Linky Friday #148: Crime & Commerce
Crime:
Image by sam_churchill 
[Cr2] Postal worker arrested after delivering the mail naked.
[Cr3] Microsoft is getting into the pre-crime prevention business.
[Cr4] An entire police department in Florida was arrested for money laundering.
[Cr5] The star-crossed love story between an inmate and a guard in Louisiana… kind of made socially safer by the fact that the inmate was male, I guess, and that we can blame for profit prisons or something.
[Cr6] Exxon finds itself in the unenviable position of people asking them “Hey, isn’t that what the tobacco companies did?”
Commerce:
Image by wahousegop
[Co2] They’re melting the candy bars their customers want nothing to do with and selling it back to them.
[Co3] I can sort of understand what this guy is getting at, but I think the point would be better made on a more attractive website, and perhaps he could draw some revenue with some ads. {via Vikram}
[Co4] Priceonomics asks if checked baggage fees are too low. Gary Leff says no.
[Co5] How North Dakota became an epicenter for drone development. Setting aside my usual giddiness with the exploitation of non-coastal human resources and development, the great expanse really is good for this sort of thing.
Education:
[E1] Randomized drug tests bad. Fraternities bad. What’s a good ole boy to think?
[E2] Getting kids to learn is hard. Making sure they show up, though, is less hard. So let’s measure that. I wrote of gameable metrics in 2011.
[E3] Well, that’s one way for private schools to recruit students in a rough market.
[E4] A new book peeks behind the curtains at graduate admissions programs and how they go about making their selections.
[E5] NPR looks at whether it’s cost-effective to pay teachers $100,000 a year.
Gender:
Image by cdrummbks
[G2] Could depression and anxiety explain some of the male-female pay gap?
[G3] IJR looks at where, when, and how women experience street harassment.
[G4] The murky, masculine, sex-suffused world of the movie detective.
[G5] When I’m not careful, I have the male equivalent of “Resting Bitch Face“… which did foist upon me a greater degree of awareness of how I can come across. And that’s without the additional penalties women face.
Housing:
Image by jeffalbert
[H2] Residents of Boulder have found a new, inventive argument to oppose more housing: Pet density.
[H3] Don’t do it! It’s a trap! The hurricanes are just lying in waiting!
[H4] This post, about overdevelopment of low-cost housing, would be a lot more interesting if it told us where it is.
[H5] Micro-apartments are making a splash in the midwest. I’ve done the “micro-apartment” thing, of sorts in small-town Deseret.
World:
Image by DMahendra
[W2] There may be a link between droughts and civil war, but according to the Royal Economic Society the evidence is that it’s a weak link.
[W3] Our attempts at supporting gay rights in Africa may have backfired.
[W4] Women in Brazil are being warned not to have children, due to an outbreak of the Zika virus.
[W5] An Australia man is growing too many potatoes.
[G6] US Secretary of the Navy asks the department to look into changing the remaining rating names that have “man” in them (e.g. ‘engineman’, ‘yeoman’)
(Ray Mabus will also henceforth been known as Administrative Assistant of the Navy and Marine Corps.)Report
Mabus has become a joke to many Navy members & vets.Report
Although I did always think the base ratings, Seaman, Airman, Fireman, were all kind of off.
For those unaware, Airmen handle all the aviation aspects of a ship, both planes & helicopters; firemen handle engineering & other mechanical & primary electrical systems of a ship or boat; seaman handle everything else, from deck operations to navigation to administrative tasks to combat control systems. I’d switch them over to Aviation, Engineering, & Operations.Report
Cr2: I still don’t know how anyone thinks such things are good ideas. Same with dick pics to women you don’t know on dating sites.
Cr4: When is it time to go back to square one and start again?
E3: Not quite. The lawsuit is specifically about increasing enrollment in the Spanish department at Amherst College, not increasing enrollment at Amherst College overall. According to wiki, Amherst received just under 8500 applications in 2014 and admitted just under 1200 students. This is an acceptance rate of 14 percent. I don’t think they are worried about filling their freshman class every year. They also have a healthy 2.15 billion dollar endowment according to wiki.
H1: So the solution seems to be having housing or building permits done at a state level rather than a local level. Makes enough sense. Though from what I read, San Francisco and New York would need to build housing at an ungodly speed in order to reduce the cost of rent. This creates a problem. Do you focus on the neediest now like seniors on fixed incomes or do you say screw them and focus on a long-term plan?Report
Most metroplexes spill across state boundaries, California is the exception due to the oolies of history.Report
I would say more due to geography. It would be hard for coastal cities in California to spill into other states for metro-expansion. It is rather easy for Boston and NYC to do so.Report
That what I mean about the oolies of history. It’s an historical accident that NYC straddles three states while the SF Bay area is entirely in one.
Eta: that is, its a function of when the states were settled and founded (by English speaking white people)Report
…more due to geography…
Exactly. Consider the 100 largest MSAs in the US. There are several in the NE urban corridor that cross state borders (more that do than don’t, I think). Outside that corridor, there are 14. They’re rare in the Deep South, and there are only three that are west of the Mississippi River.
Statelets and navigable rivers as the state borders. Chicago is the only real exception, sprawling enormously along the lakefront.Report
Everywhere you have navigable rivers as state borders, you have split cities.
Not just here, you have Buda and Pest too.Report
That’s true in a lot of places, but you’d still be dealing with fewer entities that have a broader view of the social need. Municipalities can more easily rely on other municipalities to provide housing for their maids. Harder to do that with whole states.Report
So do you start fixing the problem now, or do you continue putting off fixing the problem so it’ll take even longer to fix later?Report
Sooner. How are you going to get states to centralize their building process?Report
On that we’re in agreement on the when.
The how remains a thorny problem since building permits in high density areas are heavily bound up with housing restrictions and have passionate advocates in favor of the status quos with deep financial reasons to do resist and very convenient excuses to figleaf their motivations to their credulous supporters.Report
Especially those with “home rule” cities built into their state constitutions.
If I were just trying to drive density, I might start by banning annexation or new city creation, and doing away with private sewer districts. That more-or-less confines major job creation to the existing municipal boundaries. Of course, it probably has the side effect of driving land prices through the ceiling, exacerbating some of the other problems.Report
Makes sense, if NIMBY-ism is an issue, it helps to make the decisions be less sensitive to that NIMBY-ism.Report
Japan does its zoning on the national level and has remarkably affordable housing despite its high population density because of that.Report
Yes, the 24000 dollar question though is how one transitions a housing market from a fished up mess like NY, LA or SF into something better?Report
I suspect that people are going to need to stop writing stuff on the Internet and start doing the very boring and often maddening work of going to development meetings and other government functions and potentially run for office on an explicit platform of streamlining the building permit process.
Basically get involved in the messy work of democracy including dealing with the eccentrics and/or activists who have the time and energy to attend such meetings.
Stereotyping but I imagine that Matt Y supporters are too busy and don’t have enough skin in the game to attend these meetings.Report
I don’t know. Its going to involve a lot of drudge work like Saul pointed out at the local and state levels. Your going to have to get enough people into the legislative bodies and find away to get votes from the uninterested but not opposed.Report
Cr2: I’m thinking maybe he saw the Naked Man episode of How I Met Your Mother one too many times.Report
This reference escapes me of course.Report
Excellent comrade. By calling this Linky Friday Crime and Commerce, you are making the connection that the criminal and businesses classes are the same. Soon you will be ready for full fledged Marxism.Report
I’m finding there are a helluva lot of comrades that aren’t ML.
FWIW 😉Report
I fear I have disgraced my comrades. Crime & Commerce is an utter redundancy. I might as well have made in Crime & Crime, no?Report
G1: Why is this an argument for a gender-neutral pronoun? So that folks who don’t want to identify transgender folks by their preferred pronouns have another option? Honestly, screw that.
I doubt someone will be found in violation of the law for mistakenly using the wrong pronoun. The law is designed to prevent willful malice. A gender neutral pronoun does nothing but give people a way out.Report
I think the impetus would (or should be) either you go gender-neutral completely or you honor gender identities as announced or best discerned. A GNP offers the former option, which for a lot of businesses may be the best policy all-around. (And, I would argue, the better policy for all impersonal interactions).Report
@will-truman — Okay so I know a little bit about this. The thing is, it’s usually easy enough to tell I’m a woman. On the other hand, I’ve had the rare delight of watching shop workers struggle to talk about me without using a pronoun — which is actually pretty silly and really they should just ask. I mean, how many time can you call me “the customer” before it sounds like robot-speak?
If you call me “he,” I’ll correct you. Easy enough. Please just respect what I say.
Which, btw, cis people get misgendered sometimes also. Is happens more often to we trans folks, but I have “genderweird” cis friends who get it from time to time.
(It’s arguably worse for us, since it’s a “sensitive issue” for us in a way it isn’t for cis folks. But all the same.)
Regarding gender-neutral stuff, it’s fine but actually kinda alienating, since few people will “they” a cis person they way they will me. This is called degendering, and it’s a problem in its own way.
I mean, maybe in some gender-sparkly queer-utopia, pronouns would just work differently. So fine. But we don’t live in queer-utopia, and I want to be treated more or less the same as a cis woman. Call me she just the same as you call a cis woman she.
I mean, you might get it wrong the first time, but what-evs. It hurts my feelings, of course. But that’s life. Calling me “they” all the time also hurts my feelings. Being trans is complicated.Report
That makes sense, @will-truman .
@veronica-d
This is something I sort of explored in the piece I wrote about Mayo identifying those around us, often with gendered terms. I never wrote the follow up piece to that, wherein I talk about how the overly robotic way and lack of a GNP means you eventually have to guess and that we should be understanding of this.
For instance, there is someone who lives in my building who I am almost certain is a transwoman. She wears dresses/skirts, makeup, her hair long, jewelry, etc. But her body type and features are very phenotypically male. But I don’t know that for certain. She could be a cis woman. Or he could be a male who likes wearing dresses and skirts and makeup and long hair and jewelry. I’ve never had chance to interact directly with this person so just walking up and saying, “Hey… what are you?” feels like the height of insensitivity and offensiveness. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. It’d only matter if I had other reason to engage with her and wanted to make sure I did so using the proper terminology.
So, yea, I guess sometimes we have to guess but I think if everyone’s aim is understanding and empathy, we should be okay.Report
@kazzy — It’s pretty simple, if this person consistently presents in a manner that codes socially “female,” then call her “she,” unless she says otherwise. (Or he/they say otherwise, as the case may be.)
The thing is, most drag queens and crossdressers will take “she” pronouns when en femme, which obviously. You do get the occasional cis guy who likes skirts — which fine. I can usually read those guys differently from trans women, but not always. It comes down to empathy and experience.
Anyhow, it’s a game of signals and probability. If a man goes out en femme all the time, then he probably shouldn’t complain if he gets “she’d.” He’s free to correct them. If he gets pissy about it, then he’s throwing trans women under the bus and he can fuck off.Report
But isn’t there something inherently, well, gendered about that? That is where I get confused.
If we call a dude who identifies as a dude and wears a skirt something other than a dude, we are saying, “Skirts are for non-dudes.”
Imagine the inverse… calling a woman who wears a tie a man.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I guess I’m saying, ideally, we wouldn’t judge gender based on how people dress. Or wear their hair. Or whether they wear makeup or not.Report
@kazzy — Of course it’s gendered. Like, do you ever gender people?
Okay, so as you walk around today, do an experiment. As you look at people, try to notice at what point you assign a gender to them. If you talk to them (or about them), what pronouns do you use?
Okay, now I walk up to you. What gender do you assign to me? What pronouns do you use?
I’m clearly signaling that I’m a woman. I have breasts, for example. I dress in female-coded clothes.
Which look, pretending we live in queer utopia and clothes have no gender — that’s fine, but only if you do it consistently. Do you do it consistently? Do you even really want that?
Some people want to be degendered. Others do not. This is complicated, but if you degender everyone, then lots of folks are going to find it off-putting.Report
Oh, I certainly gender people… consciously and unconsciously. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t gender people. At least, we should if folks want to be gendered.
What I’m trying to make sense of is two ideas that seem to combat one another:
On the one hand, we talk about gender as a social construct and we want to break down the binary and challenge gender norms and tell boys its totes cool if they want to wear dresses or long hair or play with makeup and don pink and its equally totes cool if girls want to play sports and wear pants and don blue and cut their hair short and eschew femininity.
On the other hand, we’re saying that if we see someone in a dress and heals, we should assume they identify as female.
Now, maybe we just need to live with a square peg wedged into a round hole… I can accept that. It would just seem to me that ideally we’d divorce gender identity from expression. If gender identity is about a state of mind, than it shouldn’t matter how one looks or presents. We shouldn’t rely on those signals because, ideally, all those potential symbols would be available to people as non-symbolic things.
But maybe I’m *WAY* off here. None of this is an argument against trans people existing or existing in the manner in which they want or need to exist. It is trying to make sense of what — to me! — seem like disjointed ideas.Report
@kazzy — It’s about competing needs, and the way that ideology can get in the way of normal life.
Hint: most people are not queer radicals.
In fact, most trans people are not queer radicals.
Not everyone want to “erase gender,” and while that might be a good thing, depending on how it plays out specifically, it’s not how things are right now.
But I have to navigate this gendered world, as a gendered person, right now!, and some people are really kinda “non gendered” — and not all of them explicitly identify as “queer” or “radical” or whatever. Some are just that woman who works in the library and doesn’t worry to much about conforming to “femininity.”
Some of us are very gendered. For example, me.
But also a lot of cis folks.
Gender feels are complicated.
But my point is, don’t assume the “erase gender” crowd is right about everything. They are right about some things, and I strongly support respecting their personal relationship with gender. But theirs ain’t mine.
BTW, there is a separate axis to the “erase gender” question, namely the idea that we are not attacking gender in its entirely, but only the power axis of gender. In other words, masc and femme remain as they are, but the idea that masc is superior or dominant — those things get reduced.
Or not. No one knows everything about gender.Report
This goes back to my point about defaults. If your default is to use gender pronounced except when dealing with transsexuals, then you’re being deliberately disrespectful. If you’re doing it as a matter of custom, that changes things. More below in my response to Richard.Report
Which is great, until the first time they say “he” to someone who just has to make a big deal out of it (maybe they are just having a real bad day, or maybe they are just an ass, doesn’t really matter to the poor sod who got it wrong & gets a public dressing down, or an impolite letter), instead of being understanding. Then they are going to be as gender neutral as possible whenever the gender is even remotely in question.
And I’m not saying that you, or your community have to address this and deal with it, just realize that it only takes one or two such incidents to make people gun shy.Report
The problem with customized personal pronouns is that this is not how language works. Pronouns are part of the background material that usually don’t quite hit actual consciousness, much like articles. We usually don’t stop and think “should I use “the” or “a” or no article at all here?” These aspects of language run on autopilot. The problem with the standard pronouns is that they no longer consistently correctly match the reality on the ground. It may be that neither “he” or “she” apply, or either might be incorrect in ways that are not immediately obvious.
Customized pronouns are a terrible solution. They not only force pronouns into conscious consideration, they make pronouns an exercise in rote memorization: what arbitrary string of phonemes does this person want me to use? This is even assuming that the other person has any reason to know what this is. The arbitrary string of phonemes becomes part of the introduction, and everyone is expected to remember it. Truth: it ain’t gonna happen, even with the best will in the world.
Which brings me to the political aspect. There is a legitimate complaint about people using a pronoun that does not correctly apply. The dicks of this world merrily take this on: “Jenner? He is totally a dude!” If the non-dicks of the world choose to vocally take offense, we are feeding the trolls. If the non-dicks of the world choose to vocally take offense at other non-dicks for the offense of poor rote memorization skills or of using language in an insufficiently unnatural way, then the former group places its non-dick status in question. It also gives the genuine dicks good ammunition.
A non-gender specific pronoun is absolutely the solution, because it operates within the way language works. There even is a candidate in place: the singular “they.” This has been in routine use for at least four centuries, much like the singular “you.” Self-appointed grammar police don’t like it, when they happen to notice it, but even granting that this is a problem, it is one that will go away of its own accord.
The issue of pronouns has been miscast as one of preference and politics. There are solid historical reasons why this happened, but it is a blind alley. Insist on staying in this blind alley and one ends up like Abe Simpson yelling at the sunrise.Report
@richard-hershberger
I was needlessly harsh on Will’s comment there and ought to apologize. For the reasons you and he offer, I was in the wrong. My apologies, sir.Report
With an attitude like that, I can only conclude that you don’t understand how the intertubes work.Report
I’m still trying to figure out how to put a book mark in my Nook. The tassle is too short to tie it on.Report
De nada. I thought about explaining further in the blurb, since I’ve gotten that kind of reaction before, but wanted to mention the tie thing too.Report
The thing is that they do match reality, with 99+% accuracy, nearly everywhere you go. That’s why you don’t think of it in the first place.
There are places where asking pronouns is just part of the way people interact because there are a lot of people who have unusual pronouns or are fluid or trans, and I’m sure that people who spend time in those spaces don’t view it as weird to ask as a matter of course.
But is everyone else is getting next to nothing but positive feedback as to their gender-spotting abilities, day in and day out, it’ll always be an obstacle.Report
There is that, but the singular “they” is increasing in use, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Just a few years ago it was very unusual to see it applied to a specific individual of known gender, but those crazy kids nowadays are starting to do just that.Report
Online, certainly. To borrow from the old cartoon, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re an anything.
But in real life, it’s fixing a system that, for nearly everyone in nearly every situation, just isn’t broken.Report
The main problems I have with “they” is:
1) It’s already in use for another, related term.
2) It implies a degree of impersonality. You’re dealing with a hypothetical person, or a person too far off the distance to be able to discern a gender.
To pick an example (on my mind, because due January 19th)… I’d have a difficult time referring to Marvin as “they” because, well, we loved Marvin to the greatest extent that such a thing is possible. I’d also have difficulty with “they” in reference to someone standing in front of me. A gender-neutral pronoun that was in regular rotation as being simply gender-neutral, though…. yeah, I’d like that to be handy. It’s not with “they.”Report
(1) The same can be said of the singular “you.” George Fox, the 17th century Quaker, wrote at length condemning the usage. Yet the number of problems and the amount of confusion this usage produces is approximately zero.
(2) As I noted in an earlier reply to LTL FTC, this seems to be changing. I too find it odd to use the singular “they” in reference to a distinct individual of known gender. But I’m an old fart. Over at Language Log, where they talk about this sort of this sort of thing, they periodically report on just such uses.
(3) It’s what is actually happening. If we are having an If I Were God discussion, then we can do much better. But in the meantime, this is the reality on the ground, (and has been, it turns out, all along).Report
The problems under (1) while small, do seem to have led to the creation of “y’all” (which, on its own, is probably enough to justify keeping the singular “you”).
Perhaps we’ll see a matching “th’all” in time.Report
G2: While correlation is not causation, it’d be pretty easy to test your speculation vs. the authors here, because there would be different temporal relationships between the pay and the mental health issues.Report
Co3: The fundamental problem with internet performance conversations is that the people who most need to hear them are the people least likely to listen to them.Report
Will,
many thanks to you and others that put these links together each week.Report
Glad to do it.Report
Co4- I had read a while back (of course I can’t find the article now) that some of the cost differential is due to how the money is taxed and the different rates and such.
E4- “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and, to laughter from committee members asked, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?” Mmmm, bigotry is OK if we do it…Report
[Co4] I think the tax arbitrage hypothesis is bunk. The bag fees thing is a Kayak/Priceline thing. At the end of the day 7.5% of $25 each way doesn’t matter in customer preferences. However, $50 bucks matters a lot on relative Kayak/Priceline rankings.Report
Re: E4 – For another BSDI that’s topical, look at how many of the hashtags snarking about the seditious bastards in OR drag in class/region markers that aren’t even applicable (i.e. not just a stereotype, but the wrong one to boot).Report
I do wish my ideological fellow travelers were less inclined to make fun of hicks and rednecks and such.Report
I do wish less people would do things that are mockable. And said rednecks mock back just as hard on all us weak libtards too. So this is just normal family fight.Report
Fewer peopleReport
Report
Argh, there are nothing annoyinger then a grammer or spelling scolds.Report
Annoyinger is not a word.
I also would like to point out that’s neither a grammar nor a spelling scold, but a *lexicon* scold.Report
Those is preciously what a grammer scolds wuld say!Report
Of all the scolds they’re the annoyingest.Report
The most annoyingest.Report
A link I saw this morning that changes some things that were once discussed pretty thoroughly in comments.
Apparently, there is now a “smoking gun” in the classified email scandal.
In response to Clinton’s request for a set of since-redacted talking points, Sullivan writes, “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.” Clinton responds “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”
Now, of course, it’s Fox News reporting this and the only copy of the email that I’ve been able to see a shot of is on Hot Air so this is still up in the air.
Of course, none of this will matter in practice because of various reasons, but the old argument was always a variant of “after the fact” classification being different from before the fact classification.
Of course, the counter-argument would be “well, do we know that this happened or do we just have an email saying that *IF* something doesn’t work *THEN* something should be done and to say that that’s evidence for something having happened is Affirming The Consequent which is a fallacy”.
Which, I suppose, is true as far as it goes…Report
If that e-mail happens to be true, Clinton deserves to be pilloried anyway. It’s irresponsible to suggest such a thing,and worse if you’re management.Report
“non-paper” is a term of art. (and I think I’ve seen this before, because I remember looking that up before).
A set of (press) talking points is ipso facto unclassified. Their generation and internal dissemination is something that is also unclassified but for internal use only (often with the label FOUO). There’s also Sensitive, but Unclassified, which I’m not sure the state department uses.
There are often times where one can be working in some sort of secure facility, and the easiest way to communicate is via a classified network (because the unclassified machine is at another desk, or is a shared resource, or whatever). You can take an unclassified document off such a classified network and handjam it into an unclassified network (i.e. type it over again by hand). Even if it’s a classified document if there are portion markings, you can extract the portions that are unclassified (that’s the point of the portion markings). This should though, be a last resort. (and in certain cases, you need a two person check to make sure you’re not copying over classified stuff).
So again, it’s a case where it would be considered not the best practice today, and I’m not sure if it would be considered not the practice back then, but either then or now, it’s more than likely within the rules (really depends on the underlying information and how it was marked specifically)
(though, overall that’s the problem I’ve always had with the email scandal. H. Clinton is supposed to be a leader, and leaders are supposed to be ahead of the curve on best practices – not being dragged into them once getting called out.) (see also SecDef Ashton Carter)Report
I did not know that.
So this isn’t a deal at all. Fair enough.Report
Well, it’s a deal, but no bigger deal than it already was. The biggest problem with the bruhaha is that is has obscured real issues of
-over classification, misclassification, and getting things declassified that don’t need to be classified
– document management practices with one foot in the 19th century and one in the 21st
– rules for conduct that get applied arbitrarily depending on how high up and/or politically connected one is
– resource allocations that are still mostly set by legacy cold war organization size and scope
– nobody at the top tier of bosses keeping some of the underbosses in line – or at least having them all tow the same lion in the same way.
among other things.Report
It would also depend on the context of the paper in question. We’ve got stuff running around our company marked “proprietary” but 90% of any given paper or slide (Powerpoint runs the world) isn’t. It’s not uncommon, if you’re properly trained, to turn a ‘propriety’ slide/paper into an open one by quickly stripping it of the few proprietary bits.
Now, the word here is “trained” but I’m guessing aides to the Secretary of State are like any executive aides, and thus trained at least for that — proper security clearances, etc.
So, just as an example — I’ve personally been involved in taking a powerpoint presentation we wanted to give to a potential customer, and had it turned quickly non-proprietary. (We removed two slides out of 40, and removed less than 5 bullet points through the rest). We rant it through the relevant security guy, and sent it out in under 2 hours.
And we did that because we were getting hemming and hawing about whether or not they were a signatory of the relevant agreements that meant we could send them the proprietary stuff.
Now all that’s just a “just so” story, a thing that happens that has no relevance to what’s been reported about Clinton.
Except for this: Where’s the details? Every one of the emails and other stuff that’s been ‘devastating’ to her has collapsed as soon as the actual details were released. Releasing “sounds bad stripped of context” as an attack has been, well, the main tactic here. (The context most often being “it was classified after the email was sent. Generally years later”).
So it pays to be skeptical of yet another “HILLARY IS GOING DOWN!” email release lacking the context to judge.
It’s why people, by and large, have stopped biting. It’s always cries of wolf, and no wolf around.Report
This is an interesting notion… in my experience it is not true even in Silicon Valley – I have no idea why we would expect it in Foggy Bottom. Executive leaders sometime adjudicate best practice conflicts (within their organizations), but I’ve seen little evidence that they see themselves bound by them. Like the Pirate Code, they are more like guidelines than rules.Report
[G1] — This is obviously a good thing on the whole, although I’d prefer they limit the stricter controls to public employees and let private things stay private. In other words, I expect police officers to call me by my correct pronouns, and those who refuse should be fired. But a restaurant?
I dunno. I mean, I’m not going to eat there if they are rude to me. Can we legislate rudeness? Blah. On the other hand, I support “public accommodation” laws, since I want to know that when I travel I can stop at the one diner in town, just like every other traveler. So anyway. My point is, if I walk in and they just keep “sir-ing” me, and refuse to stop, that makes my meal pretty intolerable. Double blah.
Just stop being fucking transphobes people! Just fucking stop. It’s dumb we even need laws like this.
[G4] — I love Raymond Chandler. I mean, the books. The movies? Some are good, some are not. But the books! The man could write.
Yeah, they’re sexist and racist and homophobic as fuck. Whatevs. It was a long time ago.
Thing is, moving forward to today, we have both Veronica Mars and Jessica Jones to prove that, indeed, women can be as hardboiled as we wanna be. So yay. More hardboiled detective gals, says I.
[G5] — I like the theory that RBF is a response to men, namely the fact that walking around will a smile invites every stiff-dick on the subway to harass you, and of course RBF does the opposite. Even I get into a RBF mood sometimes, just so dudes will let me breathe. I expect it’s a thousand times worse for your average pretty cis woman.
Speaking of Jessica Jones, don’t ever tell us to smile.Report
G1: This seems totally obvious to me even absent any thought about the state of affairs with respect to gender and trans acceptance. “Call people what they want to be called” is one of the fundamental rules of etiquette that I’ve always assumed everybody knew. You don’t call Michael “Mike” if he wants to be called Michael. You don’t call your neighbor’s wife “sweety.” You don’t call a General “Major.” You don’t call the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party.” It’s just rude.
Misidentifying somebody by accident will sometimes happen with names, pronouns, titles, etc. But once it’s cleared up, just call people what they want to be called. Consistently failing to do that is a breach of workplace etiquette or customer service severe enough to be dealt with by management.Report
You’d be surprised at who refuses to accept that. They’ll persist in calling Caitlynn Jenner Bruce, for instance.
I’ve found renaming them and sticking to it to be at least amusing. Petty, but fun. And a constant reminder of what a dick they’re being.Report
W3: Yeah, and also that whole lynching thing in the South a few decades ago was totally that fault of those busybodies who talked out against slavery.Report
@tod-kelly Oh, I don’t think anyone can really say that the adverse effects are our fault in any primary sense. If what we’re doing is making things worse for the group we are actively trying to protect, that should change what we do, I think. Or else, it’s a tacit admission that we’re doing it for our own sake and not to actually help the people we’re saying we want to help.Report
I think that’s a dangerous way to think, though. I’m having a hard time thinking of a persecuted minority whose collective lives didn’t get worse when others first started standing with them.
It’s like saying that the civil right movement should have been nipped in the bud because it just made life worse for a lot of black at the time and, besides, those white people who supported it were just being PC to feel better about themselves.Report
Are we standing “with” them, though? It sounds like we’re standing for them when they (unlike blacks in the south) had some comparative advantage in anonymity.
If the depiction is accurate, it makes me think of the conflict minerals debacle.Report
Co2: Say what you will about Fight Club, but that soap was a high quality soap in its own right.Report
G1: You have buried the lede. The important part is the requirement to use the “name of their choice, even if the person’s official identification states a different name. ” My name of choice is “Lord and Master.”Report
There was a player on the Southern Tech football team whose name was Sir [conventional first name] [conventional last name].
As an aside, one of the things about college football is you see waves of naming conventions in African-American communities. There were a lot of what I would consider to be aspirational names during that people. Judge, Priest, even an Officer. Very few now, but the number of legacy names (so-and-so junior, so-and-so the third) have become extremely common. I’m looking forward to a lot of Baracks in ten years. (Which I think is cool. Barack is a great name.)Report
I usually like noms de music that include honorifics. Sir Lord Comic and Captain Sensible are two of my faves.Report
When I named my cat, I chose Bustopher Jones based on a poem. But that didn’t seem fitting so I ultimately went with Professor Bustopher Jones III. Note: There were no prior Bustopher Joneses, professors or otherwise.Report
Lord Buckley was good too. And nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.Report
Cr5: The link goes to a story about a man in Alabama losing >250 pounds. No mention that I can see of guards or inmates.Report
Fixed.Report
He ate them.Report
Water all over keyboard! Damn you Schilling!!!!Report
when it comes to alleviating the housing crisis, Matt Yglesias says that Seattle is showing San Francisco and New York how it’s done.
Let me guess: by encouraging people to live in parked cars. On their freeways, where no one would notice.Report
Will, you missed the biggest event for today.
Today is Roy Batty’s Incept date.
Happy birthday Roy, many happy returns, well more than a handful at least. Enjoy those C Beams.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/somewhere-blade-runners-roy-batty-just-stepped-off-the-1751786701Report
Believe it or not, I still haven’t seen that movie. It’s right up there with Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.Report
Sorry don’t believe it. Not true. Unpossible.Report
Yeah, I’ve drafted then deleted several comments. I cannot get my head around it.Report
The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.Report
That’s an issue that you really ought to rectify.
It still feels like the future (which is quite an accomplishment for a movie from the early 80’s).Report
Yeah Bladerunner is a true classic. It has been copied so much, poorly usually, that it’s influence is everywhere in scifi. Rutger Hauer is an underrated actor. Ford isn’t bad either. You could watch the flick with no dialogue, just soundtrack and visuals and it would still be stunning.Report
I’m trying to remember who it was who noted that Hauer wrote / heavily edited the famous “Tears in the rain” monologue at the end of the film, “…for which he was rewarded with the lead role in ‘Hobo with a Shotgun.'”Report
I went back to my review of Hobo With A Shotgun expecting to see something to the effect of “for a silly gratuitously violent movie, it’s got a surprising amount of heart” and I found my review that couldn’t really recommend it at all.
Really? I find myself asking myself. How in the hell do you remember it so fondly?Report
Ah, Rutger Hauer’s career…
There once was a movie with Rutger Hauer, pre-crazy Gary Busey, F. Murray Abraham, and Charles S. Dutton.
The plot was based on “The Most Dangerous Game” and it involved rich jagoffs hunting a homeless man. From Seattle (it looked nothing like Seattle). Played by Ice-T.
It was terrible. I’m still unreasonably fond of it.Report
I remember that! Something about Ice-T. I just can’t turn it off.Report
Gary Busey’s has been crazy for a long time, maybe after he played Buddy Holly, what’s the complaint about the Marlowe type narration in Blade Runner, it doesn’t make sense without it, just pure visual spectacle,Report
Yes, that was terrible, there was one with Hauer, Mimi Rogers and Joan Chen, along similar lines to the opening to Running Man, Deadlock, now called Wedlock,Report
Blind Fury. ‘Nuf said.Report
Flying cars. If you want it to seem like the future, you’ve got to have flying cars. Well, and mention that they depend on commercial fusion power.Report
That’s like saying you’ve never read Huck Finn,Report
I’ve seen PB but not Blade Runner or any Monty Python.Report
What the hell is wrong with you people?!Report
If it makes you feel better, I have seen all three, and can quote the script to Monty Python and the Holy Grail at some length. I subscribe to the definition of a wit as someone who can quote Monty Python verbatim, but doesn’t.Report
I, sadly, can do the same for Grail; frankly, as much as I love the movie, I’m not sure how comfortable I feel recommending it to someone who’s not already into any of several things (English/absurdist humor, medieval stuff).
I also recall older transfers of the film being extremely dark and muddy (Lord knows that’s how my well-worn VHS looked), though I believe there’s a new Blu-Ray release that may have cleared that up?
What I am saying is, I rank Blade Runner as nearly film-historic essential for everybody; Princess Bride & Grail are maybe a little more narrow in their appeal.Report
Life of Brian is probably a more accessible film, assuming the recommendee has suitable tolerance of irreverence toward religion. And they Did The Research – it’s my favorite history of the subject with the exception of the first reel of “Last Temptation”.Report
I’ve seen the first 20 minutes something like seven times. Liked what I saw.
(Always happened the same way. Group of people say “I’m bored, let’s watch Holy Grail” followed twenty minutes later by “Hey, let’s go to the mall.”)Report
@kazzy and I should watch the Holy Grail and Bladerunner and do a tag team post.Report
If either are on YouTube in their entirety (probably not, but occasionally stuff will pop up there briefly) you could use the setup we use for Listening Parties to watch at the same time.
Actually I’m surprised that’s not already a movie rental option, to have multiple disparate users be able to stream the same film simultaneously.Report
Twenty-some years ago I busted my butt trying to champion IP multicast — which would make such things trivial — to the big telecoms that were going to dominate internet access. Failed miserably.Report
The YouTube plugin in Google Hangouts accomplishes this, albeit to a limited number of recipients and sometimes some laggy/buggy behavior.
The main limitation is, of course, the copyrights of the material being hosted on YT. I assume they can already do rentals from there, therefore I assume Google/YouTube have the issue more or less technologically in hand, just not legally.Report
I’m game!Report
I have to admit I have a special place in my heart for Holy Grail (and a few other Python movies). When I was 14, my appendix burst & I had to have emergency surgery. As soon as I was able to have non-family visitors, my best friend showed up, sweet talked the nurses out of a TV & VCR, and made me watch Holy Grail, along with a handful of other Python movies & assorted comedies.
A right bastard for doing that to a guy who just had major abdominal surgery, but it was a fun day.Report
Seriously? You’ve not seen any of them? These movies are deeply, deeply embedded in the culture. You owe it to yourself as one who surfs on the seas of popular culture to have actually seen these movies rather than simply reading memes about them.Report
Furthermore, the three movies in question are actually good, each in their own way. Watching them is not merely a chore endured in order to check off the appropriate pop cultural literacy box.Report
The problem is that it’ll be like watching Hamlet for the first time: they’ll seem like just a collection of quotes.Report
You can watch Blade Runner with the sound off and still enjoy it. It’s just beautiful.
Maybe not the best thing to do the first time through, though.Report
The Princess Bride used to be my favorite movie. Then I found out that Ted Cruz liked it. So guess I’ve been misinterpreting it all these years.Report
It’s like finding out that Dick Cheney is a Wodehouse fan. (If he was, no one had better say so. I mean it.)Report
He liked the absurdity of it, Wallace Shawn is the perfect sophist stooge,Report
Like Donald Rumsfeld.Report
Co5: We need a better term than “non-coastal” for this. Front Range Colorado, for example, is very much a “coastal” metro area in terms of venture capital, high-tech jobs, and entrepreneurial activity. With all of the bad things like soaring rents and real-estate prices, gentrification, etc. Ditto Austin. While I sometimes find it offensive, I unfortunately think of North Dakota as “left behind” country, as in the parts of the country at greatest risk of being left behind in the new economy. Colorado, Texas, and California all have significant areas that fall into that “left behind” classification.Report
I meant non-coastal in the geographic sense. Colorado and Austin may have soaring rents and the like, but still nothing on the order of Silicon Valley and with the possibility of building outward to a megalopolis. They might not be Fargo, but they’re an improvement.
Regarding North Dakota and South, I think the better way to look at it is East Dakota and West Dakota. Rural Dakota will likely continue to empty out, but Fargo and Sioux Falls aren’t going anywhere and Grand Forks, Vermillion, and a lot of areas along the Interstate will likely continue to grow.Report
Fargo and Sioux Falls aren’t going anywhere
Unless Noah Hawley slightly increases the rate at which he’s killing off their residents.Report
[Cr1] “It’s been almost 20 years since Barton, then in his third term as mayor, got popped for taking $5,900 from the city. Prosecutors said he had checks written to a guy to remove tree stumps in the city, but took it himself…Barton now acknowledges he messed up, but still disputes the fraud.
“I’d plead guilty to the way I handled the transaction, but I’m not going to plead guilty to something I’m not guilty of.””
So this is not exactly on the same level as Marion Barry, then. More like an example of why “have you ever been convicted of a felony” is something that shouldn’t be on an interview form, because this guy would have to answer “yes”, and plenty of people would have voted “no” without even thinking about it.Report
Barry, of course, always maintained that the “b***ch set me up.”
Which she did.
It’s not the same, but it’s not all that different in my view. On one side of the ledger is that Barry took issue with the nature of his arrest while Barton with his basic guilt, but on the other side of the ledger Barton’s alleged crimes specifically involved city function.Report
Yes, she forced him to smoke the rock and inhale.Report
Wait… I’m confused… did he write checks to Joe’s Tree Removal but then pocket the money? How is that anything other than fraud?Report
W5 — Well, Roscoe Filburn he ain’t. I notice that the article didn’t really mention anything about whether there is debate about whether or not it’s appropriate for a quasi-governmental corporation to regulate the supply of potatoes, only a peculiar fascination with the man’s oh-so-very-Australian eyebrows.Report
Cr5: There was a much less charming and more sexual version of this story in Maryland recently. A gangster was basically running the place, having sex with female guards, and got at least two of them pregnant.Report
Hilliary’s email problems getting worse?
http://observer.com/2016/01/hillarys-emailgate-goes-nuclear/Report
His usual source was Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official and veteran spy-gadfly, who conveniently died just before EmailGate became a serious problem for Hillary’s campaign.
Honestly, when will Hillary stop murdering people?Report
Only once the last Seal is broken and the beast lies at her feet and blood dripping from her blade she takes the throne. Then the killing can be doneReport
Or at least, start taking requests?Report
And the search for the silver bullet continues!
It’s been decades now. When are some people gonna learn a little skepticism? Even my Aunt, Fox News junkie that she is, occasionally now disbelieves Hillary rumors on account of “That seems unlikely”.Report
W3: This is a phenomenal misunderstanding of the forces at work. The key, you’ll find, is that all the data quoted in the article has figures that start in 2012 or so.
American influence has drastically increased the power and reach of homophobia in Africa, but it hasn’t been the pro-LGBT side that’s done it. US evangelicals have been spreading their bullshit in Africa for years. And because of low awareness of LGBT issues, Africans swallowed it. All this stuff dates from the late aughts, and this article is blaming a counter-push by LGBT activists responding to the initial wave of oppression.Report
A 40% decline in federal gun prosecutions under Obama? Why am I not surprised?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/09/politics/obama-executive-orders-gun-control-enforcement-gap/index.html.Report
Looks like the Swedish police are covering for the rapeugees as well.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-11/swedish-police-under-investigation-for-sexual-assault-cover-upReport
Whoa. Teddy Cruzer can’t be happy about this:
Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president
The Constitution provides that “No person except a natural born Citizen shall be eligible to the Office of President.” … Cruz is, of course, a U.S. citizen. As he was born in Canada, he is not natural-born.Report