The NTSB wants to lower the legal driving blood alcohol content to .05 from .08. This hasn’t proved to be as popular as I would have guessed, though it appears most commenters at OTB approve.

No surprise, but I’m not a huge fan of the idea. But, as a compromise, I’ll sign on to this if we were to start making a legal distinction between driving impaired/intoxicated (say, .05 to .12) and driving while blasted (higher than .12). There’s an argument to be made for pushing more people off the road, but current law relies a great deal on treating milder offenders like the truly dangerous save for prosecutorial discretion.

My drinking days are mostly behind me. I was the inheritor of the leftover liquor content of Leaguefest 2012 and despite there having been maybe 10oz left over, I still haven’t finished it. My weekend trips to the music bars where my regular consumption was seven beers over four hours or so are likewise done. So the Fish-You-I-Done-Mine part of me says “Sure, lower it.” Safer roads and all.

But at least a part of me remains a little exasperated by the contradictions of society. We pose drunk driving as a unique evil, and then proceed to use drunk driving as a metric to prove that other things are just as bad. Drunk driving is uniquely bad, but using a phone while driving is as bad as drunk driving.

By which they mean, it’s as bad as driving with a BAC of .08. If we lower the BAC to .05, then we open the door for more things that are “just as bad as drunk driving.” Fortunately, Ray LaHood’s proposal to disable cell phones while driving didn’t go anywhere, and probably won’t.

And even though sports radio may be just as dangerous as drunk driving, it probably won’t be banned any time soon. Cops in California are pulling people over for eating behind the wheel.

I expect smoking-while-driving to become expressly illegal (the food thing is discretionary enforcement rather than express law)at some point. I stopped smoking and driving years ago, but trust me when I tell you the danger of it does not come close to matching that of eating behind the wheel. But smokers, as always, are an easy target.

It all relates back to our society’s inability to accept risk. I fear that, ultimately, what gets legislated and enforced and what doesn’t will depend on which things we want to do because freedom, and which things others should not be allowed to do because safety.

In Great Falls, Montana, an evacuation occurred when sirens went a-blaring at what appeared to be a gas leak. But then they determined that there was no gas leak. So what gives?

At first they thought it was a broken canister of mercaptan, a substance used to determine whether a gas leak is occurring. The real story turned out to be more interesting:<

Nick Bohr, general manager at Energy West, said workers at the company were cleaning out some storage areas and discarded several boxes of scratch-and-sniff cards that it sent out to customers in the past to educate them on what natural gas smells like.

“They were expired, and they were old,” Bohr said. “They threw them into the Dumpsters.”

When the cards were picked up by sanitation trucks and crushed, “It was the same as if they had scratched them.”

The chemical mercaptan is added to natural gas, which is odorless, so people can detect gas leaks. It smells like rotten eggs and is not poisonous.

All the cards combined to make a very strong smell, so as the garbage truck drove around downtown, it left behind the smell people think of as natural gas.

“It’s really, really potent,” said Jamie Jackson, a battalion chief for Great Falls Fire/Rescue.

Scratch and sniff with care, apparently…

Sextortion and poker. There’s a killer pun in there somewhere.

If you’re going to take a swing at a politician, don’t miss.

Gregory Ferenstein pushes back against the notion that there isn’t a tech-talent shortage.

Sam Ro makes the case that there’s more college graduate unemployment than we think.

Tor books says that getting rid of DRM didn’t hurt their business.

Adobe is abandoning the software-purchase model for Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). Few companies (other than Microsoft, of course) have dealt with piracy to the extent that Adobe has with its Creative Suite. This model makes sense. It’s not good for consumers, but this could easily be seen as a “reap what you sow” thing.

A proposal to allow the unlocking of cell phones may give us our stuff in other ways, too.

If we let them, cell phones can revolutionize the data that policy-makers can get. There is a trust problem, though.

Will there be a civil war over in the GOP climate change? I am actually a bit skeptical because I think public conviction on the issue is significantly overestimated. The combination of AGW-skepticism and evolution does make an uncomfortable trend for a lot of voters, though, who might be willing to overlook one or the other.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is sticking with Blackberry. If only Android made an adult phone, too.

Prince Harry thinks windmills are an eyesore. I’ve heard others suggest it, though it’s just odd to me, cause I think windmills look awesome.

How motherhood is changing.

There interesting story of how a couple people scammed eBay’s affiliate program for $28,000,000.

The interesting story of a woman who lives in a much, much more colorful world that we do.

I wrote a while back on a Tulane student athlete that only went to Tulane because his mother made him. While not ideal, Tulane will take what it can get. Florida State, though, is another matter.

“I hope that if Chris Christie some day runs for the Republican nomination, that he doesn’t lose any weight. I mean that because the United States culture continues to be replete with negative images of heavy men and heavy women especially. […] I’m not saying we need another William Howard Taft, but I actually think it would be healthy for the United States. I mean, we live in a country where Bill Clinton was talked about as a fat man, which was absurd. […] I hope that, in the future, if Haley Barbour or Chris Christie, they run, and they run as geniunely heavy men.” –Robert Farley, Bloggingheads.tv.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been in the news lately with his disclosure that he had weight-loss surgery. Marc Ambinder, who has gone through it himself, gives some good background on the whole thing in The Atlantic.

To their credit, more of Christie’s critics than I would have expected – particularly his critics on the left – have expressed support or indifference. Which is, to my mind, as it should be. A fair number of people, however, are holding on to some pretty ugly prejudices.

My primary objection to this has little to do with Chris Christie, and more to do with fat people in general. The thing is, if you mock Chris Christie for being fat, you’re not just mocking Chris Christie, you’re mocking fat people. The vast majority of it comes back to the notion that fatness is a mockable trait. Acting as though his obesity makes him inherently weak, or simply judging him as a lesser person – and less deserving of the office of governorship or the presidency – simply reinforces it. Other than the broad “I do not want an aesthetically displeasing person to run as president, the criticism often attempts to turn on a number of factors, all problematic.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about health. Is it? Would you have truly voted against Jed Bartlett’s re-election campaign? Beyond which, contrary to what Connie Mariano says, we really don’t know what Christie’s health is. The loss in life-expectency of an obese person compared to a non-obese person is 3-12 years. Hillary Clinton is fifteen years older than he is and Joe Biden is twenty years older. Statistically speaking, there isn’t much reason to be confident that Clinton and (particularly) Biden will outlive him. A larger concern tends to be health while alive. Christie could end up in a wheelchair. Are we prepared to say that we can’t have a president in a wheelchair? He could end up faced with fatigue. Old people have been known to get fatigue, too. And leaving all of this aside, Christie isn’t some statistic. He’s a person whose body may be dealing with the obesity well or may not be. If he runs for president, we will get more information about Christie’s actual state-of-health.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about discipline. Who wants a weak president? Am I truly supposed to believe that Bill Clinton’s inability to control his sexual urges was a puritanical non-issue, but Christie’s inability to control his food take is somehow relevant? This assumes, of course, that Christie’s food intake is occurring in a vacuum. Weight is a complicated thing. We don’t know how much he eats. Chances are it’s more than most, but even then you end up in a situation where one guy eats whenever he’s hungry and ends up looking like Barack Obama and another person eats whenever he’s hungry and ends up looking like Chris Christie. It’s… dicey, to actually attach a greater degree of moral worth and strength to the first person, for simply having less of an appetite? You’re still knee-deep in a lot of genetics here.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about how he’s handled the issue. The primary criticism being that Christie’s temper has been known to flare with this issue. Or that he’s uneven, between downplaying and laughing one minute to being angry the next. Well, how he responds to an issue that isn’t an issue shouldn’t be an issue, really. Our relationship with our body is a complicated thing. The expectation of some – explicit or implicit – is that he damn well better feel a healthy dose of self-loathing over this. But there is no appropriate response, ultimately. Self-loathing is deeply unattractive. Laughing it off is laughing off “a health crisis.” And getting angry at Mariano? Well, it wasn’t dignified, but neither is the “Fatty McFatterson gonna die” that he responded to. To which someone might respond “But this is part of a pattern with Christie.” Fair enough, and I’ll touch on this later, but find a better example than this one.

It’s not about appearance, it’s the hypocrisy (he’s a bully). Except that tying this to his weight only really works if weight should be considered a vulnerability that someone should be bullied over. Otherwise, he’s a bully or not whether he’s fat or thin and that’s condemnable or not on that basis. That Christie couldn’t lose the weight without surgical help is actuall par for the course for overweight people generally, only a sad few of which will ever permanently lose weight and most of those through surgery.

It’s not about the appearance, it’s about access to health care. Okay, now we’re at least dealing with relevant issues. Tread carefully here, though. It only works if you’re treating it the way you would treat a run-of-the-mill heart attack or somesuch.

It remains to be seen the extent to which weight will hurt Christie. Oddly, it could actually help him with women. Which would seriously drive some people nuts. Not unlike those conservatives who argue that Obama got a free ride because he was black. I am, ultimately, skeptical that it will. I think there’s a difference when it comes to a governor (or senator) and a president. This is a case where I really think our biases will get the best of us.

Now, I titled this piece “Fat Man For President!” But I have no strong attachment to Chris Christie. Merely that I agree with Mr. Farley on the prospect of a fat president than this guy or that one. And, while I wish Christie the best with his goal of weight loss (regardless of why he wants to lose the weight), I have to confess that a little part of me would be disappointed if he pulled a Mike Huckabee.

That I view him as one of the better candidates on the Republican side says more about the Republican field than it does about Christie. And while I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for him for governor or senator, I think there are a lot of legitimate questions about whether or not he is temperamentally suited for the presidency. And for the more liberal, of course, I understand that there are a lot of concerns about him that have absolutely nothing to do with his weight. I am not saying that there aren’t a lot of legitimate reasons to oppose Christie’s candidacy. There are. Stick with those.

NBC News has a piece asking whether the cost of private schooling (K-12) is worth the cost. This part jumped out at me:

Despite a strong résumé that included solid grades and entrance exam scores, and an enviable list of extracurricular activities, Assaf — who attended the private, $29,800-a-year Branson School outside of San Francisco — failed to get accepted to Brown. {…}

“Not getting into Brown was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Assaf, a vice president of sales at S.W. Basics of Brooklyn who ultimately ended up studying at NYU and has been accepted to the Harvard Business School.

The private school environment, according to Assaf, too often tended to engender in her and her classmates “an entitlement mentality.”

“At NYU, in a city like New York, nothing happens for you,” she said. “You have to earn every opportunity.”

When I think of a scrappy, nothing-is-free school, I can’t say that NYU is exactly what comes to mind. Later in the article:

Smith often advises his students to make nontraditional college choices — such as one student he encouraged to attend USC over an Ivy League school. However, he says he’s concerned with the dejection that students like Assaf experience, when the substantial investment in a high-priced secondary school education doesn’t yield the return they expected.

I suppose in one way, any non-Ivy school is a “nontraditional college choice” over any Ivy League school, and while USC is a private school, it’s larger than most state schools. Even so, I can’t help but find it interesting that in an article about the virtues of public versus private, it basically focuses on people looking at top-flight private schools for college.

As for the content of the article, given my aversion to private college, I have a stronger aversion to private school for K-12. At least, sending a kid to private school for the sake of “eliteness” (getting into the best college). I would consider a private school if there was something wrong with the local public school. Ideally, there’d be some measure of school choice where we end up and there would be an alternative public option, or a statewide math & science school as mentioned in the article (and like the one my wife went to).

Congressman Steve Pearce thinks congress should be allowed to telecommute. A part of me wonders if we shouldn’t just make’em telecommute.

Being alone is, apparently, bad for your health. Even if you’re a loner.

Somehow, I’m not surprised that the best live-action Wonder Woman outfit is from porn.

How much damage did Fukushima do to efforts to combat climate change?

One of the few reservations I personally have about nuclear power is the amount of time it takes to get a unit up and running. Maybe small reactors will help with that?
Diana Lind gushes over the possibility of cities without highways. Though I think the “induced demand” argument is problematic, I actually do think that urban highways should be re-evaluated. Highways to get into and around town are good, but once in town, maybe there is a better way.

If actual public opinion had its way, instead of interest groups, we’d have less legal immigration.

Is the fourth-wall breakdown in sitcoms a product of – and emblematic of – artistic laziness?

When we talk about how much physicians are paid, we also need to talk about the costs they incur.

Science fiction notoriously gets it wrong much of the time, so it’s noteworthy when science fiction gets it right.

Christopher Caldwell takes a look at abortion, national identity, and Ireland.

What do spies read for fun?

Thirty-three beautiful places… abandoned.

How driverless cars will affect our cities. The first one – increased expansion and sprawl – was not what I expect from such articles.

Glenn Reynolds wants to know who has the mineral rites… on an asteroid?

I wrote a long post over at NaPP on my conflicting views on the subject. It relates to a recent study on STEM career opportunities that has gotten some attention.

The thing is, it’s easy and socially convenient, to be a writer in non-conservative political magazines in diverse and liberal echelons of culture and stake out a position in favor of bringing in more talent from abroad. It’s easy because it’s not something a lot of people that matter to you are likely to speak up in protest about.

And to be honest, it’s easy for me to make these arguments. I don’t live in such an area, and I write for The League, but I nonetheless inhabit a cultural and economic orbit where I am not made particularly vulnerable by a potential influx of foreign workers competing with me for jobs. My wife’s job makes my career (or lack thereof) a lot less important. But more than that, the concerns Weissman outlines are not something I see, for the most part. At first thought, nearly every STEM person I know but one (who just recently graduated with a PhD in astrophysics, which is something of a niche) is doing well financially. Even those without college degrees! Back in Colosse, I know more people that are having trouble hiring (and yes, at reasonable rates with reasonable requirements) than I do people that just can’t find work.

But then I think again, and I think of the people in Deseret. Those people are struggling, with or without a degree. I am tempted to dismiss this because, well, they live in Deseret. And not in its capital and not in its tech corridor. What can you expect? But maybe, when I think a third time, that situation is more common than I think, and Colosse is less common than I think. And I wonder how much of what I believed is the comfortable generosity of the relatively invulnerable.

Because at fourth thought, I think back to when I was working at Mindstorm, a very large software company in the Pacific Northwest. I think of the fact that I worked in a department where maybe 20% of my coworkers were American. And this was a job that didn’t require a particularly high IQ. It required job-specific knowledge that could be taught. But why teach it when you can just bring it in?

Though discussion of immigration is typically discouraged here, feel free to discuss it as long as we can avoid talking about “racists!”, “treason!”, and “destroyers of civilization!”

When Governor Mark Sanford abandoned his job to win back his lover and destroy his family, I can’t say that I approved of that.

However, once the damage had been done and the smoke had cleared, I was actually sort of happy him that he went on to marry the mistress and found happiness (I’d assume) with the love of his life.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my happiness for him (to the extent that I cared about him) was entirely contingent on his never seeking public office again. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would even try. I mean, this is not only cheated on his wife and sabotaged his family, but he abandoned his post to make that happen. That makes him relatively unique among philandering politicians. You do that, and you’re done in public life as far as I’m concerned. No second acts. That’s the price you pay, which, considering the gravity of the transgression, is a relatively minor one.

So yeah, I’m a bit bothered that he’s now Congressman-elect Mark Sanford. That’s like Jim McGreevey becoming an Episcopal minister. Or a congressman. (Okay, McGreevey professional transgression, but whatever.) Except that apparently, the New York Episcopal Church has higher standards and rejected McGreevey for being “a jackass.” The South Carolina Republicans in CD1, and indeed CD1 as a whole, apparently, is not so strict.

Trailer parks could save us all, or at least solve the retiring baby boomer problem. It takes a lot to overcome the stigma, though, which creates detrimental cycles of ownership.

Google Fiber is causing traditional ISP’s to step up their game. Vermont has a plan. Though I have to say, of all the states for the federal government to throw stimulus money at for this project, Vermont does not strike me as the most worthwhile.

Amy Sullivan of the National Journal writes of the downsizing of the American Dream. James Fallows on why we should believe the illusion anyway.

A green building that eats smog.

I’ve mentioned niche online dating before. Apparently, Alex Jones is getting into the act. I’d love to know what the gender balance on that looks like.

Good guys with guns. It’s actually an interesting look at the psychology of the discussion. It’s more sympathetic to the pro-gun perspective, and I disagree with some of the conclusions, but I found it worth my time.

A look at the folks who have dropped out of the job market.

A great joke: If we really want to dismantle Al-Qaeda, we need only arrange for Yahoo to buy it. I was reminded of that joke when I read this.

The rationale behind child pornography being illegal is pretty rock-solid, though it’s possible the passive consumers of child pornography are not as dangerous as we thought.. Laws against pixie porn, on the other hand, is harder to justify.

CNet gives you a rundown how to get rid of The Soap Opera Effect. My father’s TV has that. It takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it with how nicely the non-HD stuff comes across on his Samsung compared to my Vizio.

Atheists and their relationship with god.

An inside look at fracking.

I always find it curious when I see an opportunity for a company to monetize that isn’t being taken advantage of.

Take email, for instance. Gmail offers free email. Yahoo offers the basics for free, though last I checked they charged for some of the “extra features” (ones that Gmail gives away for free, I should add). I’m honestly not sure what the current status of the service formerly known as Hotmail is.

I think that all of these services are leaving some potential money on the table.

One of the big things about the major services is that, because they are major and there are so few, it’s really quite hard for people to get the email address they want. Unless you have a really unusual name, chances are pretty good that the common versions of your name are taken. Nicknames, too. I was able to get “trumwill” but others, including nicknames that aren’t words, have been taken by people somewhere. My father has billhtruman at most of the major ones, but had to settle for billhtruman1942 for Google’s services, because there is another billhtruman out there (these are pseudonyms, people, in case you need reminding).

All of this is because every gmail account ends in gmail.com. Yahoo and Microsoft each have three options, so this thought is less useful to them. What I’m not sure about is why Gmail doesn’t have a ton of other options. Except, while Gmail is free, the others have a one-time fee. So dad could get billhtruman@notgmail.com and use that for his Google accounts.

I wouldn’t expect this to be a huge moneymaker, but it would cost next to nothing and when someone has the same username across other services, at least some people would be willing to pay for it.