Hit Coffee favorite Joel Kotkin looks at migration patterns within the US. As someone that wants our talent to be spread out, I consider it a positive of course that the lower-cost red states are gaining. I consider it win-win, as they’re easing population pressure in the more expensive blue states while helping the economies of the red states advance.

Islands for sale! Islands for sale!

Independents display less motivated reasoning than partisans. In other words, less inclined to interpret evidence on the basis of predisposition. Of course, ultimately, everybody is subject to predisposition. Nobody who has been listening to my views on the subject should be surprised by this possibility. Of course, Half Sigma too.

Ninjas, apparently, are heading for extinction. Pirates are struggling, too.

It probably speaks to my geekery that I find articles about the inner workings of Amazon to be quite interesting.

A look at the mobile war for the living room.

Prostitutes are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one.

Wired has a great article on medieval farm shapes and modern transportation networks. Or: Why Americans think that roads should come to them rather than settle where roads go to.

It is so weird to me that Android is winning the consumer market(share) and iPhone is winning the corporate. That’s completely backwards, and absolutely a failure on the part of Android handset makers.

In football, spread offenses typically stink at defense. Opinions differ as to why.

Around election time, I pondered whether Romney’s loss would have any effect on the LDS Church:

[A] change of trajectory somewhere along the line does seem possible. The Romney loss could play a roll in it, but I think being on what will be the losing side of the gay marriage issue will be a bigger one. To be clear, I don’t think the LDS Church will ever formally or informally endorse same-sex marriage. Civil unions and such yes, but marriage never. But I think their experiences with Proposition 8 and the backlash they faced may have jarred them a little (it sure as heck would have jarred me). Not just that they were publicly reviled, but it was the conspicuousness with which they were targeted. It’s not that they don’t like attention – they clearly do – but they have always seemed at least a little wary of being seen as backwards. It’s actually a bit difficult to describe, but many southern evangelicals seem to revel in being the big, bad guy to their opponents. Mormons maintain their distinctness, to be sure, but perhaps because of a history of having been on the wrong side of public backlashes, they are reluctant to be too different.

The LDS Chuch does seem to be shifting its views on homosexuality just a bit:

Among the videos on the site is one featuring the Mormon apostle Dallin H. Oaks, titled “What Needs to Change.” Oaks says that “what needs to change is to help our own members and families understand how to deal with same-gender attraction.” While that sentence doesn’t quite parse grammatically, the message seems to be: Don’t throw your children out of the house because they’re gay. Do teach them, though, not to have gay sex. The “doctrine of the church, that sexual activity should only occur between a man and a woman who are married,” Oaks says, “has not changed and is not changing.”

Those who pay attention to verb tenses may notice that Oaks does not say that Mormon doctrine will not change. On one level, this is simply good Mormonism: The LDS Church believes in continual revelation through a living prophet, so no apostle can declare with certainty that something will never change. And the new website, which is hardly a celebration of gay pride, is also a savvy bit of public relations: Brad Kramer, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan who studies contemporary Mormonism (and who is Mormon himself), called the site “an example of the curious space where PR and doctrinal shift intersect and subtly cooperate.”

To be sure, this is a very subtle shift. But it’s not in isolation. In 2010, two years after having getting a lot of negative attention due to their role in Proposition 8, they came out in favor of a ban on anti-gay discrimination in Salt Lake County and came out strongly against anti-gay persecution in schools.

Like I said, I don’t think the church will ever support gay marriage. Nor will they ever be okay with homosexuality. But I think they are at least somewhat subject to peer pressure. And we’re seeing that now.

Addendum: In the comments, Abel points to a couple of items pre-dating the 2008 election demonstrating a more broad-minded view of homosexuality than the church’s reputation.

The other day at Safeway I happened to end up in line in front of the young lady I sold Crayola, my old Ford Escort, too. I was particularly happy to sell the car to exactly the kind of person she was: young and poor. I offered the car for a really low price and even knocked another $150 off after I met her and her boyfriend, the prototypical struggling young couple. I almost had an offer for the full asking price, but I ended up glad that didn’t work out because it was a gift for a grandson who was apparently less than impressed that his first car was going to be a compact. I wanted the car to go to someone that would appreciate it the same way I appreciated having any car that would run.

While we were waiting, I asked them whether they still had the car, and they did! I thought that I had seen it around town, but I hadn’t seen it in a while. Apparently, the old car successfully drove from the Mountain West, to the Great Plains, to the Texas, and back. I was pretty stunned since I had become reluctant to try to drive it to Redstone.

I will confess, however, that “wait, so you’re saying I could have held on to that car for two more years?!” crossed my mind. But a greater part of me was glad that I didn’t rip them off with a car that had less than a couple months left on it. Besides which, the car had become unreliable in extreme cold conditions. We haven’t really had that since I sold it to them, but piece of mind was also one of the things we purchased along with the new car and warranty plan. Also, with little Lain, the two-door compact would no longer have been useful to us anyway.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law is asking me about smartphones and is interested in upgrading to one. That sort of stuff makes my day to begin with, but it worked out even better when it turned out that a phone I have that’s been gathering dust (literally – I’m looking at it now and it’s very dusty) fit her needs perfectly.

I always like it when things I can no longer use can find a home with someone who needs them.

Good on San Francisco for approving super-small apartments. If we want to increase density (a liberal goal) and keep places affordable (also a liberal goal, though more of a conservative one in my experience), projects like this need to happen. Hopefully DC follows suit. Also, stuff like this is awesome.

Knock-off textbooks for free! This is a brilliant idea, if they can figure out how to make money from it. There is a bubble here to be popped (apologies to my father-in-law, who has a side-career writing textbooks).

Joshua Gans lays out a shockingly solid case for why online schools shouldn’t bother with accreditation.

Chris Blattman says that the connection between corruption and development is not what we think it is. Is this one of those things that we sorta want to be true because it’s so convenient to believe?

Why Belarus uses Opera Browser: Authoritarianism. Bad things have their upsides, I suppose. Opera is a pretty solid browser.

A lot of the things that people tout that should be cost-savers for medical care turn out not to be. Preventative medicine being one. Online access to doctors being another. Contrary to popular belief, limitations of access more generally can really be cost-savers for the system. Intervention begets intervention.

This is an outstanding question. Why aren’t we all using Japanese toilets?

How Eastern and Western cultures tackle learning. Some recent studies have suggesting that the Eastern method is better in the overall. But I can’t imagine it’s something that could be accomplished here.

Along these lines, this article about Singapore is really quite interesting. But there is limited applicability to the US generally. I even question its applicability to China, where Sumner focuses.

Riverside Ramblin’ is one of the first blogs that I linked to. While going through and killing dead links I saw that it has actually been reborn. Here’s an interesting post on retailing and employee recruitment.

The problem with articles like this, that talk about the sexual revolution and hook-up culture as being bad for women, is when it becomes about how women should treat other women, as opposed to how women should expect men to be treated by women.

A little while ago, I got a really sweet deal on a used smartphone off eBay. It had a crack running through a corner of it and was a lower-range model to begin with (though the specs were fine). I buy most of my smartphones off eBay, and there have rarely been problems. I’d recommend it, generally. This post is not one an “I got ripped off by eBay posts”.

However, this purchase started off on an odd foot. The seller had not reset the device, so after booting up the phone, I was locked out of it. Not a big deal as I could reset the device myself. After that, I set the phone aside to take a look at when I got the time. When I picked the phone up again a week later, I learned that not only had the device not been reset, it hadn’t been deactivated. It was still receiving text messages and calls.

I did my part. I contacted my carrier to inform them that somebody out there (at [phone number]) was still being charged for a voice and data plan that they weren’t using. I was informed that unless the account-holder called, there was nothing I could do. (They also informed me that I couldn’t activate my new/used phone until it had been deactivated by the accountholder of the number it was assigned to.) I also found the email address of the original owner of the phone. I wrote them an email explaining the situation and that they needed to contact the carrier to cancel their coverage.

To which I got a six word response: “Who are you? Leave me alone.” I started to respond, but then realized that I was merely repeating what I’d said in my last email. The end result of all of this being that some girl or woman in the rust belt is going to be continually charged for a wireless phoneline that she isn’t using. She’ll probably be wondering why they are contacting her since she dispatched the phone and that obviously terminates the account right? At some point, debt collectors will be involved. Her current balance is over $1,000 in payment due.

Meanwhile, I have a smartphone that I can’t really use yet. Actually, I could use it as a separate phone line if I were so inclined. But I have a phone. I bought this for backup purposes in case I lost my phone. I assume that service will indeed be cut off at some point. Hopefully before I need this one. The next-to-last text message said that I needed to contact the carrier within 24 hours. That was over 24 hours ago, and I just got a text message from an irate friend wondering why he or she is being ignored.

It’s actually somewhat amazing to me that I have never actually lost a cell phone. I ran over one, once. I crushed one under an exercise bike. (By the way, never insure your smartphone. Trust me.) I have misplaced my phone on a couple of occasions, but I was quick to realize it was gone and recovered it.

Of course, I don’t know if she lost this phone, whether it was stolen*, or whether she just sold it. The bigger issue is that upon the dispatching or disappearance of the phone, she didn’t get it replaced or cancel the account. This is actually the sort of thing that I am bad at when it comes to wallets. I wait a week or two for it to pop up. I keep an eye on my credit card usage, and then if it hasn’t popped up I start making the calls.

I get the sense that there is no such deliberate process involved with the original owner of this phone. That she is like the guy who thinks that since his car was repossessed that his relationship with the creditors was terminated. These are the sorts of things that genuinely depress me. We live in an increasingly complicated world. The deck is enormously stacked against those who aren’t equipped for it.

* – A lot of people are under the impression that used phones are always stolen. I’ve actually never bought into this. As people continually upgrade or replace their phones, the old phones have to go somewhere. In any event, the girl in question had an opportunity to declare it stolen. She didn’t. My conscience is clean.