Linky Friday #106: Miller High Life Edition

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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103 Responses

  1. ScarletNumber says:

    Windell Middlebrooks

    This makes me a sad panda.Report

  2. ScarletNumber says:

    I’ve seen plenty of white-male homeless people, but I’ve never seen a good-looking homeless person.Report

  3. Christopher Carr says:

    (A1)

    In response to DavidTC’s comment rescue I wrote last week of NOLA:

    “…the rent market is getting more expensive. Whether a true assignment of blame or not, this has been attributed to Airbnb. As for buying, there are a variety of new standards that just went into place in the past year or two, including new, tougher standards for what can qualify as verifiable income, that takes the decision to issue a mortgage away from the lender and gives it over to an algorithm that excludes a surprisingly large number of people. In my opinion, this problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

    Dude, we just tried to buy a house and couldn’t get it financed because my extant freelance translation contracts do not count as verifiable income per the know-it-alls in Washington. These rules just went into effect in the last year “to save the housing market” and all the mortgage brokers/lenders I spoke to said they defied common sense. The house we had a signed purchase and sales agreement on was going to be our family’s home for the next n years. The lady who was going to sell it to us was crying when we gave her the news. She wanted her family home to go to another family. Instead, it got scooped up by ten dudes from New York who are going to Airbnb the shit out of it.

    Homelessness and affordable housing are still huge issues in NOLA. As mentioned in DavidTC’s post, I worked on a project for HUD a few weeks ago. It is shocking how many people have been priced out of the rental market by out-of-town developments. The rent in my own building is going up 6-7% per year. My mortgage payment on a comparable place would have been about 25% less than my current rent. New Orleans is too small and too politically inept a city to deal with these forces.Report

    • Morat20 in reply to Christopher Carr says:

      Dude, we just tried to buy a house and couldn’t get it financed because my extant freelance translation contracts do not count as verifiable income per the know-it-alls in Washington.
      I think you’d be better off blaming the Captains of Industry who were pushing for NINJA loans there.

      You can make a case the government overreacted, but given the extent of the financial meltdown and the fact that it was built on fraudulent mortgages, you can’t exactly blame them for cracking down.

      I’m sure it sucks, but it was places like Countrywide that started this mess.Report

  4. Alan Scott says:

    A5: In another thread, Brandon Berg said

    Now that I think about it, it’s funny how when the ACLU fights for the right of Nazis to demonstrate, nobody accuses them of being closeted Nazis, but when libertarians defend the right of business owners to run their businesses without having the government second-guessing their personnel decisions, it’s obviously because we’re racist.

    This shit right here is exactly why libertarians get so much flak. Oklahoma passes a bill specifically designed to stamp “second-class marriage” on every union not solemnized by a clergyman, and Reason heralds it as a step forward in gay rights.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Alan Scott says:

      And didn’t the ACLU just say that Oklahoma University’s expulsion of the racist frat members might not be Constitutional?

      WHO BENEFITS?Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

        I hadn’t heard about this. I’m impressed.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Jaybird says:

        The national ACLU issued a statement against the expulsion after the state chapter applauded President Boren’s “aggressive response”

        (This came out the day before the expulsions. From the wording of the release, the OK chapter would have been fine with the expulsions as long as the University took care of the due process rights, as opposed to unilateral action from the administration.) (Unilateral action being heretofore ‘applauded’)Report

      • Chris in reply to Jaybird says:

        I find expelling kids under these circumstances really, really disturbing, regardless of its constitutionality.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

        @kolohe , my reading of ACLU-OK’s comments is that they were initially applauding the aggressive response of kicking the fraternity to the curb, but felt differently about the expulsion. (Which is sort of my response.) Is that an incorrect reading?

        @chris Could you elaborate? I’ve been kind of uncomfortable with it myself, but too self-conscious about it to say anything. What do you feel about the actions taken against the frat?Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Jaybird says:

        Will, like I said, those statements were published on Monday, the expulsions didn’t come out until Tuesday. So, technically, they made no comment on the expulsions in the linked statement, because they hadn’t happened yet.

        There was definitely the strong implication from both authored statements that the students should be disciplined for their speech in some manner, not something like “man, these kids are grade A morons and assholes, but ain’t that America, home of the free (to be a moronic asshole?)”Report

      • Chris in reply to Jaybird says:

        Will, what worries me is that suspending or expelling students for private speech sets a horrible precedent. Who decides what speech is expellabe?

        The frat can go, though that’s not my preferred way of dealing with it (SAE would mean racist, so it would die eventually). But the students? They weren’t harassing anyone. They were just being racist dickheads, which is a substantial portion of the frat crowd everywhere. Just name them, and let the ostrscizing begin.Report

      • Morat20 in reply to Jaybird says:

        If it were a purely private university, kicking them out would be fine. As a state funded (even partially, as state schools are these days) the issue is a bit more complex.

        The “state” part here is all that’s keeping me from thinking “Of course they were expelled”. Because, you know, if my bosses saw a videotape of me drunk and chanting racist slogans — outside of work even — I’d be fired in a heartbeat, because I’d be bad for business.

        Obviously racist students are, undoubtedly, bad for the university image. I don’t think that’s sufficient for a state school

        As for the frat, getting rid of it is something I’m entirely comfortable with, state school or not.Report

      • Chris in reply to Jaybird says:

        A lot of ideas make universities look bad to a lot of people. American conservatives hate 2/3-of them. Every view on the conflict in the middle east is considered racist by someone. Marxism, philosophy majors who follow Singer, 90% of the linguistics department (OK, maybe that’s just me).

        I don’t think racism has a place in polite society, but these kids came straight from racist homes and/or peer groups, and ended up in a racist frat. Universities are supposed to expose kids to new people and ideas. The university failed them (this is also why I don’t mind the frat going).Report

      • Troublesome Frog in reply to Jaybird says:

        I always thought that if there was a river of Ghostbusters II style pink goo running under my university, it was pooling under Fraternity Row. I’m actually a little surprised when this sort of stuff makes national news.Report

    • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Alan Scott says:

      How, exactly, is OK making such unions 2nd-class marriages?Report

    • Damon in reply to Alan Scott says:

      I like what attorney Mark Razzanda in his recent posting.

      https://randazza.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/there-will-never-be-a-nigger-in-sae/

      Who also quotes another guy who also said it well.: “These SAE boys don’t deserve the protection of the First Amendment, any more than the neo-Nazi’s in Skokie did. But we don’t do it for them. We do it for us. We do it because speech is either protected for all or protected for none.”Report

  5. North says:

    E2: Yet another reason to hate apple. I’ve never liked those wretched pods.

    R4: What, exactle, would it look like if “Athiests ditched the new Athiests”?Report

    • Christopher Carr in reply to North says:

      R4: It would look like nothing, because the very term “new atheists” refers to the atheists that don’t know to keep their atheist mouths shut.Report

      • “New Atheism” sounds a lot sexier than “Atheism That No Longer Feels The Need To Do The Required Reading”.

        We’re seeing the birth pangs that will result in post-post-Christianity.Report

      • North in reply to Christopher Carr says:

        Yeah that’s what really gives theists the flop sweats: not the idea that there’s an organized athiest faction that opposes them at every turn but simply that there’s a growing demographic of people who simply don’t care or are at best puzzledly bemused by what theists have to say.Report

      • Chris in reply to Christopher Carr says:

        Oh man, that New Atheist article is awful, and no one has ever accused new of being a friend if New Atheism. The problem of induction? That’s what ya got? Hell, Hume may be the only philosopher they read. Well, Dennett, but not his philosophical work.Report

      • Troublesome Frog in reply to Christopher Carr says:

        I wonder if Cooper realizes that if the New Atheists weren’t out there talking away, the good atheists who keep their mouths shut would be the ones used as demon fringe foil to position themselves as reasonable centrists.

        I’m not sure what to say about his reading of Harris other than that it makes me sad.Report

      • Chris in reply to Christopher Carr says:

        At first I read that as, “I’m not sure what to say about his reading Harris other than it makes me sad,” and I was going to agree.

        The New Atheists, for better or worse, have gotten the opponents they asked for. At the height of their popularity, my parents would send me the religious “rebuttals” of Dawkins and his ilk, and I couldn’t help but thinking, “If you want to play an anti-intellectual game, these are the idiots you’re going to get to play with you.”Report

      • Chris in reply to Christopher Carr says:

        Those rebuttals were always books. Dawkins made money for a lot of Christians.Report

    • zic in reply to North says:

      The whole questions smacks of some level of organization and hierarchy that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t exist amongst atheist. Religion tends to be organized; there are leaders, anointed to lead in some way, and congregants who subscribe to at least part of what the leaders are preaching.

      Atheism, on the other hand, is not subscribing to this or that belief; it’s a negative space, and there is not organization. There are certainly atheist who presumed some mantle of leadership by dint of being vocal, but that mantle is given to them as much by believers who expect organization where, in fact, none seems to exist.

      I might agree with some points of a new atheist, disagree with others, but there is no there there as far as I can tell; certainly nobody that I look to for guidance on how to best practice my non belief. Organizing non-believers seems like herding cats; it’s something that happens in negative space, not in some conference that takes on some sublime dictate from non-god.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to zic says:

        This.

        And that I think a lot of theists are really uncomfortable with the void that atheists represent. It’s gotta be uncomfortable to make an impassioned argument against Sam Harris, Dawkins, etc and have the atheist you are talking to reply with a flat, “so what?”Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to North says:

      “E2: Yet another reason to hate apple. I’ve never liked those wretched pods.”

      Does it remind you too much of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Peas?Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to North says:

      North, ditching the New Atheists would look bad because you simply don’t leave people on a highway in the middle of nowhere.Report

  6. Rufus F. says:

    A3: The architecture in Buffalo is great and the weather’s usually tolerable when there aren’t massive amounts of snow. Their snow tends to be “lake effect” snow anyway and so light you can pretty much dust it off with a broom. On the downside, the people there were pretty negative, which probably has to do with the weather, there aren’t many good jobs, and downtown empties out by about half an hour past five, which is a bit creepy. It is about time it had a renaissance though and admittedly I haven’t been there in a few years.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Rufus F. says:

      Rust belt cities provide for cheap living primarily because their economies collapsed decades ago. What is true for Buffalo is probably also true for places like Rochester, Syracuse, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and dozens of other cities in the North East and Mid-West to greater or lesser extent. People still need to work for a living and hipsters providing hipster services for other hipsters doesn’t seem economically viable. I can’t see Buffalo or other rust belt citie enjoying that great an economic revival simply because young people move there. Companies aren’t going to follow the young.

      What really surprises me is that the older, denser cities in New Jersey and Conneticut haven’t experienced a revival. Rents are cheaper than any of the boroughs in New York City. Most of them are at least relatively accessible to New York because of PATH or at least NJ Transit. More than a few of them are building new apartments. NJ has good mass transit for the United States, so you could get around without a car in Hudson County and some other places. Others are small and dense enough to be very walkable. Conneticut is less public transit friendly than New Jersey but New Haven and some other cities should be able to attract people do to close proximity to New York City but much lower rents.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

        As I’m sure Kim will inform you, Pittsburgh has arrived, economically. True for a lot of the others, though I’ve known as least a couple people move to greater St. Louis for jobs.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        St. Louis and its inner suburbs are nice. The crime rate is a tad high for my tastes though but I have friends there and visited the city. St. Louis main problem is that it seems to have a very antagonistic relationship with the rest of Missouri politically.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to LeeEsq says:

        St. Louis is very much a tale of two cities. The south side and its suburbs are doing well. Much of North St. Louis and its inner-ring suburbs (includes Ferguson) are often included in the same conversations as Detroit and Flint.Report

      • Kim in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Lee,
        Nobody wants to deal with NJ taxes.
        It is enough to turn good liberals libertarian.

        In other news, NJ had tons of towns that were Industrial I and II. Are we really surprised when they haven’t bounced back? The shoemakers left, and no one came to pick up the pieces.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @leeesq

        What parts of NJ are you referring to? Hoboken is fully revived and JC is on the way (with some real estate pushing Manhattan pricing). Newark isn’t quite there for residential purposes but business is slowly moving back in.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @kazzy the rest of Hudson County, Newark, and the cities like Paterson and Elizabeth that have easy rail access to New York City but the built environment that could turn them into miniature hipster cities. Any place along the Hudson-Bergen line.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @leeesq

        All the northern train lines require a transfer in either Secaucus or Hoboken, undermining the ease of train transits. Busses run from Bergen and other parts but are only convenient to certain neighborhoods. Hoboken, Weehawken, Edgewater, Jersey City, and some other spots have huge rental markets with the owning market rapidly improving. Other towns are heavily developed as exurbs with little room to add people. Some houses are available to rent but most in the nicer areas are expensive. The not-so-great towns will likely see more improvement as the economy recovers. I just can’t imagine looking at the changes Hudson County has experienced in the last decade and say, “It should be doing more.”

        Westchester has some untapped areas but there is some social inertia there. Yonkers, White Plains, New Rochelle… All have to undue some reputation crap (e.g., less black and brown folks) to be looked at like Tarrytown or Scarsdale. Yonkers — where I once lived — has new waterfront mid- and high-rises in a great new neighborhood adjacent to a train station that has you in mid-town in 30. But it’s Yonkers, so…Report

  7. zic says:

    P3, to my mind, only considers half the story. It addresses the individual nicely. But, much of discussion around ‘privilege’ isn’t always about any individual, so much as it’s toward changing the overall arch of how we perceive groups and how, as a member of one group, we respond to members of another, and how we shape social policy in general. When I was born, for instance, men were presumed to have the privilege of sex with their wives at the man’s choosing; now, without her consent, it’s considered rape. There was a whole lot of discussion and privilege checking that went into shaping and changing the mores and laws and social attitudes that brought about that change.

    It’s not only anecdotal, it’s trend.Report

  8. LeeEsq says:

    P1: I’m not really sure how much privilege good-looking people get. Good looks certainly do not hurt but unless combined with some other personality traits and skills, it doesn’t seem to carry people that far. A good-looking person without much in the way of social graces might but better than an average or ugly person without social graces but still won’t get that much leeway. An average or even bellow average looking person who is great with social graces and filled with wit and charm can do better than a good-looking boor in life. Good looks alone can help in life but if you really want to go far or navigate certain situations well, you will also need social graces.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

      It’s not as much as you’d think.Report

    • j r in reply to LeeEsq says:

      Sure, but good-looking people generally get many more opportunities to develop their social graces.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to j r says:

        I actually think this is true in general. If your a cute kid and like the attention you get for being a cute kid than your probably going to absorb a lot of social graces by observation and osmosis. Your also to do your best to develop the skills necessary to get the reactions you like.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to j r says:

        Good looking people also get more doors opened for them (literally & figuratively). They may lack the skills to get too far inside that door, but if almost every door is opened for you, you have more chances to find success (for various measures of success).

        Now if your something of a troll like me, you have to find, for lack of a better word, a gimmick to keep the door opened (e.g. the proverbial foot in the door to keep it from closing).Report

  9. Michael Cain says:

    A1: You might rephrase to indicate that the list of cities are the cities where blacks are doing the best.Report

  10. Saul Degraw says:

    A3: This is basically an article that praises Richard Flordia’s The Creative Class thesis 😉 It is also an article that comes out every decade or so. I remember similar articles from the 1990s and early Aughts. There are always lines about how artists move to Buffalo for the space and then discover they lack students for musics and venues/audiences for performances.

    I will also say that “living like Kings” is a relative term. My version of living like a King involves easy access to world-class performance and cultural institutions like Cal Performances, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Met, MOMA, Berkeley Rep, etc. I don’t understand the need for 5000 square feet houses. I would like something more than my apartment one day but a 1500-2000 square foot house is fine.

    P2: This is pretty much what Freddie and I said about that NY Times article on exclusive private schools having classes on white privilege. It really acts as a secret maintainer of privilege.

    R3: There was a sensational murder trial in 1920s NYC. The murder involved a woman named Ruth Snyder and her love murdering Snyder’s husband and trying (comically badly) to make it look like a botched robbery. Snyder, the Husband, and her lover were just ordinary middle-class folks. The husband worked as an art director for a trade magazine and the lover was a traveling salesperson. One newspaper used McPherson as a special correspondent and McPherson used the position to lecture boys about marrying someone who would make “mama happy” instead of some “red-hot cutie”. The Daily News infamously was able to sneak a camera into Snyder’s execution and snap a picture as the electric chair sent current through her body. The photo was put on the front page. I didn’t know what McPherson looked like until now. She looks different than I imagined.Report

  11. Saul Degraw says:

    MH: I did not know about this guy because I don’t really watch TV. InterestingReport

  12. Saul Degraw says:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clay-naff/not-ok-limiting-marriage_b_6854198.html

    Here is another article on the Oklahoma bill.

    I think @alan-scott has the right of it and this very much seems like second-class or no marriage for anyone who is not heterosexual and Judeo-Christian. This looks like trying to be massive resistance but being coy about it.Report

    • That article doesn’t shed any light on anything. It doesn’t answer the primary question of whether or not there is a functional difference between a church-issued certificate and a notary-signed affidavit. Looking at the (rest of the) law, there doesn’t appear to be.Report

      • Which is exactly what one would expect, since the drafters of the bill are not clueless. The court decisions largely come down to requiring that so long as the state bestows benefits on couples who are “married”, there has to be a mechanism for same-sex couples to acquire that status.

        It would be more interesting if the state was changing its statutes to ban any special treatment for married couples: no joint tax filings, no tax-free inheritance, no automatic limited power of attorney for medical decisions, etc. And after that was done, simply stop keeping marriage records at all: “Aside from people who make contractual arrangements, we’re all just individuals here.” Since there are still federal benefits from being married, would the federal government be in a position of requiring states to have ways to form and dissolve marriages, and to keep records of that?Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Will Truman says:

        It seems like a weasel way to get the State of Oklahoma from officially having to acknowledge gay marriage and it reminds me of the recent issue in Florida where some of the Clerks (and other more official state actors) looked for ways to not give out licenses to Same-Sex Couples. I’ve needed to use a notary public before. They tend to be in places that do faxing and packaging and are not the most romantic or official looking places. This much less nice than going to the Courthouse (which tends to be built with some splendor).

        Reason might be libertarian magazine but they swing red and are usually not above bashing Democratic voters.Report

      • j r in reply to Will Truman says:

        Yeah, I’m not seeing any smoking gun in that article either.

        In addition to what Will says, we live in an age when anyone who wants can go on the internet and become an ordained Christian minister. I’m not seeing where this raises any significant bars to gay marriage. The bar is the pre-existing constitutional provision against gay marriage. If that gets struck down, what’s the problem?

        At some point you have to ask, do you care more about symbolic victories and surrenders or do you care about people being protected by the law?

        On a similar note, I am curious to hear people’s reactions to legislation just past and pending in Utah. From what I can tell the passed legislation extends existing anti-discrimination law to include LGBT folks, but also includes some religious exemptions and protections for people expressing their beliefs. In other words, it would be illegal to fire someone who expressed an anti-gay marriage opinion (so long as their expressions don’t constitute harassment), so by my reading, that would mean that Mozilla would have been prohibited from firing Brendan Eich under this law.

        Is this a suitable compromise or does it no go far enough in vanquishing the forces of reaction?Report

      • Kim in reply to Will Truman says:

        Saul,
        Notary publics around here just put a small sign outside their house. They only need an office if they want one – and the times you really need a notary public are kinda small.Report

      • There’s zero support for your hypothesis, Saul. I mean none. It doesn’t affect gay marriage at all and – but for the constitutional amendment – the verbiage would actually allow for it.

        The most that can be said here is that it could, at least theoretically (though again: not demonstrated), discriminate against non-believers. Except that I would bet money that Reason writers disproportionately fall into this category. For that matter, my wife and I were married by a judge and not a pastor.

        Nor is there any reason to believe that this is about poking Democrats in the eye. Libertarians have always had this (ill-conceived, in my view) fondness for the notion of “getting the state out of marriage” and their enthusiasm here is I believe first and foremost indicative of that.

        And lastly, while you may prefer to go to the courthouse this actually stands to save a lot of people the inconvenience of doing so. They can have their own ceremony apart from the notary (which is what I think Clancy and I would have done, if we lived in Oklahoma).

        I’m honestly somewhere in between indifferent-to-opposed to this legislation – among other things, I’m against the whole “privatizing marriage” thing, and I have no problem making judges and clerks eat their brocolli – but as a long-time SSM supporter, and someone who could theoretically be on the wrong side of this bill, the level of opposition to it seems grossly misplaced.Report

      • @j-r The LDS Church has played an interesting role out there. Supportive of such anti-discrimination law so long as it doesn’t apply to them and their organizations are protected. I’ll take it.

        When you mentioned Utah, I thought you were referring to the law that would allow county clerks not to sully their hands with gay people getting married. My inclination is to oppose it, even though I tend to be more supportive than a lot of people here of private companies taking a pass but take a totally different view of government employees – but they got the LGBTQ to drop its opposition, so I feel like I’m not in a position to object on their behalf.Report

      • Saul DeGraw in reply to Will Truman says:

        @will-truman

        I just wrote a separate post on the issue.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Will Truman says:

        Re: Notaries

        Most will happily come to see you and take care of what you need (for a nominal fee).Report

      • j r in reply to Will Truman says:

        Re: Notaries

        Most will happily come to see you and take care of what you need (for a nominal fee).

        Yes. And the best ones can also supply three-penis wine for the reception.Report

      • Mo in reply to Will Truman says:

        Banks typically have notaries.Report

      • j r in reply to Will Truman says:

        @mad-rocket-scientist

        Wasn’t sure that was even a real thing. I was just making a reference to The League.Report

      • Alan Scott in reply to Will Truman says:

        @j-r , I have no serious problem with the Utah Compromise. I wouldn’t want religious exceptions that broad for my state, but then that’s why I choose to live in California and not Utah.

        My general test for these sorts of laws is whether religious exceptions apply to all fields of discrimination or just to discrimination against LGBT individuals. Basically, it’s a measure of seriousness–if a law isn’t going to apply to religions beliefs that the vast majority of us can agree are repugnant, then it’s clear to me that the law is more about sanctioning certain forms of discrimination than ensuring religious freedom. And while I’m uncomfortable with the fact that the example language seems to specifically target LGBT descrimination, that’s only the example rather than the law itself.

        I also don’t like that the law calls out the BSA specifically as being exempt. The law should either not exempt boy scouts at all, or exempt all similarly situated organizations.Report

  13. Mad Rocket Scientist says:

    A4: See also Lincoln & Omaha Nebraska (NPR dubbed them The Silicone Prairie).Report

  14. LeeEsq says:

    R4: Atheists in the United States always seem to struggle with finding a representative speaker that is safe for prime time. The people willing to be spokespeople for atheists are either really aggressive about it and often in ways that can come across as entitled like Chris Hitchens or they have some really non-standard and squeaky beliefs about other subjects. From an old usenet science fiction group, I learned about one woman from the early 1980s or so that was something of an atheists spokesperson but ended up getting ditched once she revealed having some really out there beliefs regarding sex.Report

  15. Mad Rocket Scientist says:

    C2: t takes many years to master naval aviation. A number of countries have aircraft carriers, but very few harness their full potential.

    That nails it perfectly. Flat tops are tricky beasts to master, and require an extremely well trained & disciplined crew to operate & fight them. When I was in, before we deployed, my unit would start training with the ship we would sail with months in advance of the deployment, and we trained extensively during the cruise, and this was just a small ship launching hovercraft, which requires a lot less effort & equipment that a Helo carrier, which itself requires a lot less than launching airplanes.

    Having a carrier & being able to use it to effectively project power are leagues apart.Report

    • Kolohe in reply to Mad Rocket Scientist says:

      I would swear we discussed that very article in a linky friday or another post a month ago when it came out. Definitely, the news of a new carrier really doesn’t answer the basic question of what the PLAN (and PLANAF) is going to do with it – besides try to look good. (the foremost thought on every aviator’s mind)

      The article does gloss over the (possibly irrelevant) detail that the US (and some others) are trying to move out of the steam catapult biz into the electromagnetic biz.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Kolohe says:

        When its coordinator is not careful, sometimes LF does have reruns. Apologies if that is the case.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Kolohe says:

        It may have just been something I came across (or maybe from your twitter feed); searching the site aircraft carrier doesn’t show anything in the last year (where it isn’t used metaphorically). I may actually thinking of an article Likko posted over 3 years ago.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Kolohe says:

        Last I heard they had a working railgun style catapult that was slated to be installed on the latest carrier under construction.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Kolohe says:

        it depends on the definition of “working”, nobody’s actually driven a Ford, lately, (perhaps this year), but the delays in the EMALS have been masked by the fact the entire ship building small e enterprise has had every timeline pushed to the right because of sequester and uncontrolled cost overruns in every dang program. (and that’s not even counting the F-35 gobbling every budget in sight).Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Kolohe says:

        @kolohe

        True enough.Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to Mad Rocket Scientist says:

      just a small ship launching hovercraft

      Where did you keep the eels?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41aoReport

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        Aft equipment locker, starboard side (port side aft locker was for fire hoses & AFFF). Absolute Pain in the Ass to get them back in the locker after cleaning or maintenance. Was never sure why SeaOps required we carry them…Report

  16. Michael Cain says:

    E2: When I read this type of story, I always note that the emphasis is on turning the developing world into consumers of content. I’m much more interested in the problem of turning them into creators of content. The reviewed phone runs rings around this bad boy, with the exception of screen real estate and input devices. In addition to causing a near-riot on an evening flight from NJ to Denver (someone yelling, “Hey! This guy’s got UNIX on a laptop!” followed by a thundering herd of geeks converging from both directions), I was able to create lots of content and software on it. With some obvious exceptions — eg, editing hours of video requires huge amounts of storage — the processing and storage available in a phone isn’t the limiting factor — it’s often a matter of getting enough readable text on the screen, and having some way to input text at a reasonable rate.Report

  17. Notme says:

    C3 I thought the reason to learn spanish was that we’re going to be speaking spanish given all of the illegals obama is helping flood this country with.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Notme says:

      What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks many languages? A polyglot. What do you call someone who speaks only one language? An American.Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to Notme says:

      Years ago, the giant cable company I worked for conducted a batch of field interviews in East LA to see if the foreign-language packages we sold were aligned with what the customers wanted (yes, I know how strange that sounds). They weren’t (and probably still aren’t). What the customers wanted was Spanish-language news from a variety of countries, but the English-language version of the cartoon and music channels that their kids watched. I knew one of the ethnographers who did a batch of the interviews. He said that there was very much a “what our kids can do is too limited if they don’t learn English well” feel to it.Report

      • Yeah, this. I think immigration could reach a tipping point where the standards do not apply, but (a) it’ll take decades and (b) we’re nowhere near that tipping point.

        This isn’t particularly related, but I’m reminded of what a Hispanic shopworker (second generation, I lived in the southwest at the time) said to me once, though it’s only a bit related. Something to the effect of: “The first generation risks their lives to get here. The second generation sacrifices their language and culture to try to get ahead. The third generation says this land was stolen and should be given back to Mexico.”Report

      • Alan Scott in reply to Michael Cain says:

        I was just having a really interesting conversation with my grandmother yesterday. Her mother immigrated from Mexico, while her biracial father moved from Louisiana to California where he could pass as white.

        She talked about how they clearly made important sacrifices so that she and her siblings could grow up as white Americans, but how at the same time she was robbed of much of her culture, and of our family’s latter day attempts to sort of re-discover it.Report

      • The third generation says this land was stolen and should be given back to Mexico.

        I don’t pay as much attention as I should, but hasn’t this largely disappeared? Especially given the history over the last few years, someone who says, “We’d be better off if Mexico City were in charge of government services like police protection” sounds kind of silly. Despite recent improvements, the murder rate in Juárez is still ten times the rate across the river in El Paso. Even Charles Truxillo, who’s probably thought more about it than anyone, proposes a República del Norte that is US Southwest-centric, with a few states from northern Mexico tacked on, but having nothing to do with Mexico City.Report