thinks the courts are about to hurt the book business:

To get a sense of where the pricing issue now stands beyond the legal battles, I embarked on this simple exercise: I went to every major on-line retailer and a selection of traditional booksellers to find out what they were charging for Krugman’s End This Depression Now. The title was published last April and reached as high as number 17 on the New York Times bestseller list for printed books. A starred review in Publishers Weekly concluded, “Krugman has consistently called for more liberal economic policies, but his wit and bipartisanship ensure that this book will appeal to a broad swath of readers from the Left to the Right, from the 99% to the 1%.” According to Norton, the book has sold 30,000 copies in print, with e-book sales of 25,000. The list price for the book is $24.95, and every bookstore I called is selling it at that price. You can also order it directly from the publisher’s website, but that comes with a shipping charge and sales tax where required.

Here is where the pricing becomes interesting. Amazon’s hardcover price is $14.71, with no shipping charge for customers who pay an annual fee of $79 for Amazon Prime and two-day delivery. The Kindle edition is $9.48. At BN.com the hardcover is $14.71, but the e-book price is $13.72 (BN.com has free shipping for orders over $25). Moreover, in the Barnes & Noble bookstore, the hardcover is $24.95. On Apple’s iBook, the price is $11.99. The Sony store charges $14.99, and on Kobo, which was recently named the e-book provider in the coming year for independent booksellers, the price was $15.49. Only Google Play matched Amazon at $9.48.

The end result of all of this, Osnios believes, is that cheap will rule the day and that those who are able to sell cheap, like Amazon, will be able to force the price down to the point that everyone but Amazon will be harmed, including the consumer. The consumer, Osnios explains, will be harmed by the publishers because “the result will be fewer books that matter — like [Krugman’s book] — whether in print or digital formats. ”

Well, I can safely predict that he is wrong on Krugman. So wrong, in fact, that it calls the rest of what he has to say into question. Books like Krugman’s will always do well because they’re safe. They might not give him as much of an advance, but I don’t think Krugman is going to forgo writing a book because his advance is $x rather than $2x. The danger, to the extent that there is one, lies in unsafe authors. Any sort of risk-taking.

This may be inevitable in any event. It may ultimately not actually matter insofar as the reader is concerned. With self-publishing becoming increasingly economical, the publishers can essentially force would-be authors to make a name for themselves before signing them anything with an advance. Maybe a tenured professor at George Mason University won’t write a book to be self-published that he otherwise would if he were to get an advance, but… vanity is a pretty powerful thing.

There is a possible concern that quality will drop and we’ll have to start getting used to typos and shoddier editing, but this is not end-of-the-world stuff to me. and honestly, the risk of such is not worth the upcharge the publishers are demanding. The lack of sympathy I feel for publishers who have been trying to keep ebook prices comparable to physical book prices is not insignificant here. It’s not just that Amazon is wanting to sell me the books for less. It’s that Amazon prices actually make sense to me in terms of what I am getting.

Arguments about the increasing costs of paper aren’t going to cut it anymore.

George W. Bush is outpolling Mitt Romney? Seriously? Maybe they should have given Jeb a chance? (Actually, probably not: GWB’s numbers would probably be lower if he were not so safely displaced from running for anything.)

The Senate voted unanimously to shield US airlines from EU carbon reduction programs. The unanimity of this does not bode well for attempts at reducing carbon emissions.

Speaking of AGW, Tim Lee takes a look at media incompetence in covering the issue. In this case, a lazy reporter who “accidentally” overstated climate change’s damage by a factor of ten.

If you have an old car, or ride a motorcycle, or use a gas can for gasoline-powered mowers, refilling is about to get a lot more complicated.

A reason I’m glad I live in the west: This crap won’t fly. Maybe it ultimately won’t in New Jersey, either, but these sorts of things touch on multiple things I dislike (the War on Distracted Driving meets government-mandated pet-care meets making our lives more difficult one petty regulation at a time).

We don’t have alligators out here, but if we did, we’d probably even be okay with this. Granted, I don’t think I would get a gator for my child’s birthday party.

Women sometimes literally have men on the brain.

A plastic surgeon in Texas claims that he saved Obama’s life because “he had uncovered a plot to assassinate President Obama by a patient he was assessing. He reported that he contacted the FBI who then poisoned the patient.” … He is temporarily banned from practicing medicine.

DA offices are renting out their letterhead to debt collectors? What could possibly go wrong?

A primer on how shale gas can benefit us and the environment.