Monthly Archives: February 2016

Regulating For Hazard?


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Earlier this week, Lain got her hands on a pack of Skittles that she got from preschool. We let her have candy in small amounts, but a pack of Skittles is a lot. Still, it was sealed so we didn’t worry about taking it from her. It turns out, somewhere along the way she learned how to use scissors properly (and quietly). While my wife and I both admired her problem-solving skills, it was definitely a “woah” moment.

President Obama has signed into law a regulation involving ecigarette juice, to protect young children from hazard. As many of you may recall, I support ecigarette regulation that makes the product safer without impeding the industry that helped me quit smoking, though I am suspicious of regulation for the sake of regulation, based on undemonstrated and/or unrealistic fears, and for the sake of “getting tough on big tobacco.” I fear we’re headed more in the direction of the latter than the former, but time will tell.

I believe in the greater hierarchy of things to be feared by consumer products, much of the concern around ejuice poisoning is not especially justified. People don’t seem to understand how incredibly awful the stuff tastes. I don’t mean it tastes a bit unpleasant, like sour or something. We’re talking about a level of pleasantness somewhere between soap and gasoline. The nicotine actually stings the tongue.

That being said, I support regulation to address this. It may not be the hazard some are making it out to be, but it seems to me to be a hazard that can be avoided with relatively minimal negative impact on the producers and the product. The regulation that passed, however, may make things worse rather than better.

ejuiceI get my ejuice from three sources: Halo, Bulk E-Juice, and Totally Wicked. You can see the Halo bottles to the left, and Bulk to the right. The Halo bottle has a child-proof cap that Lain would not be able to easily open. She would have to know to push it down and twist it, which is probably enough to satisfy the safety standards. In order to get the juice into the device, it has a dripper underneath. For Bulk, the lid comes off by simply twisting it, and has a squirter below to get the juice into the device. Lain would be able to get the cap off without any problem whatsoever. Totally Wicked has a child-proof cap (you have to squeeze the sides and twist) and a squirter.

While the regulation targets the Bulk containers, I am far more worried about something happening in the Halo bottle than the Bulk. Underneath the lid, the Halo bottle is completely open. Once she gets into the Halo bottle, she could just chug-a-lug it before realizing exactly how awful it tastes. A week ago I would have keep skeptical of her ability to get into the bottle, but parenthood is a series of revelations on what the little ones can’t and then suddenly can do. Like using scisssors to get into a bag of skittles. Or open a childproof container. For the Bulk bottle, she would have to squirt it in her mouth, which I’m not sure she has the strength to do. And if she did, I suspect she would immediately discover that it really tastes awful and she would move on. She could decide to keep going, but there are 100 things in this house she could decide to ingest that worry me more. In order to chug the Bulk juice, she would have to get the squirter off, which I myself can’t do without a thin instrument like a butter knife. So, I’m not worried about the Bulk and kind of worried about Halo.

In preparation for the law, I suppose, Bulk seems to be offering alternative packaging for their juice. I ordered some yesterday and will report the results, but it looks like they’re moving towards Halo-like bottles (it’s described as “child-proof cap with dripper”). Which means that it will be trading less safe (to my eye) packaging for more safe packaging. Which might make this reglation a net hazard instead of a net benefit. It’s hard to say.

What would have been ideal is to require both child-proof capping and a squirt insertion system or something similar). This is what Totally Wicked does, and it is by far the product that I am least worried about.

So, I’m not positive that they thought this through as well as they should have. It could be that I am wrong about the comparative hazard. It could be that they just didn’t think this through. It could be that passing a law was more important to them than what the law actually did. Ultimately, though, the responsibility for all of this is going to fall on vapers with young children in the house. Which is, regulation or no, is how it was always going to be.


Category: Statehouse

“That’s how you slowly kill children, every morning.”


I love all kinds of breakfast cereal. Too much, in fact. I had that successful diet with the FiberOne, of course. The FiberOne is good, but not so good that I can’t stop eating it.

Regular cereal? Man, I can’t have that in the house ever because I just never want to stop eating it.


Category: Kitchen

Thirty-Two Tweets For Thirty-Two Presidents


The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost put out a bunch of Tweets for President’s Day that I thought were worth sharing. One tweet for each president, followed by an account of the three most underrated presidents in his estimation.

Thirty-Two Tweets For Thirty-Two Presidents

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Category: School

A Sudden Vacancy


Upon hearing confirmation of Scalia’s death, the first thought I had was “Woah.”

After that, though, it was “Oh. Right. This is why I vote Republican.”

For president, anyway. Since joining the party in 1998, I have voted Democrat for nearly every type of office at least once. A couple times, I’ve voted for more Democrats than Republicans. But for president, the only time I didn’t vote for the Republican was 2012, which on the one hand I came to later regret and on the other I may end up doing again in 2016. And even then, I voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2012 and may do so again in ’16. The only way I vote Hillary the Democratic nominee is if the Republicans nominate Trump. If they nominate Cruz I likely vote for Johnson again. But… maybe not. Scalia’s death reminded me of something: When it comes to judicial rulings, I am somewhat solidly in the Republican camp.

It’s not that I always agree with the conservatives and don’t want a balance, but I am reasonably more comfortable with the balance we have than the lack of balance that seems likely to occur with another Democratic appointee. My constitutional views lean towards the right when even my operational ones don’t. (If I’m being honest with myself, I think that Obergefell was wrongly decided it just so happens I was and am too elated by the outcome to care.

I don’t have a special love for Scalia. I thought he was brilliant when he was right, and especially loathsome when he was wrong. I prefer somewhere in between Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts. But wherever my preferences lay, if I prefer something other than a liberal justice, Republicans are the only ones to appoint them. Republican appointees drift and evolve, but for my entire life Democrat appointees circle the wagons. That could change on a liberal court, but I think there may be some hard dynamics at play to prevent it from happening.

—

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately announced that they wouldn’t be confirming any appointments for the duration of Obama’s tenure. I was asked whether I agree with this, and I do not. For two reasons.

First, from a good government perspective, Obama has almost another year left of his presidency and there may be more than enough time to get a nominee through if we assume good faith on all parties. There is a cutoff wherein I would understand a Senate Majority Leader simply saying “Nope! We’re not going to waste our time.” But I think we’re at least a couple months from that, maybe as many as four.

That being said, this is different in affectation but not effect. If the GOP had taken the Schumer 2007 position, there’s a good chance that the result would be absolutely, 100% the same. Had RBG died that year, I think the chances of a new nominee – almost any nominee – getting through would have been low. While the result would have been the same, though, it’s not quite the same. Though most likely disingenuously, Schumer left the door open for the possibility while McConnell simply declared A New Rule. There is a line between those two things. It’s not a line between “This is perfectly okay” and “These people are terrible” but it is a line nonetheless.

Court nominations have been on a downward trajectory for quite some time. We will probably not see another 90+ vote confirmation, as we did with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, again for quite some time. Ideology is increasingly considered a fair basis for voting someone down. Which, right or wrong, means it’s going to become the staunchly ideological/partisan issue that it somehow amazingly avoided from 1970 or so until last decade. This might mean, at some point in the future, vacancies of far greater duration than the one we’re looking at now. This moves the needle in that direction.

The second reason is more tactical: I think it’s a bad move. Given the particulars of the circumstance, they could probably get an unusually moderate Democratic appointee here. The next President of the United States is likely to be Hillary Clinton. She might win with her a Democratic senate. At that point, she can appoint anyone she wants and will have something of a mandate to so. So this maneuver increases the likelihood that instead of Obama appointing the new swing justice, that the court will move sufficiently to the left that the only hope is that Breyer becomes a swing justice.

That seems like wishful thinking to me, however, because Democratic appointees have discipline that Republican appointees lack.

—

So, assuming that this reaches its most likely conclusion: A Democratic administration with a wide degree of latitude in her appointment, what then?

Reflexively, I think everything changes. Some of my views on this might be influenced by status quo bias in that there has been a conservative majority my whole life and I don’t even know what a liberal majority would do. All I have to go on are the dissents, but it’s always easier to bark louder behind a fence. The rulings could well be to my liking. Or it could be a 5-4 rewriting of pretty much everything. Hard to say.

As mentioned, the next swing vote is likely Breyer. There used to be a minor divide on the left side of the court between Breyer and Souter towards the center and Stevens and Ginsberg on the edge, but now it seems to be 1-and-3 with Breyer alone. It’s… possible that this will entice Breyer towards less solidarity with his more liberal colleagues. Or maybe not. The question is why the leftward drift occurs with Republican appointees in ways that don’t seem to be the case the other way around.

One explanation is that going in to 2000, there were 7 Republican appointees and two Democratic ones and they shifted to fill out the balance. Either to keep things from going overboard, or the nature of the cases the court’s conservative majority accepted lent itself to cases where they’d side with the left and an internal dynamic took hold. If that’s the case, then Breyer very well may shift to the right and gain a Strange New Respect among conservatives. Another explanation is that it’s simply a manifestation of O’Sullivan’s Law, in which case, abandon all hope ye conservatives who enter. The court’s left flank is already further to the left than the right flank, and it’s about to get worse.

—

The Supreme Court Deathwatch remains a pretty good reason to have 18-year term limits. As I am sure you all know.


Category: Newsroom

Linkluster Quattrocentocinquantuno


Why does Georgia have so many countries? WHY?!

Why does Georgia have so many countries? WHY?!

Matt Yglesias argues that Bernie Sanders is the future of the Democratic Party. Meh. While people may stick to the same party as they age, that doesn’t mean that they don’t shift inside the tent. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of closet Sandersian Democrats in the party going back to the aughts.

Max Fisher (ugh) has a good piece on the risks of unintended war with Russia. While it’s become popular to argue that members of each party are substantively the same (“At least Trump is flexible on economic policies, and Bush got us into Iraq!”) this falls into the category where I believe presidential temperament and philosophies even within a party are really quite important.

Another focal point in the battle over charter schools was opened up in New York with a video of a teacher figuratively ripping apart a first grader and literally ripping apart her paper.

Kevin Drum explains why Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about welfare reform, and how the left is going the way of Fox News.

As the War Against Cigarettes is (allegedly) stalled, Canadian anti-tobacco activists are looking towards more aggressive solutions.

There’s nothing especially new about the argument that we should rethink recycling, but I’m used to hearing it from ornery libertarians and conservatives rather than Vox-types.

Arrh! Return of the Research Pirates.

In an article lamenting the lack of regulation for tax preparation services, Ben Steverman points out that tax preparers actually have a worse track record than amateurs. Some of that may be due to the complexity of the returns they hand.

What would be the effect of a Bloomberg candidacy? Probably negligible, but if Sanders somehow wins the Democratic nomination and Trump (or maybe Cruz) wins the Republican nomination, he could be the biggest third-party candidate since Wallace.

The New York Times explains why the EU is breaking down.

John Likely lost more than half of his body-weight… on fast food.

Elna Baker lost a lot of weight, but then had to deal with a different problem as a lot of excess skin was left behind.

Andres Moreno Sepulveda also lost a lot of weight, through surgery, but then died of a heart attack.

Xenocrypt wants – in addition to a moratorium on the term “the prison population”, more from the “mass incarceration” debate.

Chris Mohney argues that families belong in the suburbs.


Category: Newsroom

Hey, Hey, It’s the 90’s!



Category: Coffeehouse

Labrisk


In the US, we have a problem with forensics in crime labs. In Canada, they have a problem in hospitals:A

Even though child services found no proof that she was a negligent parent, that didn’t count for much against the overwhelmingly positive results from a hair test. The lab results said she was abusing alcohol on a regular basis and in enormous quantities.

The test results had all the trappings of credible forensic science, and was presented by a technician from the Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory at Toronto’s Sick Kids Hospital, Canada’s foremost children’s hospital.

“I told them they were wrong, but they didn’t believe me. Nobody would listen,” Marchand recalls.

Motherisk hair test results indicated that Marchand had been downing 48 drinks a day, for 90 days. “If you do the math, I would have died drinking that much” Marchand says. “There’s no way I could function.”

The court disagreed, and determined Marchand was unfit to have custody of her daughter.

It’s… not an uplifting story, to say the least. And it almost leaves one puzzled as to how this happened.

The first thing that jumps out at me is the name of the lab, Motherisk, which is a bit insulting right out of the gate. It almost lends one to the belief that they veer towards the paranoid. Mothers as risks to their children. That’s the sort of thing we usually reserve for step-fathers (or sometimes just fathers). I imagine that there is a mentality in the US crime labs where “If they’re wanting us to check this, the person we are checking is probably guilty. So operating from that assumption, those are the conclusions where they land. At least, whatever else we might think, we’d like to at least think that they’re not intentionally or uninterestedly sending innocent people to jail*.

Likewise, at least a part of me would like to find a benign motive in there somewhere. But given the name, “deeply paranoid” is about the most charitable explanation I can come up with. And, of course, it’s not actually a very charitable explanation.

As a private lab (unlike the crime labs), you worry further about the money aspect. If they’re the go-to place for a positive result, that might be very lucrative. More lucrative than the alternative, maybe. That’s “I don’t know how you sleep and night and you are going to Hell you terrible terrible person” territory. That this involves children at such a well-renown hospital makes it even more disconcerting. It also makes me not want to take my kids there if I can avoid it, if their operational philosophy is such that Motherisk’s results seemed legitimate.

It’s just a terrible story all around, from start to finish.

* – Though, in some cases, it does appear that is what happened.


Category: Newsroom

Pornography Ruins Everything


Ted Cruz has, to the surprise of nobody, gone negative. His two primary targets are Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. His reasons for attacking Trump are obvious, but his reasons for going after Rubio are two-fold. Against the latter was was the most brilliant ad I’ve seen this cycle. It’s a “Conservatives Anonymous” meeting, wherein conservatives explained how they were taken in by Marco Rubio to their existential lament.

The ad served two purposes. First, to weaken Rubio who is right behind him in the South Carolina polls. Second, though, to pick up his voters. There is a surprising overlap between Cruz supporters and Rubio supporters, in both directions. So if he can pry off a Rubio voter – especially one who views himself or herself as conservative – Cruz stands to benefit. Cruz being Cruz, the only fault in the add is that it was too harsh. The message should have been “You made a mistake. It’s okay. It’s a new day and you can walk the right path.” Instead it mocks them. But even so, it was a really good and cutting ad.

And they’ve pulled it.

I was really quite shocked by this. It was getting a lot of criticism, but good heavens it was brilliant! And since when does Ted Cruz back off from being too mean? Well, it turns out that vinegar wasn’t the problem. Sugar was.

Ah, well.

Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com


Category: Newsroom

The Hand of God Over Portugal


So. Yeah. That was pretty awesome.


Category: Newsroom

Linkluster Prophets of Baal


itllgrowbackPew Research looks at the rising tide of animosity between Republicans and Democrats.

A moment of silence for the inventor of the video game console.

Joel Kotkin argues that California has gone conservative.

Jim Edwards argues that rent control bumped a San Francisco artist out of his apartment.

Aaron Carroll reports that medical malpractice suits don’t happen by chance. Which is true for the 16% of physicians that are sued more than once but may not be true of the 84% of doctors that are only sued once. And even then, lawyers may target doctors that have already been sued as a matter of course.

Uncle Steve writes about the honorary nonwhiteness of Alexander Hamilton.

If you fly the Gadsden Flag, you may get the attention of authorities in Utah and the DHS. Seems just a bit overwrought, though, as they’d be looking at a number of things. Still…

Meanwhile, a retired DHS officer says that he was ordered to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties. I’m still evaluating my different gut response to these two things.

Researchers who research vaping probably need to actually talk to vapers about how they actually vape.

Ben Lindy, already vulnerable for participating in Teach For America, almost had his campaign benefits stripped due to a research paper he wrote in college critical of unions, but was given a “second chance.”

Is Lena Dunham a poison pill for liberal feminism?

Theodore Dalrymple looks at eye-to-eye contact.

The son of Soviet dissident immigrants gets a tough lesson about expressing unpopular views.

Tyler Cowen reports that assortive mating is on the rise, returning to Gilded Age levels, and that it’s contributing to inequality. Notably, though, it peaked in 1980 before falling and only recently has starting inching back up.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains how museums in Europe are renaming some classics to conform to modern sensibilities. I don’t reject this out of hand, when especially egregious or when they weren’t named by the original artists, but… treat carefully is all.


Category: Newsroom