Or child welfare hearings, most of which are outside of the court system, at least in my state. I don't know how the case workers do their job -- I certainly couldn't.
Perhaps I misunderstood your analogy. I thought you were implying that current practice is to simply dip into the pool at random, rather than picking and choosing.
But in the case of refugees, we do perform basic tests. That's one of the reasons that the number of Syrians accepted can't be ramped up quickly. They have to file with the UNHCR in the country to which they have fled. The UNHCR has to decide that they are at risk even in that country, and should be transferred to a third country (the vast majority are disqualified at this point). If referred to the US, the application has to be processed by an RSC that conducts interviews and such. Then the USCIS has to review the case and make a decision. From beginning to end, the process typically takes 18-24 months. The process is specified in international treaties and US statute -- it would take action by Congress to change it.
This is why the US has accepted only three million refugees over the last 40 years. The vast majority of refugees get stuck in the country to which they initially flee. Few of the Syrians can afford to "flee" directly to the US. Syrians are getting to France and Germany because the EU recently passed a "refugee sharing" law: legally, they have fled directly to France or wherever. Without that, they were almost all going to be stuck in Greece.
Based on the Republican campaign thus far, we would seem to be in the range of 20-25% who are against refugees because they're against all immigration. The "not in my state" thing is a red herring -- they've got to know that once a refugee is in the US legally, there's no real checks on where they can go. Colorado has a growing Somali refugee population. That's not because the government has decided to settle them here initially, but because we have meat packing plants willing to hire them. This is a growing trend nationally. I wonder how many of these governors have considered that there's a fair chance the meat they're eating at supper tonight passed through a Muslim refugee's hands?
I admit to a bias based on where I live. Draw a line down the center of the Great Plains and consider the region to the west. In round numbers, 40% of the area of the contiguous states, population about 70M. The vast majority of the population, certainly >60M, live in urban/suburban areas totaling far less area than Montana. Arguably, you can add in the non-marginal (when irrigated) agricultural land and it's still smaller than Montana. In one sense it is Germany, it's just divided up into chunks scattered here and there across a vast landscape. That doesn't mean that the empty spaces between those chunks is usable, though.
The carrying capacity in the West is largely determined by water during multi-year droughts, and by how much diversion and storage can smooth out the supply. There are any number of experts who will explain in great detail why Southern California and the rest of the area that draws on the lower Colorado River has already overshot that capacity. The Bureau of Reclamation will probably be able to juggle the water levels in Lakes Mead and Powell for another couple of years before serious emergency cuts get made, but they're clearly coming. None of the West is immune: Vancouver, BC implemented stage 3 emergency water restrictions this past summer.
Of course, from a general population perspective the West has been absorbing an enormous number of immigrants annually for decades; it's just that most of them came from elsewhere in the US :^)
At exactly this moment in time, yes, the correct policy position is that the US should accept lots of Syrian refugees. Thank you for saying it, Jason. That out of the way, I disagree on the open borderish parts of the post (ie, the "all immigration has turned out well, so that will always be true" stuff).
1) It is one thing to be a temporary refuge. It is another to be the permanent residence for millions of people displaced by a much smaller number of bad guys. At some point, it would seem the answer has to be "Ten million of you have to say 'no' to one million of the bad guys, not run away."
2) In the long term, the answer can't always be "The US will absorb some millions of refugees." The US chunk of North America has a carrying capacity for an American-ish lifestyle, with single-family homes and generous allocations of electricity and broad streets and personal transportation and cutting-edge medical tech and... I happen to think that we're close to it. I don't apply this just to Syria. The US can't forever be the safety valve for Mexican or Central American societies by absorbing another few million immigrants. It is one thing to say "Previous immigration waves have not crossed that carrying capacity." It is quite another to say that we won't ever exceed the carrying capacity, that increasing population will never result in a decline in living standard. Bring numbers that suggest it can be done without baking the planet.
3) I spent the afternoon thinking about what could be done with a few thousand 30-minute road flares, each with a small circuit board (square inch or two) and battery attached to it. I came away convinced that the world is lucky the bad guys seem to lack imagination. If unemployed US engineers ever decide that terrorism is in their interest, we are screwed. (Small note, tongue mostly in cheek, but not entirely, to the folks who think there is no difference between STEM programs and liberal arts programs: liberal arts programs don't generally teach you skills for rendering cities uninhabitable.)
"Cocktail" may give people the wrong idea. The drugs are not mixed pre-injection; three drugs are administered in a particular sequence. The first renders the recipient deeply unconscious. The second paralyzes most muscles. The third stops the heart. IIRC, the real problem is with the first drug. It's no longer manufactured in the US, the EU bans export, and the Indian suppliers have not been approved for human use in the US. As an anesthesia, it's been largely replaced in the developed world by safer more-expensive drugs that do not put the patient as far under.
There's a lot of economic and political discussion points here.
Rubio might even mean engineers when he says that. It still leaves him with the problem that American businesses don't want to fully employ the population of engineers we currently have. If STEM is the answer, then the question isn't "How do we get more students to study STEM?" The question is "How do we get American businesses to hire more STEM graduates?" I use "graduates" broadly here -- an unemployed 45-year-old hard-real-time programmer who can't get an interview is not being put to good use.
I hear people bemoan the fact that China is graduating more engineers than the US each year. I tell them that the thing to be afraid of is that China is finding engineering jobs for all those graduates.
I found the comments in this subthread to be quite interesting. Probably says a lot about where/when I grew up, but the large majority of homeowners would have been able to do things like interior painting, replacing the toilet guts, replacing a worn lamp switch, re-gluing chair or table joints that had dried out. A sizable fraction would be able to replace a faucet, replace wall switches and outlets, do much more extensive (hidden) furniture repairs. Unless you were rich, you were expected to do those things -- you called in a pro for the big things, did the routine maintenance yourself.
I'm looking forward to #1; the rest of the items on the list look like it's probably reasonable. Jumping well out ahead, is "failure to clear" covered in one of #2-8?
I suspect you're wrong about the language. I'd be surprised if the scholarship didn't say clearly that it was contingent on your continuing to participate in all of the team's activities, less a handful of spelled-out exceptions. There are a small number of schools that do multi-year scholarships, or that allow you to keep the scholarship when you stop taking part, but that's not the standard NCAA arrangement.
At least for the very top players, it's not the loss of the scholarship that's the big risk -- it's the loss of the opportunity to audition for the NFL general managers.
I argue with it. It's the stock supply-side argument -- if we produce more vocational-training graduates, jobs that make use of that training will magically appear. It's not clear that we're employing our current population of vocational and STEM folks well. There are very few places where you can point and say, "Look! Salaries and hourly rates in this STEM or vocational field are increasing rapidly because there's a shortage!"
Yes. Today's professional welder is expected to know more techniques, to be applied across more kinds of metal, using more complex equipment, than used to be the case.
Not good enough. You claim that Obama should have pulled off a miracle. Which one?
The Bush administration couldn't negotiate a SOFA in Iraq that extended past 2011. Obama should have given the Iraqis the things that Bush wouldn't (eg, US military personnel being tried in Iraqi civilian courts)? Obama should have just "wanted" a favorable SOFA more than Bush did and the Iraqis would have given in? Obama should have declared the US an occupying power? Obama should have declared the right to deploy its military without a SOFA? Obama should have supported a separate Kurdistan if they would let US troops stay?
Pick something that was on the list of not just wishful thinking.
I need to start thinking seriously about what to do about my devices. I've got an old flip phone, an old iPod Nano plugged into the auxiliary port in my car, a Nexus 7 running Android for which Google has MD'ed official support, and an old Lenovo laptop running Kubuntu (with lots of traditional "UNIX" software installed on top of that. The tablet gets used largely as an e-book reader, occasionally as a browser. I find myself increasingly frustrated by the app-centric handling of data and lack of file system on the smaller ones. Just fishin' put the MP3 files in one place in an honest-to-deity file system (available to my Mac as well) and run the player software of my choice. And I've got some of my own software written in Perl and Python that I'd like to run on it. Wishful thinking that I might get a single device that's not too big to do all those things?
As I recall, the decision was much more complicated than just stay or go. The Iraqi government wouldn't give permission for the troops to stay unless they were under Iraqi civilian control over deployments, with soldiers/contractors responsible for civilian deaths potentially charged with murder and tried in Iraqi courts. The alternative to that is to say "we're an occupying power," but then you're liable for a whole lot of the care and feeding of the civilian population: food, water, keeping the electricity on, etc.
I guess there's the alternative that Israel uses in the West Bank: they say they're not an occupying power but reserve the right to run whatever military operations they like. Having a Security Council veto power do that is a really scary precedent. Russia could roll into Ukraine, or China into Vietnam, saying "Security. We're not an occupying power, but we reserve the right to deploy our military."
There are thousands of colleges across the country, more than enough to create a “free market”.... If parents don’t like the content, the kids can go elsewhere.
If you're a Missouri parent, though, there are very few places in the country that will give you the same deal on tuition that the UoM schools do. Within the state, for some majors, there may be only one or two choices, or one stand-out program from among a few.
I admit that I'm old, and old-fashioned. What I remember about Novembers from my own undergraduate days was trying to find enough hours in the day to deal with mid-terms and impending final projects. There wasn't enough time to go protest and still pass.
The defunding that Freddy fears is apt to be selective. In my state legislature -- and I have no reason to think it's atypical -- the membership from both parties is stuffed with graduates of the two flagship state universities and the public law school. The Republicans are likely to want to trim the offerings rather than cut funding broadly. Anything of the form "X studies" will be high on their list.
I mean, suppose you are a young person interested in video game design, or programming, or network design. What labor union would you turn to in order to get apprenticeship? Would Apple or Google or Microsoft support a labor union that attempted to organize their workers to supply apprenticeships?
Why unions? Some states simply say "Practicing profession X requires a state license, or that the work is done under the supervision of someone with a state license." For some types of engineering, in most states, you can't hang out a shingle to practice as a professional engineer without a state license.
It's not that states haven't tried doing this for more contemporary technical fields, though, like electronics and software. Within my working career, the state of NJ had hearings on legislation to require just that. The heads of Bell Labs and RCA Sarnoff Labs went to Trenton to testify. What they told them was basically: (1) our currently unlicensed staff are inventing the things that you'll be testing on in five years. Or if you're not testing on them, then your tests will be meaningless because our stuff is what people will be using. (2) We recruit nationally; adding a requirement that people can't do useful work until they obtain a NJ license to design circuits or write code kills that. (3) Given (1) and (2), we'll relocate the whole damned business to another state before we'll do it your way.
Here's an interesting mental exercise. Imagine a world where, if you want to change a formula in a spreadsheet, you have to hire someone from the union or call in one of the apprentices from over in IT. In the latter case, you can't actually use the changed spreadsheet until the guy with a license signs off on it. Things can get almost that ridiculous. When my tech organization moved into a building still under construction in NJ, under union contract rules, we had to go get one of the union electricians to supervise while we plugged a piece of equipment into a different outlet. I took the site foreman out for a drink after work one day and said something like, "My folks are tired of annoying your people, and I'm sure your folks are tired of being annoyed. I understand you have some apprentices on site studying for their next-level exams. If I provide them with a quiet well-lit study area in our lab, is that enough supervision for us to unplug equipment?"
By the way, welcome back, counselor. Not to nag, but I'm expecting a deep piece on the six top cases on the Supreme Court docket for this session. Next week would be nice. And I think I owe you a beer, so I'll have to figure out how to pay for that.
I think the font restrictions my software imposes actually startled me more than the ads. Here's an image with a couple of simple examples from my notes. The top row is before-and-after for a piece of The Atlantic's front page at the time I was writing the software; the bottom row from The Daily Beast's front page at the same time.
I really do tend to forget that there are individual pages out there that use six fonts in sizes ranging from overwhelming to unreadably small.
Absolutely. I have in-laws that hang on desperately in the dying small town where they seem to be related to half the population. My wife is unusual in that she left. On the cost of living thing, you can sometimes live in an old farm house for free there, because the owners just want someone living in it to keep an eye on things. OTOH, in my family, in my parents' generation and mine, most of the time none of the siblings lived within a hundred miles of one another, or their parents. Seems to be a tradition -- in the part of the Cain family tree that I know anything about, each generation moved another few hundred miles west from the previous one. Farthest I've traced that is to a Solomon Cain in eastern Kentucky in 1820.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “On The Attempt To Use A Child As A Weapon”
Or child welfare hearings, most of which are outside of the court system, at least in my state. I don't know how the case workers do their job -- I certainly couldn't.
On “Be Bigger than Them”
Perhaps I misunderstood your analogy. I thought you were implying that current practice is to simply dip into the pool at random, rather than picking and choosing.
"
But in the case of refugees, we do perform basic tests. That's one of the reasons that the number of Syrians accepted can't be ramped up quickly. They have to file with the UNHCR in the country to which they have fled. The UNHCR has to decide that they are at risk even in that country, and should be transferred to a third country (the vast majority are disqualified at this point). If referred to the US, the application has to be processed by an RSC that conducts interviews and such. Then the USCIS has to review the case and make a decision. From beginning to end, the process typically takes 18-24 months. The process is specified in international treaties and US statute -- it would take action by Congress to change it.
This is why the US has accepted only three million refugees over the last 40 years. The vast majority of refugees get stuck in the country to which they initially flee. Few of the Syrians can afford to "flee" directly to the US. Syrians are getting to France and Germany because the EU recently passed a "refugee sharing" law: legally, they have fled directly to France or wherever. Without that, they were almost all going to be stuck in Greece.
"
Based on the Republican campaign thus far, we would seem to be in the range of 20-25% who are against refugees because they're against all immigration. The "not in my state" thing is a red herring -- they've got to know that once a refugee is in the US legally, there's no real checks on where they can go. Colorado has a growing Somali refugee population. That's not because the government has decided to settle them here initially, but because we have meat packing plants willing to hire them. This is a growing trend nationally. I wonder how many of these governors have considered that there's a fair chance the meat they're eating at supper tonight passed through a Muslim refugee's hands?
On “We Should Welcome Syrian Refugees”
I admit to a bias based on where I live. Draw a line down the center of the Great Plains and consider the region to the west. In round numbers, 40% of the area of the contiguous states, population about 70M. The vast majority of the population, certainly >60M, live in urban/suburban areas totaling far less area than Montana. Arguably, you can add in the non-marginal (when irrigated) agricultural land and it's still smaller than Montana. In one sense it is Germany, it's just divided up into chunks scattered here and there across a vast landscape. That doesn't mean that the empty spaces between those chunks is usable, though.
The carrying capacity in the West is largely determined by water during multi-year droughts, and by how much diversion and storage can smooth out the supply. There are any number of experts who will explain in great detail why Southern California and the rest of the area that draws on the lower Colorado River has already overshot that capacity. The Bureau of Reclamation will probably be able to juggle the water levels in Lakes Mead and Powell for another couple of years before serious emergency cuts get made, but they're clearly coming. None of the West is immune: Vancouver, BC implemented stage 3 emergency water restrictions this past summer.
Of course, from a general population perspective the West has been absorbing an enormous number of immigrants annually for decades; it's just that most of them came from elsewhere in the US :^)
"
At exactly this moment in time, yes, the correct policy position is that the US should accept lots of Syrian refugees. Thank you for saying it, Jason. That out of the way, I disagree on the open borderish parts of the post (ie, the "all immigration has turned out well, so that will always be true" stuff).
1) It is one thing to be a temporary refuge. It is another to be the permanent residence for millions of people displaced by a much smaller number of bad guys. At some point, it would seem the answer has to be "Ten million of you have to say 'no' to one million of the bad guys, not run away."
2) In the long term, the answer can't always be "The US will absorb some millions of refugees." The US chunk of North America has a carrying capacity for an American-ish lifestyle, with single-family homes and generous allocations of electricity and broad streets and personal transportation and cutting-edge medical tech and... I happen to think that we're close to it. I don't apply this just to Syria. The US can't forever be the safety valve for Mexican or Central American societies by absorbing another few million immigrants. It is one thing to say "Previous immigration waves have not crossed that carrying capacity." It is quite another to say that we won't ever exceed the carrying capacity, that increasing population will never result in a decline in living standard. Bring numbers that suggest it can be done without baking the planet.
3) I spent the afternoon thinking about what could be done with a few thousand 30-minute road flares, each with a small circuit board (square inch or two) and battery attached to it. I came away convinced that the world is lucky the bad guys seem to lack imagination. If unemployed US engineers ever decide that terrorism is in their interest, we are screwed. (Small note, tongue mostly in cheek, but not entirely, to the folks who think there is no difference between STEM programs and liberal arts programs: liberal arts programs don't generally teach you skills for rendering cities uninhabitable.)
On “Market Failure 1: Ideal Markets (Why you should care about spherical cows)”
"Cocktail" may give people the wrong idea. The drugs are not mixed pre-injection; three drugs are administered in a particular sequence. The first renders the recipient deeply unconscious. The second paralyzes most muscles. The third stops the heart. IIRC, the real problem is with the first drug. It's no longer manufactured in the US, the EU bans export, and the Indian suppliers have not been approved for human use in the US. As an anesthesia, it's been largely replaced in the developed world by safer more-expensive drugs that do not put the patient as far under.
There's a lot of economic and political discussion points here.
On “Welders and Philosophers”
Strange tax incentives. For part of my tech career I was a depreciable asset.
"
Rubio might even mean engineers when he says that. It still leaves him with the problem that American businesses don't want to fully employ the population of engineers we currently have. If STEM is the answer, then the question isn't "How do we get more students to study STEM?" The question is "How do we get American businesses to hire more STEM graduates?" I use "graduates" broadly here -- an unemployed 45-year-old hard-real-time programmer who can't get an interview is not being put to good use.
I hear people bemoan the fact that China is graduating more engineers than the US each year. I tell them that the thing to be afraid of is that China is finding engineering jobs for all those graduates.
"
I found the comments in this subthread to be quite interesting. Probably says a lot about where/when I grew up, but the large majority of homeowners would have been able to do things like interior painting, replacing the toilet guts, replacing a worn lamp switch, re-gluing chair or table joints that had dried out. A sizable fraction would be able to replace a faucet, replace wall switches and outlets, do much more extensive (hidden) furniture repairs. Unless you were rich, you were expected to do those things -- you called in a pro for the big things, did the routine maintenance yourself.
On “Market Failure Introduction”
I'm looking forward to #1; the rest of the items on the list look like it's probably reasonable. Jumping well out ahead, is "failure to clear" covered in one of #2-8?
On “Dissent”
I suspect you're wrong about the language. I'd be surprised if the scholarship didn't say clearly that it was contingent on your continuing to participate in all of the team's activities, less a handful of spelled-out exceptions. There are a small number of schools that do multi-year scholarships, or that allow you to keep the scholarship when you stop taking part, but that's not the standard NCAA arrangement.
At least for the very top players, it's not the loss of the scholarship that's the big risk -- it's the loss of the opportunity to audition for the NFL general managers.
On “Welders and Philosophers”
I argue with it. It's the stock supply-side argument -- if we produce more vocational-training graduates, jobs that make use of that training will magically appear. It's not clear that we're employing our current population of vocational and STEM folks well. There are very few places where you can point and say, "Look! Salaries and hourly rates in this STEM or vocational field are increasing rapidly because there's a shortage!"
"
Yes. Today's professional welder is expected to know more techniques, to be applied across more kinds of metal, using more complex equipment, than used to be the case.
On “Thoughts and prayers for the people of Paris”
Not good enough. You claim that Obama should have pulled off a miracle. Which one?
The Bush administration couldn't negotiate a SOFA in Iraq that extended past 2011. Obama should have given the Iraqis the things that Bush wouldn't (eg, US military personnel being tried in Iraqi civilian courts)? Obama should have just "wanted" a favorable SOFA more than Bush did and the Iraqis would have given in? Obama should have declared the US an occupying power? Obama should have declared the right to deploy its military without a SOFA? Obama should have supported a separate Kurdistan if they would let US troops stay?
Pick something that was on the list of not just wishful thinking.
On “Weekend!”
I need to start thinking seriously about what to do about my devices. I've got an old flip phone, an old iPod Nano plugged into the auxiliary port in my car, a Nexus 7 running Android for which Google has MD'ed official support, and an old Lenovo laptop running Kubuntu (with lots of traditional "UNIX" software installed on top of that. The tablet gets used largely as an e-book reader, occasionally as a browser. I find myself increasingly frustrated by the app-centric handling of data and lack of file system on the smaller ones. Just fishin' put the MP3 files in one place in an honest-to-deity file system (available to my Mac as well) and run the player software of my choice. And I've got some of my own software written in Perl and Python that I'd like to run on it. Wishful thinking that I might get a single device that's not too big to do all those things?
On “Thoughts and prayers for the people of Paris”
As I recall, the decision was much more complicated than just stay or go. The Iraqi government wouldn't give permission for the troops to stay unless they were under Iraqi civilian control over deployments, with soldiers/contractors responsible for civilian deaths potentially charged with murder and tried in Iraqi courts. The alternative to that is to say "we're an occupying power," but then you're liable for a whole lot of the care and feeding of the civilian population: food, water, keeping the electricity on, etc.
I guess there's the alternative that Israel uses in the West Bank: they say they're not an occupying power but reserve the right to run whatever military operations they like. Having a Security Council veto power do that is a really scary precedent. Russia could roll into Ukraine, or China into Vietnam, saying "Security. We're not an occupying power, but we reserve the right to deploy our military."
On “Enough Already, with the College Students This and the College Students That”
There are thousands of colleges across the country, more than enough to create a “free market”.... If parents don’t like the content, the kids can go elsewhere.
If you're a Missouri parent, though, there are very few places in the country that will give you the same deal on tuition that the UoM schools do. Within the state, for some majors, there may be only one or two choices, or one stand-out program from among a few.
I admit that I'm old, and old-fashioned. What I remember about Novembers from my own undergraduate days was trying to find enough hours in the day to deal with mid-terms and impending final projects. There wasn't enough time to go protest and still pass.
On “Safe Spaces”
The defunding that Freddy fears is apt to be selective. In my state legislature -- and I have no reason to think it's atypical -- the membership from both parties is stuffed with graduates of the two flagship state universities and the public law school. The Republicans are likely to want to trim the offerings rather than cut funding broadly. Anything of the form "X studies" will be high on their list.
On “Linky Friday #140: Criminal Ed”
Please. I haven't had supper yet.
"
Aye. You can have guilds, and you can have giant corporations, but I'm pretty much sure that you can't have both at the same time in the same system.
"
I mean, suppose you are a young person interested in video game design, or programming, or network design. What labor union would you turn to in order to get apprenticeship? Would Apple or Google or Microsoft support a labor union that attempted to organize their workers to supply apprenticeships?
Why unions? Some states simply say "Practicing profession X requires a state license, or that the work is done under the supervision of someone with a state license." For some types of engineering, in most states, you can't hang out a shingle to practice as a professional engineer without a state license.
It's not that states haven't tried doing this for more contemporary technical fields, though, like electronics and software. Within my working career, the state of NJ had hearings on legislation to require just that. The heads of Bell Labs and RCA Sarnoff Labs went to Trenton to testify. What they told them was basically: (1) our currently unlicensed staff are inventing the things that you'll be testing on in five years. Or if you're not testing on them, then your tests will be meaningless because our stuff is what people will be using. (2) We recruit nationally; adding a requirement that people can't do useful work until they obtain a NJ license to design circuits or write code kills that. (3) Given (1) and (2), we'll relocate the whole damned business to another state before we'll do it your way.
Here's an interesting mental exercise. Imagine a world where, if you want to change a formula in a spreadsheet, you have to hire someone from the union or call in one of the apprentices from over in IT. In the latter case, you can't actually use the changed spreadsheet until the guy with a license signs off on it. Things can get almost that ridiculous. When my tech organization moved into a building still under construction in NJ, under union contract rules, we had to go get one of the union electricians to supervise while we plugged a piece of equipment into a different outlet. I took the site foreman out for a drink after work one day and said something like, "My folks are tired of annoying your people, and I'm sure your folks are tired of being annoyed. I understand you have some apprentices on site studying for their next-level exams. If I provide them with a quiet well-lit study area in our lab, is that enough supervision for us to unplug equipment?"
On “End of Sabbatical Report”
By the way, welcome back, counselor. Not to nag, but I'm expecting a deep piece on the six top cases on the Supreme Court docket for this session. Next week would be nice. And I think I owe you a beer, so I'll have to figure out how to pay for that.
"
I think the font restrictions my software imposes actually startled me more than the ads. Here's an image with a couple of simple examples from my notes. The top row is before-and-after for a piece of The Atlantic's front page at the time I was writing the software; the bottom row from The Daily Beast's front page at the same time.
I really do tend to forget that there are individual pages out there that use six fonts in sizes ranging from overwhelming to unreadably small.
On “Linky Friday #140: Criminal Ed”
Absolutely. I have in-laws that hang on desperately in the dying small town where they seem to be related to half the population. My wife is unusual in that she left. On the cost of living thing, you can sometimes live in an old farm house for free there, because the owners just want someone living in it to keep an eye on things. OTOH, in my family, in my parents' generation and mine, most of the time none of the siblings lived within a hundred miles of one another, or their parents. Seems to be a tradition -- in the part of the Cain family tree that I know anything about, each generation moved another few hundred miles west from the previous one. Farthest I've traced that is to a Solomon Cain in eastern Kentucky in 1820.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.