Varad Mehta says that we can’t let the Wookies win, but Anthony Domanico disagrees.

Emma Pierson contemplates being an affirmative action admit.

A report suggests that Austin needs to increase the number of granny flats.

A couple years ago, Sweden instituted a program to text people who knew CPR when there is someone around who needs it, and now they’re texting blood donors when their donated blood is used.

Jane The Actuary looks at College For All, Lee Siegel, and path dependency, with an eye towards Europe’s different expectations for its college-bound than we have.

Whenever there is a breakout at the zoo, it’s only the flamingos that get away. Here’s why.

It looks like Terry Pratchett will have no successor to write the Discworld novels.

Good walls make good coworkers. I actually found, over the years, that I prefer cubicles to offices and prefer the open environment to a closed one. This is, for me, quite odd.

Here are the eight strictest states when it comes to homeschooling. North Dakota, I’m disappointed in you.

In Mansfield, Ohio, Stranger Danger training has possibly saved children from a nefarious man who got out of his car to wave to his children.

InsideClimate News wonders why TV meteorologists don’t believe in climate change. Jose Duarte says that the “97% consensus” on climate change is closer to 80%.

Relatedly, Francie Diep looks at physicians who don’t believe in evolution.

If you’ve lived or work there, Minnesota may owe you money. But if so, they aren’t telling. Some of y’all may recall a few years ago I found out Deltona owed me money (somewhere between $100-200, if I recall). I found out about it shortly before I found out that it was going to claim it outright.

The Atlantic looks at what it would take to double a cell phone’s battery life. Getting to 24 hours with intense use is something that absolutely happens. If you want to take away my removable batter, you absolutely need to do that first. If Samsung hasn’t by the time I need a phone, I may have to get LG (assuming they don’t flip).

Wall Street Journal looks at how colleges are struggling with Chinese student application fraud.

Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are suing Harvard and hiring consultants to tell them to downplay the whole ‘coming from Vietnam with $2 in a rickety boat and swimming away from sharks’ thing. (Perhaps swimming lessons are a mark of privilege…)

Maybe we don’t need to see St. Louis burn, because Puerto Rico already has:

The report cites one surprising problem: the federal minimum wage, which is at the same level in Puerto Rico as in the rest of the country, even though the economy there is so much weaker. There are probably some people who would like to work, but because of the sickly economy, businesses can’t afford to pay them the minimum wage.

Someone working full time for the minimum wage earns $15,080 a year, which isn’t that much less than the median income in Puerto Rico of $19,624.

The report also cites regulations and restrictions that make it difficult to set up new businesses and hire workers, although it’s difficult to know just how large an effect these rules might or might not have on the labor market.

A report by the New York Fed also suggests that Puerto Rico has a relatively large underground economy employing a big part of the population. These workers aren’t taxed or counted in formal employment numbers.

In any case, it’s relatively expensive to hire and pay workers in Puerto Rico, which along with the high cost of transportation, energy and other goods, means that fewer tourists are planning trips to Puerto Rico than they were a decade ago and the number of hotel beds is the same as it was four decades ago, according to Krueger and her colleagues.

This doesn’t speak to the appropriate minimum wage level in high-cost places like Los Angeles and Seattle, but it does point to the dangers of setting a national minimum wage with those places in mind and disregarding other places. Notably, the Washington Post itself downplayed the downside to the Puerto Rican minimum wage just a few months ago:

Based on that experience, Freeman thinks a few things might happen if the federal minimum goes up to $12. First, some companies might find ways to work around it, either by having their employees work off the clock or by turning them into independent contractors. That’s not ideal, but it at least allows people to keep collecting some paycheck.

“There are many ways that firms and workers will make sure that people don’t lose their jobs,” Freeman says. “If you say that 90 percent of the people get higher wages, and that’s what you want to have happen, and then 10 percent find ways to wiggle around so they keep their jobs, that’s a pretty good outcome.”

Second, if jobs do disappear, Freeman figures that people will move to areas of greater opportunity. “Minimum-wage workers tend to be young people, so they’re reasonably mobile,” he says. “Mississippi is the lowest-wage state in the country. If it tips you to move to Georgia, which has higher wages, that’s a reasonable response.”

Which, to me, involved a lot of handwaving away. I don’t mind people moving from Mississippi to Atlanta for the sake of greater economic opportunity. I don’t even mind bribing them to move if it’s better for the economy overall and better for their long-term prospects. But this isn’t really that. This is sort of handwaving damage done to the Mississippi economy in a “burning a village to save it” sort of capacity. And unnecessarily so, given the lack of portability of most minimum wage jobs. A lot of people won’t leave, and a lot of jobs will still need to be done. And allowing them to work for less – and allowing employers to pay less – is not a strike against the dignity of the worker, who can afford to live as well in Mississippi as someone with a higher minimum wage would be able to live in Atlanta.

But even setting aside the emigration question, there remains the question about those who stay behind. Which is the problem that Puerto Rico is facing now and the problem that Mississippi too would face. And could become a problem for a majority of the country. The $12 minimum wage nationally is analogous to the hike that occurred in Puerto Rico, to the point that the Washington Post felt comfortable pointing to it as a reason not to fear its repercussions.

Minimum wage advocate Arindrajit Dube is unmoved, however. There almost certainly is more to it than just the minimum wage. And perhaps the Krueger report is misguided entirely? The problems described therein, though, do seem real and precisely of the sort critics of the minimum wage have argued would occur.

Again, this isn’t an argument against raising the minimum wage – or even raising it aggressively in places – but it does suggest a degree of caution is warranted. Contrary to what I’ve heard some people say, raising the minimum wage to $12/hr (much less $15) is not bringing it in line with historical norms. It’s breaking new ground, at least over a dollar an hour highest than the highest minimum wage we’ve ever had (and which we had only briefly). That should be reason for concern, and Puerto Rico provides justification of proceeding with caution.

{Link via Oscar Gordon}

Sayeth the Transplanted Lawyer:

From where I sit, it’s fantastically obvious that anti-discrimination law at both the Federal and state levels ought to include rather than exclude sexual orientation as a protected class. We’ve protected sexual orientation by statute in California the same way we’ve protected race and sex and religion since 1992, with no apparent adverse consequences to either our economy or our citizens’ ability to enjoy religious freedom. Congress should pass ENDA. Further, Congress should amend Title VII to include sexual orientation as a protected status, and not rely on the courts to use questionable language and logic games to shoehorn “sexual orientation” into “sex” or “marital status.” If Congress does this, it can write in protections for religious freedom, and not have to rely on courts to do that, too.

This has happened already in Utah, whose body politic is dominated by no less conservative a religious institution as the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, found a way to reconcile itself with the inevitability of same-sex marriage. But bringing Republicans around to the notion that such a legislative scheme represents the best of all remaining possible worlds for social conservatives may take some work: it will require people of good faith who disliked the Obergefell ruling and see a need arising from it to protect religious liberties to accept that the perfect cannot be allowed to be the enemy of the good — and it will require people of good faith who, like me, rejoiced at Obergefell to concede that sincerely religious people are not going to give up their religious beliefs that same-sex marriages are strictly legal matters which their consciences forbid them from blessing.

It’s been interesting watching the “what next” debate light up on Twitter focusing around polygamy (goosed on by Freddie deBoer who openly advocates it, but mostly by conservatives who are itching to be able to say “I told you so”), when the more fertile ground really is, as Burt says, anti-discrimination law. Perhaps it’s because polygamy is simple to talk about, and a lot of people don’t even know that anti-gay discrimination is actually still legal. The dude in Tennessee probably thinks that his sign is okay because Freedom of Religion, when in fact it’s okay because of the absence of anti-discrimination law that most people probably assume is in place. Indeed, the whole debate in Indiana was built around the premise that their RFRA was allowing forbidden discrimination when said discrimination was not actually forbidden.

And even I have been wrong on this in the past. When I lived in Deseret, the legal counsel of my employer was fired when the company’s president discovered that he was gay. This came right after the rest of the staff had been let go. He was the one they felt could do the job of what used to be a department of three, but apparently only if he preferred the intimate company of women to that of men. And when this happened, I was really quite stunned to find out that it was perfectly legal according to Deseretian law. The company’s president didn’t even need to find an excuse. Gay? Fired. Even in Deseret, and even among my Mormon coworkers, the firing was largely seen as deeply unfair and wrong. The marijuana firings were understood and defended. Somebody may have defended the company’s right to do it (I can’t recall), but nobody defended the decision to.

And with this in mind, I was not surprised when Utah passed the law that Burt refers to. The LDS Church itself signed off on an employment-housing anti-discrimination law in Salt Lake County some time back. It’s going to be pretty hard to find prolonged, vocal opposition to those things. Except, that is, right after people are licking wounds after being slapped down in court and as some Republicans are looking for ways to retaliate. In the same way that the law in Utah was delayed by the ruling that allowed gay marriage, so too will anti-discrimination law. No matter, though, as I don’t expect it to take long.

One of the main reasons that Utah’s law passed is that it stuck to what mattered. My main concern will be the desire to, as Burt states, simply add sexual orientation to the protections offered on the basis of race or religion. That might be a desirable aim, but Utah would have no law right now if they’d insisted upon it. Maybe it should be illegal for Tennessee hardware guy to put up such a sign – it is certainly worthy of condemnation either way – but it also strikes me as not being nearly as fundamentally important as employment, housing, and other essential and emergency services. And for what it’s worth, the Human Rights Campaign agrees with me. As public attitudes change, as Burt and I both believe they will, we can revisit and simplify it.

When I bring this up, a lot of people are bothered by the symbolism of actively allowing discrimination in all but the most obvious of cases or, really, anywhere that we disallow discrimination against racial minorities. I understand the impulse, though I also see different situations as different (in the same way we allow certain gender discrimination where we don’t allow racial discrimination). But most importantly, we should not let our feels and symbolism trump things that will actually make lives better for gays and lesbians that live in states where complete non-discrimination just isn’t possible. Utah passed a law, and North Dakota was on the road to passing a law until the freakout over Indiana sent everybody running for cover. Progress can be made, state by state.

From here it is tempting to take it to the federal level and say “Screw North Dakota and the law we didn’t pass. We can make their law do what we want. Well, we certainly can, but I don’t think that’s particularly advisable. At least, not yet. Because there are things we can make them do and things we want them to do that we cannot make them do. Playing too firmly on the first set of issues makes progress on the second more difficult. We can make Tennessee Hardware Guy serve gays, but we cannot make him put out a sign that says “Proceeds from sales to gay customers will go to [anti-gay group].” Nor can we prevent them from putting up signs like the one that angered the lesbian couple in Canada to the point that they did not want to do business with that establishment.

Some things can’t wait for consensus. The rights and privileges of marriage were – at least arguably – among them. I firmly believe that anti-employment and anti-housing (including hotels and whatnot) discrimination are also among them. But at a certain point after that, I think it actually does more good for gays who live in Utah to have limited but locally supported protections than federally imposed ones that breed resentment. My calculus on this may change in the future (as it did – or came close to doing – on court-imposed SSM), but that’s where we are right now. Let’s get the essentials passed. And as minds and hearts change, further laws can be passed (or, even more optimistically, rendered unnecessary).

Priceonomics has an article about the end of the one-hit wonder:

From 2005 to 2010, the fraction of songs by artists that never made the chart again hit an all-time low. It’s important to keep in mind that these numbers are conservative, as several of the bands that generated these possible one-hit wonders could still hypothetically produce another hit someday. In other words, UGK still has a chance to write another “International Players Anthem” and scale the charts again (note: as one reader points out though, this particular chance is extremely unlikely).

This is part-and-parcel of a larger phenomenon that they talk about, which is the increasing conservatism of the radio in general. My favorite story is when a conglomerate purchased a very popular radio station in Colosse that was known for introducing new artists to the nation. They decided that the station would be even more popular if they declined to play any single that hadn’t been on the radio for at least a month. Within a year, they seemed to have changed formats and were playing techno and dance music. But for the same reasons that the radio stations are not keen on playing new music, they’re also less keen on taking a chance on any new artists. Which means that they’re less likely to run across that otherwise mediocre band with that one great song. Or more favorably, it could be described as giving artists with that one hit much more investment, helping to assure that they will have follow-up hits.

It’s an interesting article, and you should read it.

According to the chart of one-hit wonders, the nineties were a watershed year for them. I mean, sure enough if I look through the list there are a lot of songs there that I like. The nineties were the prime of life as far as listening to new music, so of course they would ring familiar. The top song on the list is Duncan Sheik’s “Barely Breathing” which holds a particular sentimental value. Also holding some sentimental value is Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Unlike “Barely Breathing” that I like through and through I am relatively indifferent to the song itself, but some time after its release I met Porky, and it informally became our song. Which if you remember the song, is kind of odd because it’s a song about a relationship falling apart and seems about as sincere as a snake.

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Some of those on the list I was surprised to see, mostly because I remember followups that I thought were as good as the initial release. For instance, after “Sonny Came Home,” Shawn Colvin released “You and the Mona Lisa” which I consider far more memorable. And while I consider “The Freshman” to be the best Verve Pipe song, I thought “Hero” was a pretty solid follow-up.

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When I got Rhapsody in 2004, I actually started listening to some of the CDs of a lot of one-hit wonders from the 90’s. And… well for a lot of them there was a reason that they only had that one hit. This was not news to me. Everybody’s taken a chance on a CD only to discover that either they poured their heart out into the one song, or it was the one song that they didn’t write themselves. One of the biggest surprises, though, was Marcy Playground, whose “Sex and Candy” makes the list towards the bottom. It turned out, they were a band that I liked through-and-through.

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Of course, good music stopped coming out around 2011, which coincidentally is when I turned 33:

When you reach 33 years or older, you will stop discovering new music, according to a new online study. New research, based on U.S. Spotify users, concludes that 33 is the average age when people stop listening to new music.

“While teens’ music taste is dominated by incredibly popular music,” the study says, “this proportion drops steadily through peoples’ 20s, before their tastes ‘mature’ in their early 30s.”

The study reports one reason for people’s transition away from popular music:

“First, listeners discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank. Second, listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age — but which has since phased out of popularity.”

The research also suggests that “men and women listen similarly in their teens, but after that, men’s mainstream music listening decreases much faster than it does for women.” While people with children tend to stop listening to new music earlier than their peers.

I actually started stopping well before 33. Mostly. Every now and again I will fire up Pandora and find some new artists. But country, which was one of my staples, started shifting away from what I enjoy. The local music scene – and its general flavor – that fueled a lot of my listening kind of died. Alternative and a lot of pop speaks rather specifically to a phase of life I’ve passed. So the primary use of that genre is to take me back to a different time, and old music does that better because it was there with me. Also, I listen to less music of any stripe.

Another factor that could have hastened the decline of my interest in new music was is the collapse in price for exposure. Which sounds wrong, but near the tail end of the phase of my life where I listened to new music, Rhapsody occurred. And then, suddenly, it was all there. In an alternate timeline, I would have had to buy CDs one at a time and would have had to try new things and give them a chance. Remember when you were young, your resources were limited, and you got that new CD? How you listened to every track? These days, apart from the audiobooks I listen to in lieu of music, I no longer have to listen to a song for long enough to really absorb it. I’m not as invested. In that sense, those who argued against the availability of music may have had more of a point than I realized.

Either that, or really it just all went downhill in 2011.