You almost certainly have not read the whole thing:
"A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy [i.e., the United States] shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can."
I think I read the book in the late 90s after the initial controversy, and only after I'd read Midnight's Children which I prefer. Agree with Jaybird that there is a lot of humor, slapstick, absurdity, and I think I was surprised that it wasn't polemical. There are no absolutes in the story. Stuff happens and maybe there is a meaning under it all, but mostly its just that good stuff happens which is good and bad stuff happens and its not so.
Obama had a plan for cost-control, it was a major initiative highlighted in his 2012 state of the union address, but he got blocked by colleges opposed to the government informing students on the returns on their investment.
So what we got was a decline in college enrollment as marginal students (those for whom college is a close call and Democrats worry are from a disadvantaged background who would benefit from higher education) got scared off the college track. I have a neighbor has been a professor at two colleges in the last ten years that folded. The invisible hand at work.
The best standing argument appears to be for the lending institutions servicing these loans who would lose monthly payments they receive while loans are in repayment.
I'm not that familiar with Congressional standing issues, but another issue might be retroactive / prospective remedies. If the Administration moves quickly to cancel debts, is a Court really going to order reinstatement. If someone with standing quickly seeks a preliminary injunction to stop cancellation, will the courts grant the injunction in light of the balance of the various equities? Don't know.
I don't see how this is disguised. Anybody without a college degree understands who it is that goes to college.
As to spending for college, if your household is in the bottom half of income in Illinois, you are entitled to free tuition at U of I and probably all other state schools. If you want to borrow more than the $32,000 or so in federal direct loans, then as far I can tell you and/or your parents need to pass a credit check. IOW, the lower the income the more the financial aid and the less the eligibility for student loans.
Regression to the mean. Just to make up some numbers: Two parents each with a 120 IQ will more likely have a child with a 115 IQ than a 125 IQ. Still very likely to be above average.
Yep, if I want to watch my MLB team live, I pretty much have to keep cable. I can subscribe to MLB and watch teams on the other side of the country or watch a replay of my team the next day. I still will miss a handful of games that MLB grants special distribution deals to Facebook, Peacock, Apple, etc.
My main concern with this is that my dad's health took a turn for the worse a few years ago, and his baseball team was his main interest. His satellite tv provider discontinued baseball coverage and he refused to get cable. It was only when we realized that MLB would play the games the next day, and my dad usually DVR'd them anyway because he couldn't stay awake long enough in the evening. I don't know if I can watch that way.
I read a collection of "ghost stories" from Maupassant a few months ago, mostly not about ghosts, possibly should have been described as Poe stories. It was as such collections go somewhat hit and miss, with the first person narrator frequently assuring us that 'you must think me mad, but hear me out . . .' The last story, which I think was true both for the book and the author contained this description of his introversion that I liked:
"We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness."
Hadn't that happened already? I mean Missouri had one clinic that's now closed, but if you can get to its St. Louis location, you can hop on a train or bus to East St. Louis, IL.
What comes to my mind is Stephen Douglas' Freeport Doctrine: whatever the SCOTUS might say on the matter of slavery, if people in a given locality "are opposed to slavery they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst." There has been thirty years of unfriendly legislation, plus new medication alternatives.
The right to interstate travel isn't just about physically blocking people at the borders, it precludes other infringements on free movement like taxing railroad passengers leaving a state.
Under the Commerce Clause, there are similar restrictions preventing states from applying its laws to commerce taking place wholly outside of the State’s borders.
The third issue is the state sovereignty is territorial, it does not generally have the power (jurisdiction) to prosecute activities in another state's boundaries.
I don't know what some people are suggesting, but it looks to me like there are a lot of Constitutional limitations weighing against it being successful, none of which are based upon Roe v. Wade. Two points of vulnerability might be abortion transportation services and billboard advertising, because they take place at least partly in-state, but I would hazard to guess how the current Supreme Court would rule on issues involving commerce and free speech.
Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from Illinois to Wisconsin where he killed some people before returning to Illinois. I never heard anyone suggest he could be tried in Illinois unless he acquired the guns in Illinois illegally and that would be for gun charges not killings.
Kavanaugh is the swing justice in Dobbs and he wrote in his concurrence: "For example, may a
State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel."
Lucas is a dissembler of near Presidential levels is one problem. The re-imagining of the Greedo scene clearly made the story worse.
This is partly a limitation of technology. If he had replaced the scene entirely with a new one instead of trying to special-effects his way through the existing film, he might have provided an adequate alternative storyline, maybe one in which Greedo is disarmed before they sit-down and is interrogated in a way that emphasized that Jabba is nearby and a scary threat.
Han didn't shoot until after Greedo, aiming a "blaster" directly at Solo, says that he plans to kill him. The whole preceding dialogue establishes that Solo doesn't have any choice. Greedo won't negotiate, neither will Jabba. Greedo has a longstanding grievance with Han.
In the rewrite, the blaster is sort of like a 17th century flintlock, slow and apt to shoot wide of target. Han can do the admirable thing and wait until he is fired upon because the technology is easily avoided.
I didn't see that as a correction, you raised an interesting point and I thought it had to be add discussed somewhere in the report. It was in the footnotes, so DM probably didn't see it.
Those two tracks are what our kids experienced. I would add that for bomb threats, the students are walked away from the building. These became pretty common about seven years ago, and so they started making credibility determinations. AFAIK they're always kid pranks, frequently incentivized by getting out of school, so instead of giving them what they want, the school confers with law enforcement about the seriousness of the threat and then text parents to inform them that this happened.
In any event, there was not a lot of detail in the report that I could find from skimming about the policy. The main things I saw was that there had been a significant increase in bailouts in the last 18 months, and school parents had offered to pay for off-duty police to be at the school.
The report up top found that the man the cop sought permission to kill wasn't the shooter, but a gym coach.
"In a subsequent DPS interview, the officer in question described the person he saw not as 'the shooter' but as 'a person in black toward the back of the school, but kids were behind that individual.' DPS interview (June 13, 2022). These DPS interview reports do not include or support the detail suggested in the ALERRT report that a Uvalde police officer 'observed the suspect carrying a rifle outside the west hall entry.' Based on its review of evidence to date, this Committee concludes that it is more likely that the officer saw Coach Gonzales dressed in black near a group of schoolchildren than that there was an actual opportunity to shoot the attacker from over 100 yards away, as assumed by ALERRT’s partial report."
It looks like I saw them two days earlier in Champaign. I think Stipe once described the three stages of R.E.M. as underground college act, stadium pop stars and band making music for fans of the first two groups to grouse that it wasn't as good as their older stuff. This could be fake news, but seems like something he would have said anyway.
I agree, causation is hard to determine. The usual examples given against challenging an incumbent (Reagan against Ford; Kennedy against Carter) are of failed challenges, and they have the advantage of preceding close election losses. But it still seems like Ford and Carter were weak candidates even with incumbent advantages.
OTOH, Truman and Johnson's incumbency advantage was weakened by their length. Truman served almost 8 years and would have been ineligible for re-election but for being grandfathered by the recent 22nd Amendment. Johnson had served just under six years. Presidential popularity has historically waned after four years. Part, maybe most, of the reason Washington left office was the growing personal attacks and rancor directed at him during his second term.
There is a study that concluded the number of friendships peaks at age 25. I saw this in an advice piece from an older person about the different things one should do now to be happy later in life. One is supposed to fight this trend.
Who do you think her audience is? I'm sure its not some stock ugly American trope, but includes readers interested in multicultural topics that would like to know/understand more.
Her later comment indicates she's not interested in either: "The second anyone implies that white people might not be the target audience for something, it causes reader/writer meltdowns across Twitter." It sounds like her intended audience is the Chinese diaspora in Vancouver.
Many of the coal people think that the Clean Act of 1990, signed by Bush, was a sop to his buddies in the natural gas industry. And that was before the fracking revolution made it very competitive.
To be clear, the CAA of 1990 required EPA to address with SO2, and the differences between high and low sulfur coal was well understood (as well as the natural gas substitutes). EPA didn't require any power plant to switch fuel. I doubt the thought occurred, but maybe the rulemakings addressed this.
EPA can certainly regulate CO2 emissions, the SCOTUS approved the part of the regulation that required "heat rate improvements." (The regulation had already been withdrawn so it's not in effect)
I'm not sure that baking soda conversion is quite demonstrated available technology yet. Maybe it is, but I think EPA will need evidence that there is a market for all that baking soda, otherwise they need to consider the economic and environmental costs of landfilling.
The Clean Air Act works primarily as a technology-forcing vehicle. The EPA sets standards based upon "Reasonably Available Control Technology" or "Best Available Control Technology" depending on the circumstances. That means that compliance is achievable for financially viable emitters because the technology exists, but the drafters were concerned about technology creating not just a floor, but a ceiling. If a facility could meet or exceed the standard in some other way, then it did not have to actually install the widget that created the standard. Of course, the development of alternative control technologies influences the creation of new floors.
So when EPA created SO2 standards for power plants, there was an implicit requirement to install scrubbers with all the associated costs of retrofit installation and continuing operating costs. A lot of coal-burning power plants switched to low sulfur coal to avoid those costs. Some even switched to natural gas.
I've not seen anyone mention this, but it seems clear that EPA knew at the time the Clean Air Act of 1990 was passed that it could not directly require a plant to stop burning high sulfur coal to meet the SO2 criteria, even though that's effectively what happened.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Joe Biden’s Fake Anger”
You almost certainly have not read the whole thing:
"A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy [i.e., the United States] shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can."
On “On The Satanic Verses”
I think I read the book in the late 90s after the initial controversy, and only after I'd read Midnight's Children which I prefer. Agree with Jaybird that there is a lot of humor, slapstick, absurdity, and I think I was surprised that it wasn't polemical. There are no absolutes in the story. Stuff happens and maybe there is a meaning under it all, but mostly its just that good stuff happens which is good and bad stuff happens and its not so.
On “From the New York Times: Biden to Cancel $10,000 in Student Loan Debt for Borrowers Earning Less Than $125,000”
Obama had a plan for cost-control, it was a major initiative highlighted in his 2012 state of the union address, but he got blocked by colleges opposed to the government informing students on the returns on their investment.
So what we got was a decline in college enrollment as marginal students (those for whom college is a close call and Democrats worry are from a disadvantaged background who would benefit from higher education) got scared off the college track. I have a neighbor has been a professor at two colleges in the last ten years that folded. The invisible hand at work.
"
The best standing argument appears to be for the lending institutions servicing these loans who would lose monthly payments they receive while loans are in repayment.
"
I'm not that familiar with Congressional standing issues, but another issue might be retroactive / prospective remedies. If the Administration moves quickly to cancel debts, is a Court really going to order reinstatement. If someone with standing quickly seeks a preliminary injunction to stop cancellation, will the courts grant the injunction in light of the balance of the various equities? Don't know.
"
I don't see how this is disguised. Anybody without a college degree understands who it is that goes to college.
As to spending for college, if your household is in the bottom half of income in Illinois, you are entitled to free tuition at U of I and probably all other state schools. If you want to borrow more than the $32,000 or so in federal direct loans, then as far I can tell you and/or your parents need to pass a credit check. IOW, the lower the income the more the financial aid and the less the eligibility for student loans.
"
Share of student loan debt by household income (ages 25-40):
1st: 9.4%
2nd: 16.4%
3rd: 18.2%
4th: 27.5%
5th: 28.5%
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/11/16/what-is-the-current-student-debt-situation/
(The average income for the top 5th quintile is $253,484, so debt cancelation would include a significant chuck of them)
If Republicans passed a tax break with these distributional effects, would it be trickle-down?
On “Extra! Extra! The Ten Second News Links We’ve Overlooked!”
Regression to the mean. Just to make up some numbers: Two parents each with a 120 IQ will more likely have a child with a 115 IQ than a 125 IQ. Still very likely to be above average.
On “Gird Your Loins For The “Great Rebundling””
Yep, if I want to watch my MLB team live, I pretty much have to keep cable. I can subscribe to MLB and watch teams on the other side of the country or watch a replay of my team the next day. I still will miss a handful of games that MLB grants special distribution deals to Facebook, Peacock, Apple, etc.
My main concern with this is that my dad's health took a turn for the worse a few years ago, and his baseball team was his main interest. His satellite tv provider discontinued baseball coverage and he refused to get cable. It was only when we realized that MLB would play the games the next day, and my dad usually DVR'd them anyway because he couldn't stay awake long enough in the evening. I don't know if I can watch that way.
On “Sunday Morning! “Pierre and Jean” by Guy de Maupassant”
I read a collection of "ghost stories" from Maupassant a few months ago, mostly not about ghosts, possibly should have been described as Poe stories. It was as such collections go somewhat hit and miss, with the first person narrator frequently assuring us that 'you must think me mad, but hear me out . . .' The last story, which I think was true both for the book and the author contained this description of his introversion that I liked:
"We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness."
Who Knows?
On “Abortion and Confronting Our Tolerance for A Visible Hand”
Hadn't that happened already? I mean Missouri had one clinic that's now closed, but if you can get to its St. Louis location, you can hop on a train or bus to East St. Louis, IL.
What comes to my mind is Stephen Douglas' Freeport Doctrine: whatever the SCOTUS might say on the matter of slavery, if people in a given locality "are opposed to slavery they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst." There has been thirty years of unfriendly legislation, plus new medication alternatives.
"
The right to interstate travel isn't just about physically blocking people at the borders, it precludes other infringements on free movement like taxing railroad passengers leaving a state.
Under the Commerce Clause, there are similar restrictions preventing states from applying its laws to commerce taking place wholly outside of the State’s borders.
The third issue is the state sovereignty is territorial, it does not generally have the power (jurisdiction) to prosecute activities in another state's boundaries.
I don't know what some people are suggesting, but it looks to me like there are a lot of Constitutional limitations weighing against it being successful, none of which are based upon Roe v. Wade. Two points of vulnerability might be abortion transportation services and billboard advertising, because they take place at least partly in-state, but I would hazard to guess how the current Supreme Court would rule on issues involving commerce and free speech.
"
Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from Illinois to Wisconsin where he killed some people before returning to Illinois. I never heard anyone suggest he could be tried in Illinois unless he acquired the guns in Illinois illegally and that would be for gun charges not killings.
Kavanaugh is the swing justice in Dobbs and he wrote in his concurrence: "For example, may a
State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel."
On “Extra! Extra! The Ten Second News Links We’ve Overlooked!”
Lucas is a dissembler of near Presidential levels is one problem. The re-imagining of the Greedo scene clearly made the story worse.
This is partly a limitation of technology. If he had replaced the scene entirely with a new one instead of trying to special-effects his way through the existing film, he might have provided an adequate alternative storyline, maybe one in which Greedo is disarmed before they sit-down and is interrogated in a way that emphasized that Jabba is nearby and a scary threat.
Han didn't shoot until after Greedo, aiming a "blaster" directly at Solo, says that he plans to kill him. The whole preceding dialogue establishes that Solo doesn't have any choice. Greedo won't negotiate, neither will Jabba. Greedo has a longstanding grievance with Han.
In the rewrite, the blaster is sort of like a 17th century flintlock, slow and apt to shoot wide of target. Han can do the admirable thing and wait until he is fired upon because the technology is easily avoided.
On “Robb Elementary Report: Read It For Yourself”
I didn't see that as a correction, you raised an interesting point and I thought it had to be add discussed somewhere in the report. It was in the footnotes, so DM probably didn't see it.
"
Those two tracks are what our kids experienced. I would add that for bomb threats, the students are walked away from the building. These became pretty common about seven years ago, and so they started making credibility determinations. AFAIK they're always kid pranks, frequently incentivized by getting out of school, so instead of giving them what they want, the school confers with law enforcement about the seriousness of the threat and then text parents to inform them that this happened.
In any event, there was not a lot of detail in the report that I could find from skimming about the policy. The main things I saw was that there had been a significant increase in bailouts in the last 18 months, and school parents had offered to pay for off-duty police to be at the school.
"
The report up top found that the man the cop sought permission to kill wasn't the shooter, but a gym coach.
"In a subsequent DPS interview, the officer in question described the person he saw not as 'the shooter' but as 'a person in black toward the back of the school, but kids were behind that individual.' DPS interview (June 13, 2022). These DPS interview reports do not include or support the detail suggested in the ALERRT report that a Uvalde police officer 'observed the suspect carrying a rifle outside the west hall entry.' Based on its review of evidence to date, this Committee concludes that it is more likely that the officer saw Coach Gonzales dressed in black near a group of schoolchildren than that there was an actual opportunity to shoot the attacker from over 100 yards away, as assumed by ALERRT’s partial report."
pp. 42-43.
On “Be Sure To Get Good REM”
It looks like I saw them two days earlier in Champaign. I think Stipe once described the three stages of R.E.M. as underground college act, stadium pop stars and band making music for fans of the first two groups to grouse that it wasn't as good as their older stuff. This could be fake news, but seems like something he would have said anyway.
On “Joe Biden and the Incumbent Advantage”
I agree, causation is hard to determine. The usual examples given against challenging an incumbent (Reagan against Ford; Kennedy against Carter) are of failed challenges, and they have the advantage of preceding close election losses. But it still seems like Ford and Carter were weak candidates even with incumbent advantages.
OTOH, Truman and Johnson's incumbency advantage was weakened by their length. Truman served almost 8 years and would have been ineligible for re-election but for being grandfathered by the recent 22nd Amendment. Johnson had served just under six years. Presidential popularity has historically waned after four years. Part, maybe most, of the reason Washington left office was the growing personal attacks and rancor directed at him during his second term.
On “Lives Intersect And We Just Move On”
There is a study that concluded the number of friendships peaks at age 25. I saw this in an advice piece from an older person about the different things one should do now to be happy later in life. One is supposed to fight this trend.
On “Promulgating Opacity In The Manufacture of Perceptive Understanding”
Who do you think her audience is? I'm sure its not some stock ugly American trope, but includes readers interested in multicultural topics that would like to know/understand more.
Her later comment indicates she's not interested in either: "The second anyone implies that white people might not be the target audience for something, it causes reader/writer meltdowns across Twitter." It sounds like her intended audience is the Chinese diaspora in Vancouver.
"
She appears to be Canadian, there are no significant black people in her racial typology.
On “The Fickle Nature of Supreme Court Rule”
Many of the coal people think that the Clean Act of 1990, signed by Bush, was a sop to his buddies in the natural gas industry. And that was before the fracking revolution made it very competitive.
To be clear, the CAA of 1990 required EPA to address with SO2, and the differences between high and low sulfur coal was well understood (as well as the natural gas substitutes). EPA didn't require any power plant to switch fuel. I doubt the thought occurred, but maybe the rulemakings addressed this.
"
EPA can certainly regulate CO2 emissions, the SCOTUS approved the part of the regulation that required "heat rate improvements." (The regulation had already been withdrawn so it's not in effect)
I'm not sure that baking soda conversion is quite demonstrated available technology yet. Maybe it is, but I think EPA will need evidence that there is a market for all that baking soda, otherwise they need to consider the economic and environmental costs of landfilling.
"
The Clean Air Act works primarily as a technology-forcing vehicle. The EPA sets standards based upon "Reasonably Available Control Technology" or "Best Available Control Technology" depending on the circumstances. That means that compliance is achievable for financially viable emitters because the technology exists, but the drafters were concerned about technology creating not just a floor, but a ceiling. If a facility could meet or exceed the standard in some other way, then it did not have to actually install the widget that created the standard. Of course, the development of alternative control technologies influences the creation of new floors.
So when EPA created SO2 standards for power plants, there was an implicit requirement to install scrubbers with all the associated costs of retrofit installation and continuing operating costs. A lot of coal-burning power plants switched to low sulfur coal to avoid those costs. Some even switched to natural gas.
I've not seen anyone mention this, but it seems clear that EPA knew at the time the Clean Air Act of 1990 was passed that it could not directly require a plant to stop burning high sulfur coal to meet the SO2 criteria, even though that's effectively what happened.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.