Charles Lane argues that we should have fewer elections, for Democracy’s sake:

One of political science’s better-established findings is that “the frequency of elections has a strongly negative influence on turnout,” as Arend Lijphart of the University of California at San Diego put it in a 1997 article.

Yet in the United States, we constantly hold elections: Every two years, we elect a new Congress and, in many states, a new legislature. Every four years, that’s combined with a presidential election. Some jurisdictions squeeze local balloting — for sheriff, school board, judge, coroner, you name it — into the years between midterm congressional and presidential elections. Of course, these are often twice-a-year exercises, since a primary precedes the general election. Sometimes primaries have runoffs!

The United States and Switzerland don’t have much in common, but they both have (a) frequent elections, with Switzerland holding at least three or four national votes per year, in addition to cantonal elections, and (b) relatively low voter turnout. A mere 49.1 percent of registered Swiss voters cast ballots in the 2011 national parliamentary elections.

First, I believe there is some truth to this. For instance, we have far too many elected officials. First off, we elect judges when we really shouldn’t. But whether we think judges should be elected or not, for a lot of urban voters it overstuffs the ballots considerably. When I lived in Colosse, there were over 300 judgeships, and while their elections were staggered over time, there were still scores of them every single election. When I first voted at 18, I read up on every single race. But political nerd that I am, that didn’t hold up after the first few elections. I would vote straight-ticket Democrat on the basis that Colosse County was Republican and any Republican judge close enough for my vote to matter was probably a lousy judge. (Colosse County is now not so red, so I don’t know what I would do.) There are also multiple executive positions at every level of government, many of which probably don’t need to be independently elected. I also question the city/county distinction and believe that as often as not we should merge those governments.

It’s also true that we have too many election days. This includes bond elections, periodic recalls, and special elections to fill vacancies. It seems reasonable to me that we should be able to reduce elections to an annual affair without too much of a problem. There may be some emergency bond election that may not be able to wait until November, and I think provisions can be made for those such as requiring turnout thresholds. If you can’t get more than 30% of voters to show up to vote for it, it can’t be all-important. I am not a fan of recall elections generally, but absent something impeachment-worthy (where impreachment is a possibility) the solution is to work it so they’re up for election the next November along with whatever other elections are being held. And I believe we can – and should – restructure how we handle succession in case of a death or retirement. I also support IRV to avoid runoffs (and hell, maybe do away with primaries).

Beyond that, though, I believe that holding national elections every four years – and only every four years – is a terrible idea. I don’t believe that it’s too much to ask voters to come out once a year. I’m open to “voting week” instead of “voting day” if that’s the hangup, despite my general skepticism of excessive early voting opportunities. And voters who can’t be bothered to vote once every two years don’t especially deserve to have their voices heard. This may create some discomfort at the national level with the “two electorate problems” but canceling elections is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Realignment is constantly shifting, and the situation will resolve itself at some point. I prefer both the voter feedback that midterms can provide, as well as having different elections devoted primarily to different levels of governments. While the US may be a bit of an outlier when it comes to the sheer number of elections we have, in parliamentary federal republics provincial elections often do not align with national elections (and shouldn’t).

If I were in charge, we’d have election week every November basically going presidential-local-gubernatorial-local. It wouldn’t be strictly federal-local-state-local since legislator elections at the state and federal level should still be staggered, but that does have the advantage of boosting turnout somewhat while also allowing the focus on elections to be more federal some years and state the others. I’m not reflexively against having state elections on odd years and avoiding that, though presidential-gubernatorial-local/congressional-local/gubernatorial lacks elegance and I’d need to look up how it affects turnout in odd-year states (Louisiana/Jersey/Virginia).

The current system is messy, and apart from certain electoral advantages I can understand the impulse behind deciding that policy should be decided (perhaps even at all levels) on very periodic elections but where most people show up, but I would prefer that be balanced with tighter feedback and a bit of separation between state election years and federal ones where the issues are often different. By all means, we should look at reducing the number of elections we have, but within limits.

This is pretty wild.

I remember when I first saw the Final Fantasy movie, and how amazing it looked. It actually still looks pretty good at points, though at others it doesn’t.

I was really excited to see that they did an update to Appleseed, which was one of my favorite anime productions back in the day. I was pretty disappointed when I saw that it was crappy CG. Crappy CG is worse than all but the worst animation. Trying and failing miserably (to be realistic, in this case) is way worse than kind of taking something that’s not meant to look real. And attempts to merge the two continue to look odd.

On the other hand, if they can get it to look consistently as good as the above, that would indeed be pretty fantastic. Of course, advances in CG have revealed how silly the physics of regular movies are, and this could have some unfortunate biproducts, too. Indeed, it’s the advances in how CG look that make the movements in Appleseed look so bad.

Anyway, here’s the animated Appleseed:

And the newer one:

What to do about the liberal bias in social psychology? Piercarlo Valdesolo argues that neutrality of perspective, and not equality of perspective, should win out.

A look at the cisterns of San Francisco, and a cave in Georgia (the other Georgia) so big it has its own Subway.

Gundam/Voltron is happening!

Martin Robbins is worried about sexism and racism on future Martian colonies.

Snake People are having fewer sexual partners than Generation Xers. Good for them, I say.

Peter Schellhase discusses the conservative vision of Hayao Miyazaki.

Nancy Cook writes about rural planning in the ag sector.

The oil slump has hit the petroleum engineering community hard. My Man in Texas says that this is a mistake, because they’re going to be needed.

Scott Sumner gives us an update on the Sunbelt.

It’s good that you went to college and all, and hey it’s great that you went to an Ivy League school, but maybe you need some vocational training.

Warning: In this post, I’m going to use something that somebody said in order to make a point that I would have tried to make even if I couldn’t find anybody who said it.

Four years ago, at around the time that Scott Walker was doing what he did to public employee unions that made himself famous, Doug Mataconis wrote a critique of public employee unions to which I’m largely sympathetic. But Mataconis ends with this almost throwaway sentence:

The party is over guys, and your days of feeding off the government trough are coming to an end.

My problem with that statement is that it’s unnecessarily confrontational and a goad to anyone who sees the issue differently to knock the chip off his shoulder. As a public employee who for a long time thought he was in a public employee union* and who works with other public employees, most of whom are in said union, I’ve heard enough complaints about how those who oppose public employee unions don’t care about the workers and are trying just to demonize the mostly minority employees who make up the bulk of public employees.

I’m not well-versed in the rhetoric of those who oppose public employee unions. But it seems hard to find one, especially if he or she holds elective office, who doesn’t choose to demonize public employees in some way while opposing such unions. Too few people maintain that it’s possible such unions represent mostly hardworking, well-intentioned people, and yet those unions just don’t function well for the state, for taxpayers, or for people who rely on the services provided by those employees. (Yes, I know some public employees who seem to just phone it in, and that’s a pretty big problem. But it’s not the sum total of the problem.)

Again, I’m tone trolling Mataconis’s piece. The rest of his article makes mostly an argument about why such unions can present a problem, and that argument and similar arguments need to be part of the discussion. But if those who oppose public unions wish to garner more widespread support and not appear to be merely partisan hacks, they should make the case on the merits and shy away from the “government trough” language.

*I got very mixed messages as to whether I was in the union. When I finally got up the courage to formally rescind my union authorization card (Sangamon is a card check state for public employees), I was informed that I wasn’t in the bargaining unit anyway, even though the union let me vote on the contract back when it was up for consideration. Fortunately, the union had never deducted dues, but I had walked out with it when it did a short strike, and in retrospect, doing so without being in the bargaining unit put me in danger of being fired. I shouldn’t have walked out anyway since I didn’t agree with the union, but I didn’t want to be “that guy” who scabbed.

The thing is, if smoking is to remain legal, smokers need to be able to smoke somewhere. We’re not going to effectively ban it in a giant game of process-of-elimination.

The thing is, if Australian officials can’t actually be expected to look at every game that’s released, the best solution is not “well, then, games just won’t be released.”

Even critics of the Confederate Flag are rolling their eyes at the removing of Dukes of Hazzard from TV, but Tommy Christopher argues that – even though Dukes of Hazzard actually had more black characters than did Friends – it’s actually complicated. Made more so, in my view, that I’m not sure anything legitimized the use of the flag among my generation as much as that TV show did. I’m personally hoping that this spurs A&E to do a reboot with a couple good ole boy weed-couriers driving a car sporting a new design.

The headline says it all: Woman gives birth, fights off bees, starts wildfire in Northern California

A man in Texas says “Fuck that alligator,” gets eaten by alligator. The death was avenged, however.

I’m not saying this is okay, but I will say that people have died in fights over dumber things.

Man, I did not need to see this so soon before our three-legged flight to Alaska.

Is Puerto Rico’s debt crisis about to cause a mass exodus?

BBC explains how you dismantle a nuclear submarine.

James Poulos argues that Silicon Valley and the Pentagon should team up to colonize space.

Residents of Beijing are fleeing the pollution.

A study from BYU looks at the happiness in marriage and divorce, and has some interesting findings, among them that the trajectory from happiness to unhappiness in divorce is not as gradual as many of us assume.

That time when Ray Bradbury was lectured that he didn’t understand his own book, and five other misunderstood books.

A few weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Thinkpad T520. One that was $100 below the price point of purchasing one. So what the hell. It didn’t have an SSD hard drive, so I went ahead and ordered one. Everything else was just right.

The funny thing is, when it arrived it did have an SSD hard drive. Weird, right? It also had the wrong version of Windows, Home Premium instead of Home Basic. A win! Then I looked at the corner of the screen bezel to see if it was a W520 or a T520 (I couldn’t remember which I’d ordered), and I saw it was a… T510. I looked to make sure that it had the 8GB of RAM, and while it did I noticed that it had an i5 rather than an i7 processor.

So… I must have gotten the wrong computer. Truth be told, the specs were kind of a wash. Better OS and better HD, worse model number and processor. Should I say anything? I decided to go ahead and contact the seller. Maybe I could get them to knock off $25 or something from the price. Or maybe he needed to know that he had sent my computer out to someone else. And if I were the seller, I’d want to know.

I got a very, very panicked response in a few minutes. He asked me to send the computer back and he’d throw in an extra hard drive with the right computer. For a few reasons, namely that working out the timeline in my head the computer would not be arriving until after a trip we’re taking later in the month, I didn’t want to do that. I wrote back saying that I either wanted to buy the computer he sent me, or if he’d sold it someone else, I would prefer to just get my money back.

I admit that I pressed my advantage a little bit because I knew he was panicked. At the same time, I told him that as long as we came to a satisfactory resolution, he wouldn’t get a negative review. It was obviously an honest mistake. It was also apparent that English was not his first language, and I have a real soft spot for immigrant entrepreneurs. We haggled a bit over the price of the machine that I’d been sent. He looked up other T510’s and saw that they were selling for about $175 less than I’d purchased. But, he pointed out, I’d gotten a better hard drive than is in most of those machines. So we added the cost of the hard drive upgrade and that was that. I could have pressed harder (considering that he’d offered me a new hard drive!), but I also could have mentioned that some of the specs on the machine were unusually good (specifically, the 1920×1080 resolution) and that was worth more to me than the hard drive.

The end result is that it was a pretty good deal all around. I would have paid the T520 price for the T510, but instead got it for $120 less than I was willing to pay. He, on the other hand, did not get a negative review and I suspect would have been willing to sell it to me for the $175 discount if I’d pushed him on it.

A little while ago, Cameron Crowe took some heat for casting Emma Stone in a role for a character with a Vietnamese name. In his (non-apology) apology, he wrote:

Thank you so much for all the impassioned comments regarding the casting of the wonderful Emma Stone in the part of Allison Ng. I have heard your words and your disappointment, and I offer you a heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice. As far back as 2007, Captain Allison Ng was written to be a super-proud ¼ Hawaiian who was frustrated that, by all outward appearances, she looked nothing like one. A half-Chinese father was meant to show the surprising mix of cultures often prevalent in Hawaii. Extremely proud of her unlikely heritage, she feels personally compelled to over-explain every chance she gets. The character was based on a real-life, red-headed local who did just that.

From the start of this “controversy” I had wondered if this was the case. That the fact that she didn’t look Asian was built in to the character. Since it is, that makes casting a non-Asian actor very appropriate. Which lets Cameron Crowe off the book, at least as far as I am concerned. You could ask “Well, why doesn’t Crowe change the character to match our preferred casting.” Which itself might be reasonable, if the story would be better that way. Maybe so. Haven’t seen it.

This drags us a bit into how frustrating these sorts of conversations almost always are. People point out something that looks like an example of racism or sexism. Defenders say “Hey, sometimes things work out that way.” And sometimes, as in this case, they can actually point to particular circumstances that do justify otherwise awkward casting. Or justify a fifty-seven year old actor with a 20-something female love interest. Or an all-white cast. Or any number of things. Which brings us to Maggie Gyllenhaal:

Maggie Gyllenhaal recently lost a film role because she was apparently “too old” to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man, the 37-year-old actress revealed in a new interview with The Wrap.

“There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time,” Gyllenhall said. “I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me.”

While she declined to identify the project’s name—because Gyllenhall is all class—she said she was eventually able to laugh off the rejection.

“It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”

It’s hard to assess whether this decision was appropriate to the story or not, without knowing what the story was. There are times when it might indeed be appropriate to cast two characters of differing ages. I mean, it wouldn’t have quite worked if Mrs Robinson had been the same age as Ben Braddock in The Graduate (though, notably, Mrs Robinson is not who the Ben Braddock ended up with). And with any single example, a decision can be justified. It’s when the decisions create a pattern that the complaints take on significance, and even if every single instance can be justified because that’s sometimes how things happen, patterns should not be ignored.

Now, the answer to this could be “That’s just capitalism, baby!” Which is the answer you usually hear when the pattern is pointed out. Or when people complain about the lack of minorities, female leading parts, or whatnot. (It’s certainly something I hear whenever I talk about how TV shows overwhelmingly take place in a handful of places, or Trumwill’s Law.) And depending on the subject, I sometimes believe it’s true (and other times believe it’s mostly a product of the creators being white, male, urbanite, liberal, etc.)

In the case of racial casting, though, and the sexism/ageism thing, it’s not entirely clear to me whether it’s capitalism or not. I mean, I’m inclined to say “Not entirely” on the first and “Mostly” on the second. That’s guessing, and I think the impetus should be on Hollywood to better demonstrate that it’s not actually them because I have a general suspicion. But whether it’s Hollywood or Hollywood pointing a mirror back at the paying public, it is worth talking about and I believe a lot of people are entirely too dismissive.

I got some old Sesame Street shows on video. They come with a disclaimer. Here’s the story on that. (Oscar the Grouch being orange was weird to see.)

Speaking of Sesame Street, is it responsible for the gentrification of Brooklyn?

This is, indeed, some pretty impressive photoshopping work. Beautiful of horrifying at the same time.

Now that’s a state slogan: You can die on Mars, or you can live in South Dakota.

Sometimes being smart can help you be much more impressively unwise.

If you think that alpha males and hypergamy are a problem today, it was way worse 8,000 years ago.

In his argument against raising the minimum wage, Reihan Salam makes a point that I have in the past: The appropriate minimum wage for Massachusetts is probably not the appropriate minimum wage for Mississippi (even if we assume the same value system).

For a nation that consumes so little electricity, North Korea is evidently an ecological disaster.

Some Alabamians are saddled with such court costs that they end up committing crimes to pay for them.

The biggest lab diagnostic company in the country is about to let patients bypass doctors and order tests on their own.

How Superman kicked the KKK’s butt.

New Coke was easily the biggest fiasco in soft drink history. Despite its infamy – or perhaps even because of it – I’m surprised they never tried a re-release. I bet a lot of people would love to get another chance to try it and see if it was as bad as remembered/advertised.

Some teenagers designed a movable village of tiny houses for the homeless.

The coolest one of this list of eight celebrities criticizing Nashville Country is Merle Haggard’s: “Too much boogie boogie wham-bam and not enough substance.”

It’s easier to live with less when you have more.

I used to think being gay was wrong. I supposed that if you asked me, I would have said “being gay” wasn’t wrong, but “choosing to live as a gay person” was. I’m not sure I made that distinction at the time. I also thought it was appropriate for the state to encode its objection against homosexuality in its laws. While I probably would not have supported outlawing gay sex or instituting/continuing a formal program against gays, I believed the state shouldn’t offer any protections to gay people as gay people.

For example: In 1992 (I was 18 then), Cibolia had an amendment up for consideration by voters that would have invalidated then existing civil rights protections for gay people. These were laws that Danvar and a couple other cities had adopted to forbid discrimination in housing, hiring, and other practices based on sexual orientation. I supported that amendment, not so much because I bought into the “special rights” argument that amendment supporters invoked. I supported it because I thought such anti-discrimination laws meant the state “legitimized” and therefore implicitly recognized that being gay was acceptable. (For the record, the amendment passed and was overturned by the US Supreme Court 4 years later, the first of a string of decisions written by Justice Kennedy that led to Obergefell.)

My views then made up an almost textbook case of “bigoted position.” I can see that now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t see that then. It took me a long time to change my mind on such issues.

The principal reasons I changed my mind were the following, in descending order of importance:

1. I noticed a pretty strong disjuncture between the Lockean idea of consent of the governed and the need for civil liberties with laws restricting gay rights.

2. As I grew up and from a variety of personal experiences and revelations, I came to have more empathy for gay persons.

3. Gay rights activists forced me to try to justify and rethink my position.

No. 3 was in last place for a reason, and in my opinion, was the least important for my conversion. My anti-gay views at the time certainly had a hearing at Cibolia State University, but it was a minority view there. I don’t think I ever voiced it, in part because the pro-gay rights position, as I heard it, was of the shaming sort, similar to what we find in Sam Wilkinson’s post Over There. It wasn’t uncommon to hear any objection to gay rights be answered with “why are you insecure about your sexuality?” or with a lecture about how Ancient Greeks thought homosexuality was good, so we should, too.

One thing the activists accomplished, however, was to compel me to justify, at least to myself, why I opposed gay rights. The stark reasons I mention in the first paragraph of this post solidified as my own answers to activists’ positions. As later events challenged and undermined those reasons, I began to see them as I see them now, as bigoted positions.

Perhaps my position would have changed sooner if the activists had tried to engage people like me more empathetically than they did. Perhaps not. But I realize that the goal of such activism isn’t necessarily to change my or anyone else’s mind or to honor my position on the matter. It could be to rally those who already agree, or to marginalize a certain position as bigoted or beyond the pale. In 1992, it was probably as much of a defensive posture as anything. Matthew Sheppard’s murder still hadn’t happened yet. And not only was Cibolia State University very close to where the murder would happen, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be gay or to support gay rights despite what seemed to me at the time to be the majority pro-gay rights view. There was one story  of a person wearing a “straight but not narrow” button being physically assaulted, assuming I’m remembering things right.

Even now, in 2015, the righteous, crusading, vengeful tone we see in Sam’s post is probably not wholly about righteousness, crusading, and vengeance. It’s still probably not safe to be openly gay, regardless of what the Supreme Court says about the right to marry. Still, perhaps that tone ill serves the cause, as several on that thread, including Will and Mr. Blue from Hitcoffee, have tried to note there.

As most people here probably know, Mr. Obama has proposed changing overtime regulations so that more people will be covered. Megan McArdle’s critique of this proposal is, as usual, well-spoken and in my opinion mostly spot-on. But she unfortunately neglects and seems to assume away one of the arguments in favor of Mr. Obama’s proposal.

McArdle points out that changing the overtime requirements to include erstwhile exempt employees would encourage employers to more closely monitor those employees’ hours. For people like her–and like me, who in my current job is exempt–that would work as an intrusion, assuming it would apply to us at all. (Other than snippets from the news and internet, I’m not sure on the specifics of Mr. Obama’s proposal. But I think she and I would still be exempt, even though I, for one, earn less than the $50K+ threshold of the proposed regulations.)

But here is where she errs:

I have a vague idea of what it would be like to manage a Chipotle, in that I can probably specify the major duties involved, like ordering stuff and training workers. But I have no idea what that manager’s biggest day-to-day challenge is, what it takes to do the job well, what he enjoys about his work and what he doesn’t, where she’s hoping to get and what she’s willing to do to get there.

You know who knows that? The manager and the manager’s boss: the people who are currently agreeing to the terms of employment. The administration is proposing to overrule their judgment and force overtime restrictions onto them. But if I asked that Chipotle manager whether he wants the possibility of overtime pay and the certainty of clock-punching that comes with it, he might give an answer quite a bit like my own — all about why his job, like mine, shouldn’t fall under those rigid external rules.

The error isn’t necessarily in what McArdle suggests about the manager and his/her boss knowing their business and interests better than a regulator would. And as applied to Chipotle or to any number of jobs, or to any number of managers, she might be right. The error, though, is that a lot of service jobs–maybe not Chipotle, but probably Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonalds, Hardee’s, etc.–hire “shift managers” who after a certain training period are put on salary and sometimes must work in excess of 40 hours per week. Their pay may be greater to put them above the current overtime-qualifying wage threshold, and they may very well be managers in key respects, but they are also in many ways just as much workers as they are managers. These aren’t the assistant managers or co-managers or general managers.

There’s much I don’t know. For instance, I just said “a lot of service jobs…hire ‘shift managers.'” Maybe “a lot” isn’t that many, and maybe even those earn so little that the overtime requirements do apply to them. The anecdata I rely on are faulty because in addition to being anecdata, they’re about 20 years old. But Obama’s proposal addresses what to “a lot” of people is a real grievance. Whether that grievance admits of a remedy, and whether his proposal is that remedy or might in some ways make things worse, is another question. I, with McArdle, suspect the remedy might be worse and am at best ambivalent about the proposal.

I probably haven’t done justice to McArdle’s column. It’s about more than this one point I claim she neglects. So of course, read the whole thing.