In addition to having to get a new driver’s license and car registration, Queenland also has state safety inspections. It’s been a little while since I’ve had to contend with them,, and honestly it’s never been a problem when I have. Until now, anyway.

The Toyota had a problem with the exhaust pipe, which the inspector made a clean $400 off fixing. We could have gotten a second opinion, but we gave them the benefit of the doubt in part because they’re the only inspection station around here and such chores become surprisingly more difficult when you have a baby. And besides, the car is approaching twenty years old. We expect problems to occur.

The Forester had a more verifiable problem. Not long after we got it, we got a crack in the windshield. The crack has been growing in fits and starts ever since. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t affect visibility unless you count my ability to clearly see my front hood. The previous state that I lived in which required safety inspections only cared if it was in the line of sight, but Queenland apparently sees (haha, no pun intended) it differently.

This is not, strictly speaking, a matter of freedom. There are certainly negative externalities when it comes to unsafe cars on the road. If my visibility were obstructed, it would represent a hazard first and foremost to myself, but also to others. Acknowledged.

It reminded me of James K’s post on the price of safety at League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I recommend reading the whole thing. The comment thread runs 370 comments long and, alas, nothing gets resolved. Within the comments, Mr. Blue actually comments about auto inspections being an example of safety regulations unduly impacting the poor (oddly enough, relating back to when he failed inspection for a cracked windshield). He backs off it a bit as not being the best example, but I think it’s a great point. Especially in light of what I was tagged for.

Replacing the windshield was no real burden on my part. It was less than the exhaust repair. But it’s a pretty clear case of something where the danger to myself – much less others – was positively minimal. While $250 isn’t much for me, it is a significant burden for some people. All for access to the thing they need to make money to do things like repair cars with actual problems.

A fair number of accidents on the road may indeed be attributable to car malfunction, but that shouldn’t be the question. The question should be the extent to which an annual (or less) check of certain things reduces them to any significant degree. And whether each thing we are forcing people to address, in itself, would save lives. How many lives, and at what cost?

It’s worth noting that my stance here is not some right-field hyperlibertarian one. Officials in no less than Washington DC came to the same conclusion and chose to junk inspections altogether:

The District of Columbia recently decided that its periodic motor vehicle safety inspections were flab. Performed at a D.C. facility along with emissions tests, the safety checks were junked for an annual savings of about $400,000. In justifying the cut, the D.C. Council cited a lack of data proving periodic safety inspections save lives.

Safety advocates, who’ve worked to expand periodic safety inspections beyond the 19 states that still require them, worry that others will decide to rethink the cost. They acknowledge that the way crashes are reported makes good data hard to come by, but argue that the current economy makes it even more important to check that drivers are maintaining their vehicles.

“Safety inspections are particularly needed in hard economic times, because when you’re on a tight budget, you tend to skip the badly needed maintenance,” says Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Automotive Safety advocacy group.

Like a broken windshield that obscures my view of the front hood! More seriously, the only danger is that a crack is more likely to explode into something else in the event of a major accident. That’s not nothing, but the aggregate costs of these checks are enormous. To the extent that there are externalities to be addressed, there is already a venue to do so: insurance companies. An optional inspection for a cut on your insurance rate could price out the total costs quite easily. They’d certainly have an incentive to know how much that would save in lives and property damage.

Now, you might say “Ah-ha! Insurance companies favor inspections!” I don’t know that this is true, but I bet it is. Even if it is, though, why shouldn’t they? Even if it does absolutely no good, it doesn’t cost them a dime. Let them put their money where their mouth is, if this is important. They don’t even have to wait for a state to end auto inspections. Most states don’t presently have them.

Melinda Moyer talks kindergarten redshirting:

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that an estimated 9 percent of parents don’t send their 5-year-olds to kindergarten anymore. They wait a year so that their savvy 6-year-olds can better handle the curriculum. This so-called “academic redshirting,” a nod to the practice of keeping young athletes on the bench until they are bigger and more skilled, is highly controversial. The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists and the National Association for the Education of Young Children fiercely oppose it, saying that redshirting “labels children as failures at the outset of their school experience.” Studies that have evaluated how well redshirted kids fare compared to their schooled-on-time peers conclude that redshirting provides no long-term academic or social advantages and can even put kids at a disadvantage.

The practice has become even more controversial in recent years over claims that some parents do it for the wrong reasons: They redshirt their kids not because their kids aren’t ready for school, but because, in the age of parenting as competitive sport, holding them out might give them an academic, social, and athletic edge over their peers. If little Delia is the star of kindergarten, they scheme, maybe she’ll ride the wave all the way to Harvard. Gaming the system this way, of course, puts other kids at a disadvantage.

I like to say that I failed Pre-K. The truth is that I was held back. Which was a bit confusing at the time, since my peers were going on to kindergarten while I wasn’t. It’s also the case that while I was academically held back, in most kiddie sports leagues I was not. So my sports teammates were one set of kids, while having another set in school.

The only exception to that was after I “retired” and was brought back, movie-style, when a team needed a player. So I was one of the oldest kids out there. It was, not coincidentally, the only year I made the league allstar team. Which may or may not be instructive. It was definitely to my advantage when I was the oldest kid, and my disadvantage when I was one of the youngest. I fixate on baseball because that’s where it was particularly pronounced. The allstar year, I was at the top of a two year age bracket* and even apart from my waived year, my batting average was reflective of whether I was on the upper grade or lower grade of the bracket.

Scholastically? I’m not sure whether it helped much or not. My graders in school were pretty lousy starting at around the third grade and ending in the sixth. The grades were okay before that, and good after that. Would it have been worse if I was a grade ahead? I’m not sure how much of a difference it made for me. My grades were largely a product of effort (or lack thereof).

It’s a tad frustrating to think of parents holding kids back for positional reasons.

If all this makes you think redshirting is a really bad idea, you’re not alone. Many articles, including a piece published here at Slate and a 2011 New York Times op-ed titled “Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril,” have deftly argued against the practice. Others point out that redshirting could be bad on a societal level, too: When lots of kids in school are redshirted, parents demand a more advanced curriculum—they often “argue that they have invested in a child’s education, and the school must now individualize to meet a 6-year-old’s needs,” says Beth Graue, a curriculum and instruction expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Education Research—and this could create a vicious cycle making kindergarten more and more challenging, encouraging more and more redshirting. And when redshirting is common, it can put young low-income children at a disadvantage, because these kids may not be ready for the curriculum, yet their parents often can’t afford to pay for an extra year of preschool.

It also may be ineffective:

Other research suggests that redshirted kids are less motivated and engaged than their younger peers in high school and that they are more likely to require special education services. And in a 2008 review, David Deming, an economist of education at Harvard University, and Susan Dynarski, an education and public policy expert at the University of Michigan, concluded that redshirted kids also tend to have lower IQs and earnings as adults. This latter finding is probably linked to the fact that redshirted teens are more likely to drop out of high school than non-redshirted teens. Redshirted kids tend to have lower lifetime earnings, too, because they enter the labor force a year later.

Given that boredom was an issue for me, maybe I would have done better. I do think I would have done better in honors classes than I did in regular for that reason.

As the article goes on to note, though, redshirted kids aren’t a random sample. I was held back because I was a borderline performer with learning issues. And so you would expect there to be more of such kids in special ed. I am sympathetic to the follow-up argument that often redshirting is a misdiagnosis and on that basis alone may do more harm than good.

* – The leagues were two grades, but the teams were one and elevated together. Meaning that 7th and 8th grade was the Tiger League, but the team I elevated with was full of seventh graders and me and a few other holdbacks. The next year almost all of the team was 8th graders but I was in the seventh and we were playing against 7th grade teams as well. The allstar year, I was old enough to be in the 9th grade, but was in the 8th grade and was playing against 7th and 8th graders. It was the only time I really had the age advantage.

Veterans are having problems with fake service dogs and people believing their service dogs are fake.

Millions of years ago, the west coast was further east. Sort of. Interesting maps.

Kaiser tests new medical technology at a fake hospital.

Mermaids in Texas.

Anti-bullying efforts may lead to more bullying. Why? Bullies know what teachers are looking out for. The identification of an increasing array of behavior as bullying may also be playing a role. “Jimmy’s being a bully. He won’t loan me his pencil and he has two.” (Yes, that happened.)

Childhood bullying has lasting effects. They’re more likely to grow up to be troubled adults. (Or alternately, people who are troubled are more likely to be bullied. Kids can certainly smell vulnerability.)

Theodore Johnson has a good look at Harvard Extension School, and what it means.

These jetpacks look a lot more cumbersome than what we were told to expect.

The Columbia Journalism Review asks if copyright law is working
. Their answer is “not exactly.”

In case you wanted to know what a $300,000 house in China, there ya go. And here is a look at China’s vertical city.

The situation with China’s ghost cities may not be as bad as they appear.

Jerry Kill missed his first full game due to another seizure.

The traditional model is that kids hear lectures in the classroom and do homework at home. Maybe we have it backwards.

I don’t feel so bad frequently citing articles from the Atlantic. Their readers – or their commenters, anyway – are the most intelligent of all! Unless you count Ordinary Times, which scored higher.

The NSA has tried and failed to de-anonymize Tor. Linux godfather Linus Torvalds confirms/denies that the US government approached him about a backdoor to Linux.

Here is what we thought Earth looked like from space, before we actually saw what Earth looked like from space.

Germany’s latest export? Grandmothers.

The French are an unhappy people.

The new IPCC Climate report hat-tips geoengineering. A Texas plant is on it.

The only reason I care about Blackberry possibly selling out to Google or Samsung is the foolish hope that one of them will release a good productivity smartphone.

Increasing distance from Deseret has lead to a greater appreciation for the LDS Church. But then they start talking like this.

An interesting rundown on the progress of women in Utah. I tagged this for reference sake and maybe a future post, but thought I would share it.

Daniel H Bowen and Collin Hitt respond to the recent Amanda Ripley piece on school athletics, arguing that it is actually a good thing. Honestly, I think they might have the better argument, at least for some kids. I remember athletes who couldn’t be bothered to show respect for anybody but their coaches.

David Williams argues that companies should strive to fill their ranks with athletes.

Matt Walsh, a blogger and radio personality, wrote a piece about parenthood that is getting some traction among people I know:

[H]er kid bumped into a display and knocked a bunch of stuff onto the ground. I started to help pick it all up, but she said she wanted her son to do it because he’s the one who made the mess. Touché, madam. Nicely played. A lot of people would buckle under the pressure of having sonny going psycho in aisle 7, while, seemingly, the whole world stops to gawk and scrutinize, but this lady stayed cool and composed. It was an inspiring performance, and it’s too bad you missed the point because your feeble mind can only calculate the equation this way: misbehaving child = BAD PARENT.

I’m no math major, but that calculus makes no sense. A kid going berserk at a grocery store doesn’t indicate the quality of his parents, anymore than a guy getting pneumonia after he spends six hours naked in the snow indicates the quality of his doctor. Grocery stores are designed to send children into crying fits. All of the sugary food, the bright packaging, the toys, the candy — it’s a minefield. The occasional meltdown is unavoidable, the real test is how you deal with it. This mother handled it like a pro. She was like mom-ninja; she was calm and poised, but stern and in command.

My views are in-line with Walsh’s here. As long as I cannot readily identify something that the parents are doing wrong, or did wrong, I tend to be pretty forgiving. Thss was true before I had kids, but is especially true now. Lain has been a little darling and we haven’t had any incidents of uncontrolled crying, so it’s not that. Rather, it’s that I am reminded daily how un-malleable they are at a young age. We haven’t had that not because we’re awesome parents, but because we have a remarkably peaceable kid. We may not be so lucky next time.

Due partially to my own background, I would much rather have to deal with a crying kid than have the parents cave in to the crying kid. One is an inconvenience at the moment. The other is Everything That Is Wrong With Contemporary Society (if I may be a tad hyperbolic). I remember an incident many years ago where a father and son had I guess established a protocol that when they refilled the gas tank, they’d go in and he could get a cheap candy. They walked in, the father said to pick something from the cheapest section. The kid – in this case, we’re talking late grade school – blew a gasket. “I don’t want those candies. There’s hardly nuthin’ in’em. There’s hardly nuthin’ in’em! The father tried to explain or negotiate, but the kid took on one of the most irritating whining voices I have ever heard. The father grabbed the kid and marched him out of the store. The sound of that kid still haunts me, but it was worth it just to see what the father did.

Now that story isn’t entirely on-point, because it is an older kid than what we’re talking about, I think. Also, because the father could leave. He didn’t need to be there.

One of the subchapters in What To Expect When No One’s Expecting involved the conflicts between parents and non-parents in areas where there are high concentrations of the childfree. He chose particularly egregious comments and statements that made the childfree seem quite entitled (“I shouldn’t have to put my dog on a leash, you should have to put your child on one” and the like) but these were particularly gross examples of comments I have heard over the years. By way of example, Megan McArdle argued a couple years ago that people with young children shouldn’t fly.

It was not an argument that was well-received among parents. I wasn’t a parent yet, but I objected to it, too. In part because I knew then that we would fly our baby around repeatedly. Theoretically, flying is not something somebody has to do, like shopping. But once-in-a-lifetime opportunities would have been lost if we hadn’t. That, to me, trumps McArdle’s right to a baby-free flight. Clancy was tired and exhausted, but nonetheless played with the baby nonstop on a leg where she was particularly grumpy. I’ve seen parents do less, and parents show a pretty blatant disregard for their crying child.

There are also cases where taking children somewhere is almost entirely optional. Being a parent means, among other things, that you don’t get to do everything that you got to do before. Or if you do them, it’s with the understanding that you may have to stop at any point. Clancy and I have made the point to ourselves, several times, that any time we go out to eat and take the baby with us, we will have to be prepared for an early ejection or to eat in shifts while the other one walks her around.

Outside of that, though, kid will cry. It’s one of the prices we pay for the fact that they will also be chipping in for your retirement.

With a little more effort and brains, this dog could pass for a cat.

Pseudonymity is under seige. Which is good, in many ways. The proposed New York law not-so-much.

Are we going to smartphone optricians out of the job? I suspect they will be helpful tools for deciding when we need to go to the eye doc, but I also think that we still won’t get by without our annual visits.

Like horses? Thank merchants. Okay, that’s not quite right, but as with so many other things, people had a great deal to do with them becoming what they are.

An organization offered inmates in solitary confinement a chance to request images from the outside world. Here are the results. #10 is just awesome.

Amanda Ripley makes the case against high school sports. This is one of the many beauties of school choice, of course. Charter schools very often lack such distractions.

Some community colleges are apparently unclear on the concept of community college. Hint: It doesn’t include posh dorms.

According to Alex Knapp, we’re good here on Earth for a while. The article goes beyond that, though, talking about life-supporting potential elsewhere which has been a subject on which I am (a) fascinated and (b) hopelessly ignorant.

My third novel, written in 2002, is alas already dated. In part because it is steeped in music from a previous era. I may track down an excerpt for future posting. Anyway, I was thinking of that when I read this article by Steven Hyden arguing that Counting Crows’ August and Everything After is actually as relevant or more as is Nirvana’s In Utero. As someone who was into Counting Crows but not Nirvana, I approve.

Nobody worries about missing when it comes to public toilets, of course. We can always just flush with our feet.

Matthew O’Brien looks at which states have recovered from the Great Recession and which ones won’t until 2018. Also, cities.

The notion of learning styles is getting some pushback.

The Earth isn’t flat. Maybe the universe isn’t flat, either.

The story of “Taiwan’s Holocaust.”

Robert Charette laments that Alabama QB AJ McCarron cannot be paid for his services, while his girlfriend Katherine Webb is getting paid for being his girlfriend. Errr, that didn’t come out right. Let me try again. Webb is a former Miss Alabama and the girlfriend of Bama QB AJ McCarron. Due partly to being Miss Alabama but mostly to being McCarron’s girlfriend when Bama was playing for the championship, Webb has gotten all sorts of endorsement deals. Endorsement deals that McCarron himself cannot take due to NCAA violations.

Which sounds ridiculous when you think about it that way. Why should Webb be allowed to profit off Bama football (indirectly) while McCarron can’t? While it’s true that Webb is only making (most of) the money she is because of her indirect association with Alabama football, we only know who AJ McCarron is because of same. Webb and McCarron both became known due to Alabama football.

Quick, who was the winner of the World League of American Football’s MVP award in 1991? Stan Gelbaugh. That same year, Desmond Howard won the Heisman. Gelbaugh was almost certainly the better player between the two. But no one really cares because he played for the London Monarchs in the WLAF while Howard played for Michigan in the NCAA. McCarron could be the best player of all time for a minor league Tuscaloosa Talons teams and would get no more attention than Stan Gelbaugh of the Monarchs. He’d get less attention, actually, because at least the WLAF had a TV deal.

Now, if Webb and McCarron both became known due to Alabama athletics, you could argue that McCarron should be able to get the same sort of endorsement deals that Webb does. My primary objection to such is that it would be rife with corruption. More corruption than we are presently seeing. But as a matter of fairness, we should point out that McCarron is getting a college education and 100,000 screaming fans week in and week out, while Webb is getting a few ads on TV. And as soon as he graduates, McCarron will be able to get TV ads, too, even if he doesn’t make it to the NFL.

Of course, some players have just found out that they are getting a bona fide check:

The case, which began more than four years ago, is focused on the rights of colleges athletes, how their likenesses are used — particularly in video games and broadcasts — and whether they should be paid.

The settlement by the other parties, if approved by the judge, indicates that the N.C.A.A. will probably be alone in defending itself.

“We have asked for, but have not yet received, the terms” of the settlement, said Donald Remy, the N.C.A.A.’s chief legal officer, “so we cannot comment further.”

Michael Hausfeld, a lawyer for the athletes, declined to discuss the settlement terms but said it would not be an “unreasonable inference” to conclude that the student-athletes might now have the support of E.A. Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Company, which handles rights licensing for many universities.

Hausfeld also said he did not believe the settlement “changes the mind-set of the N.C.A.A.”

Payout is likely to be minimal on a per-player basis. The important part is that they are more likely to get cooperation, and unlikely to get opposition, from EA Sports in their big lawsuit against the NCAA.

EA Sports screwed up and there is documentation that even the NCAA athletic directors were uncomfortable with what they were doing. EA Sports will no longer be doing an NCAA Football game. I can’t imagine that there would be no game at all going forward, but it may be the case that they go a few years without while everybody figures out what they can and cannot do.

The “pay the players” movement has been gaining steam in recent months. It was starting to sound like the big name college programs themselves were in favor of it. Which actually made sense because they can afford it and if they can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the lesser programs, they can make a killing by instituting a real playoff without the controversy of Boise States and such. I’m not sure what happened, though, but something changed.

The players themselves have started All Players United, which is geared towards a vague set of goals that would ideally (for them) include compensation. I have my reservations about that, though it’s hard to argue against some of the other things.

-{This was originally posted at Ordinary Times. As this post involves immigration and such, and since the previous prohibition on discussing race and immigration has been cautiously lifted when on-topic, those subjects are obviously not off-limits. I do ask that they be approached with some care.}-

Sometimes it seems as though live in two realities. Well, one reality, at a fork in the road, leading to two opposite futures. Earth 1 faces a future that is heavily automated. So automated, in fact, that we cannot realistically find enough self-supporting work for everybody. Not that there wouldn’t be things for people to do in exchange for money, but the market wages they get would be insufficient to be able to afford a lifestyle that we would consider to be respectable and reasonable. It is because of this that I sometimes think we need to divorce the notion of work and self-sufficiency. That, even if “the 53%” statistic wasn’t deeply misleading, it would be a blinkered way to look at it so long as we assume that most the remaining 47% were working, had retired from a lifetime of work, or were on the road to working. If there are more people than market-adding places to put them, I simply can’t view people as the problem. (more…)

Some countries like to relax. Some either don’t or don’t have a choice. Here’s a map and a graph. Check out Mexico and Greece, both often associated with laziness. Greece in particular is interesting. They retire young, but work like heck.

USA! USA! We’re the best place in the world to be an entrepreneur, according to some metrics.

It reminds me of the Grunions invasion from Beverly Hillbillies, but Jellyfish are invading and it looks like it could be something serious. It seems weird to me that this could be such an intractable menace.

The Cranky Flier defends the unbundled airline structure one week, then proposes how we should rebundle the next.

According to this, money is more important than intact families when it comes to sending your kids to college, but poverty matters less than family structure in keeping your kids out of prison.

I used to think that in the past, roommates were more common than they are today. Not so? It would be helpful if the article differentiated more between premarital cohabitation and having roommates, though.

The Republicans may be re-evaluating their view on taxes. Good, says Conn Carroll.

One university has had some success by paying smart students to help struggling ones.

One of the knocks against charter schools is that they push out poor-performing students. Not so, says a recent study.

One of the reservations I have about unlimited H1-B visas is that they will be used in lieu of training domestic personnel. According to Heather Rolfe, that isn’t the case in the UK.

One of the advantages of having assigned schools is supposed to be that your kids are sent to a local high school. That may not be the case much longer in NYC.

Chad Alderman explains the results of a recent study suggesting that green TFA teachers are outperforming veteran College of Education products.