I don't have children yet, but I know I'm this kind of person. I forget things all the time; once, I left our cat shut in the spare room for six hours. He was fine, but I will have to be very careful.
Paula Lieberman @106 --
As one might imagine, given my forgetfulness, I'm strongly in favor of an automatic safety measure, like a seatbelt warning, that would ding or not lock the car doors or in some way give a warning if there was a weight in the back seat.
I do not think that this kind of built-in warning is in any way comparable to an automatic breathalyzer; one would have to breathe into the breathalyzer every time one started the car. It would be intrusive in the extreme. And I imagine a breathalyzer would be far more prone to problems than a simple force transducer. The technology for the backseat alarm is already there, and tested, and even standard safety equipment in many new cars. It turns off the passenger-side airbag if there's a child in the seat.
Of course, one could make the argument that all safety equipment is intrusive. Maybe the breathalyzer should be standard safety equipment too. But I don't think an aftermarket addition would be anywhere near as useful, because I think the standard narrative -- only bad parents forget their children -- would preclude purchase in a lot of cases.
Arachne @48 --
I know shame isn't something you can wish away, but if it helps, I don't think you are being stupid or have any reason to be ashamed. Good people do what they can for others in need with the resources they have available, and that sounds like what you're doing. Right now, you don't have as many resources free as you once did. There are many stories in many cultures about people who couldn't give much, but who gave what they had with grace. Your concern over how little you can give leads me to believe that your gifts are indeed graceful.
No worries, debcha -- I envy you your first-hand experience, which I am currently denied for reasons of geography and finance and inability to convince my husband we need to blow a month's rent on dinner.
Earl Cooley III, #511 -- as the late, great Molly Ivins used to say, I have no dog in this fight.
Clifton Royston @501 -- I think that sounds amazing, and if I weren't several thousand miles away, I'd be going too. It reminds me of the blog written by the woman who cooked every dish in the French Laundry cookbook.
Earl Cooley @508 -- I like steak, too, and someday I'd like to try Wagyu beef, but this is a cow of a different color. Whether or not you personally like this style of cooking, it's unquestionably an art. The skill levels involved are incredible. And I don't think the so-called "French Problem" applies at all. I mean, for one thing, it's a 21-course tasting menu, the portions are supposed to be small so the diner can get everything down. For another thing, $300 a head probably approaches straight food costs for foie gras, truffles, white sturgeon caviar, and abalone.
And pretentious? This kind of DIY foodie-god homage is pretty much anti-pretentious -- you'll never get to tell anyone you really ate at the French Laundry, there's no "atmosphere," it's all about love of the food.
Mostly, though, I just hate to see anyone stomp on another person's honest enthusiasm.
Rikibeth -
If the drilling option doesn't work out, I think a triangular stitch pattern with the point of the triangle at the hole at the top of the heart would work to secure the tags. And it might even turn out to be a design benefit -- bondage hearts!
I've always been sort of confused by this "centrist" thing. I don't know anybody who describes themselves as a centrist. I'm a bleeding-heart liberal myself, my father's some kind of rugged-individualist libertarian shading toward liberal on a bunch of issues, my stepmother-in-law is a Bush loony, and my best friend's husband is very socially liberal but votes on the Second Amendment exclusively, because he thinks social change is an inevitable force of nature. How exactly do you find a center in all of that?
Honestly, the cry for centrism seems to me to be a namby-pamby "plague on both their houses" technique used to avoid having to acknowledge the facts or take a stand on any issue. What do you do, just take the average? Centrists were pro-war but aren't anymore? Abortion should be almost impossible to get, but legal? Torture is okay when we do it, but not when anybody else does and only if we're really really sure we're torturing the bad guys? This is the I Am A Grownup political position?
I prefer reality, myself. Of course, that requires engaging with issues, gathering data, verifying politicians' statements and deciding on the best course of action. Much easier to just decide they're all wildly partisan and pick some arbitrary spot in the middle.
Gah.
/end rant
Personally, I think electric-car manufacturers should focus their efforts on northern cities -- the infrastructure is already there. I live in Edmonton, where people have to plug in regular cars during the winter so they'll have a prayer of starting. One of the joys of -40 C. (Another one is that your breath will freeze on your eyelashes; unfortunately, it took a fairly messy mascara incident for me to figure that out. But I digress.) Most condos and apartment buildings, and even some parking garages, provide outlets, and most homeowners have some kind of outlet available even if they don't have an actual garage.
Of course, they'd need to make sure the batteries work properly at -40 C, which may be a nontrivial problem -- IANA materials engineer.
Terry Karney @270 -- I yield, I yield. Averages remain slippery, read the Methods section and the footnotes, watch the error bars, look to the skies, Alaska is a crazy place. Also, re 269, have you read that Molly Ivins/Louis Dubose article on the Texas exams I linked to in 267? It's terrific, though it may be stuff you already know.
C Wingate #265:
Okay, so you say we're so good at writing tests now that racial biases are pretty much nonexistent, and socioeconomic biases are the ones that are left. Maybe. You also say universal testing eliminates the bias brought about by selective testing; sure, I'll buy that.
But socioeconomic bias is still one heck of a bias, and I don't believe you've addressed ESOL bias either, which is a big problem, particularly in urban areas. Should ESOL students who have good reading comprehension in their own language or good math skills when they understand the problems be held back? What if they're taking classes in a mixture of English and a native tongue?
What if, contrary to what you say, they're not being poorly taught at all? What if their teachers are competent and the students are hammered by the socioeconomic or ESOL bias in the test? Their teachers get penalized anyway. I'm not sure you realize the true extent of "teaching to the test." It's not that the teachers have to go back to the basics. It's that the teachers have to take time out of classroom activities to teach kids to underline thesis statements in paragraphs, restate the question before answering, bubble the Scantron in properly; teachers have to spend hours drilling kids on test questions, getting them to memorize phrases, doing practice exams. It's horribly boring for the kids, especially the at-risk kids. And it doesn't teach them anything they can use.
Also, you didn't catch the other problems with tying testing to money. When I said cooking the books, I didn't mean just teaching to the test. I meant discouraging low-scoring kids from continuing, letting them fall through the cracks in the system, hiding drop-out rates in other numbers. Molly Ivins, who was thoroughly, charmingly biased (God rest her soul) but a generally excellent source of information, goes into some impressive detail with coauthor Louis Dubose about the Texas system, on which NCLB was loosely based, and its disastrous effects on Texas schools. The Texas school system, where all students must pass a test to graduate, reports its dropout rate at 4%; independent estimates put it somewhere between 40 and 52%. There's also a nice little trick where students who have failed one course can be kept at that grade level, sometimes for a year or three, in order to keep them from taking the exam.
This is what happens when there's an "incentive end" to a nationwide test like this. You don't seem to understand that the data generated by the NCLB is corrupt. It doesn't mean anything, because there is cheating of various kinds in the system. In Texas, the scores rose over 10 years to a point where most students were passing. Looks like improvement, right? Except that scores on the SAT and ACT didn't rise. Whoops.
If all the NCLB did was mandate the testing, it would be a much better program. As it is, it weakens schools, discourages kids, and puts massive burdens on already-burdened school systems.
heresiarch @253 -
That's a very good point, but I'm not convinced it's the one albatross was making; the examples he gave were all of problems everybody seems to agree are problems, like disparities in life expectancy, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and so on. But again, a very good point. I think a lot of seemingly insurmountable disagreements start from people having an unexamined assumption or two about Just What Is Wrong Here.
Terry Karney @263 -
I absolutely agree that "average" is a slippery thing, but you'll note that when I talked about it, I was either talking about average spending broken down by neighborhood and factored by race, class, etc., or average spending broken down by category, such as education, public services, and so on. "Average spending by state" is a slick and wily creature indeed, but "average" tends to approach cleanliness as the stats get finer-grained. For a given value of cleanliness. And "median" is still its more stalwart, upright cousin, of course.
Re C. Wingate 239:
You haven't actually answered my question, which was how administering a test over large groups makes biases disappear. Now you say you don't believe biases exist in the first place, because correlation is not causation and even if it is (wait, what?) then maybe those poorly-testing cultures are at fault and should be changed.
But the tests are being administered now, and they have major repercussions now for the children who are members of those disadvantaged cultures or socioeconomic groups. If the test is supposed to measure intelligence, any cultural or socioeconomic bias is a major problem. If it's supposed to measure education, as in the NCLB, it's a possibly less major problem -- because education isn't innate, and the test is measuring how well students can jump through this particular hoop, and maybe that's relevant to their future success in our society -- but may still not give accurate results, because a question may be posed in such a way that it is confusing to ESOL students, or may include cultural knowledge which is not relevant to the test's goals.
Also, regardless of the quality of the test itself, while I understand your preference for lots of tasty data, the NCLB system results in bad, untrustworthy data, which is much less tasty. If the NCLB is only a good measure of performance in good schools to begin with, because bad schools teach to the test, how exactly is it useful for improving bad schools? No one is saying schools shouldn't be able to fire bad teachers; they're saying that a system where schools are automatically penalized for not bringing up their test scores every year is begging to be abused. And really, how is a system where one must frantically teach to the test, as one must in poor, struggling schools, going to attract good educators? Good educators hate teaching to the test.
C. Wingate 232:
I'm not clear on how socioeconomic and cultural biases in standardized tests disappear when the test is administered over large groups?
Also, I am inclined to doubt that the statistics generated by NCLB are trustworthy, because of the huge incentives for school districts to increase their performance on the test. The minute a test becomes tied to money, people start cooking the books. At best, if schools are using "teach to the test" methods, improved scores tell you that the kids are capable of learning how to take the test, to the detriment of art, music, and anything else that can't be bubbled into a Scantron sheet. At worst, improved scores tell you that school administrators have figured out how to make poor-performing children "disappear."
albatross @226:
I agree with you that the data we have are not good enough. However, I think what got up my nose initially is that I perceived you as saying that that's it, data are never good enough, and don't really get at the interesting questions. My position is that if the data aren't good enough, we need better data. So the Golden Statues spending plan wouldn't stand, because we'd have data broken down by spending on education, public services, etc.
I do think you're moving the goalposts a bit in your latest comment; in #206, you were talking about identifying oppression, quality of government, and causes of problems with data. Now you're talking -- "what government ought to be doing, which simply isn't available in the data" -- about solutions. Not the same animal. I think solutions need to be informed by data, but that of course they have to also be informed by ethics. Shipping all HIV+ people off to a prison camp would almost certainly reduce the spread of the disease, but it is an utterly morally loathsome solution. So on that point I agree with you; data's not sufficient for solutions.
Also, you're right, I didn't make myself entirely clear in describing the connection between black deaths and governmental failure; sorry about that. What I meant was that if black deaths are disproportionately due to homicide, AIDS, etc., those are external causes: somebody shot somebody else, or gave someone AIDS.[1] Whereas smoking and other lifestyle choices are internal: somebody decided to smoke. External causes are much harder to guard against on a personal level; for example, if you're born in the projects, right there you have a much higher chance of being shot or getting AIDS, and so I think government ought to address those causes with a bit more vigor.
Of course the water's more muddy than that, because tobacco companies try very darn hard to get people to start smoking early, and as C. Wingate pointed out, AIDS & homicide are related to the drug trade. But as I tried to show in #229, I think the drug culture is the way it is because certain types of drugs are illegal, and that's a governmental choice.
[1] Re your footnote 2, I did not say that I thought homicide, AIDS and accidental death were the only cause of difference between black and white life expectancies, just that they made up a large portion of the difference. By which I still stand.
Re 219, 225:
I think you may be equating proximal with ultimate causes in comparing "lifestyle choices." As I see it, the important difference here is that the harder drugs are both much more addictive and illegal. Regardless of your assessment of how it would affect society in a broader sense, and I am not sure where I stand on that either, if cocaine and heroin were legal, you'd be able to buy hypodermic needles in a drugstore -- and there goes a lot of shared-needle HIV/AIDS -- and you'd be able to buy cocaine and heroine from a liquor store, grocery store, convenience store, wherever -- and there goes the corner trade culture and its attendant shooting deaths. Also, it removes prison from the equation, of course. What would be left is deaths from the actual drug use, which would probably still be higher than deaths from tobacco use, but not so much higher, and not quite so concentrated.
So yeah, I think the government is still quite involved in those statistics. The choice then becomes about whether legalizing hard drugs will be better for society than keeping them illegal. But I think it's pretty clear that keeping them illegal is bad for the parts of society that are predominantly black.
Albatross @ 206:
Perhaps you could make a case for obfuscating factors in average income and average life expectancy, but I fail to see how "average level of spending of taxpayer money by neighborhood, factored by majority race, ethnos, and class of the neighborhood" does not speak directly to quality of government.
I also think that contrary to your argument, average life expectancy speaks pretty clearly. As you say, men live shorter lives than women, on average, and black people live shorter lives than white people, on average, and so, you say, this must mean that it's impossible to tell who is being oppressed from the data. Okay, sure -- from those data. But when you break it down to causes of death, you can see what's really going on. For example, in Canada, women live longer than men, just as in the US. But if you remove deaths related to smoking and other preventable causes, men live longer than women. In the US, black life expectancy increased from 1993 to 2003, because HIV/AIDS related deaths, homicides, and accidental deaths decreased.
So, just looking at the available data, it seems that the gap in male and female life expectancies is mostly created by life choices such as smoking, whereas the gap in black and white life expectancies owes a great deal to deaths from disease, homicide, and accidental causes.
I would be interested to find out how my pre-existing beliefs have influenced this interpretation of the data.
I do think, however, that data alone isn't enough. My thesis advisor always told me to look for the story in the data, because stories are what humans like. In order to change public opinion, progressives need to be able to tell data-driven stories about conditions in the United States; we need a reality-based equivalent to (for example) Cadillac-driving welfare queens.
Re Xopher 127, IIRC Nader actually has received quite a lot of money from right-wing interests -- yup, according to this 2004 article from the San Francisco Chronicle, almost 10% of Nader's major contributors in the 2004 race had also recently given to the Bush/Cheney campaign; presumably donating to Nader was a tactical maneuver designed to sap votes from Kerry.
Nader's running mate deplored this, but Nader didn't seem to mind.
Mortimer @ #71:
I think the problem here is similar to an issue discussed rather thoroughly on Making Light a few months ago, which is the existence of loaded terms which may seem benign to outsiders but which carry toxic baggage. "Uncle Tom" is one of those terms. Ralph Nader is some kind of career... something, possibly a politician, but at any rate a big part of his job is to use words. It's his responsibility to avoid those loaded terms in public speech, and in this case he failed.
I would also like to point out that it really doesn't matter whether other people have tried to generalize the term "Uncle Tom" -- the reactions of people in this thread make it clear that "Uncle Tom" has not lost its sting, not by a long shot. The practice of reclaiming is a tricky one. Best not to get into it unless you are deeply immersed in the culture, and in this case, well, Ralph Nader is white.
All shall. Shall all. *Shall all.* Eep!
*sigh*
The first line of #37 is "shall all," not "all shall." Please pretend accordingly.
An Electoral Villanelle (Which Came Out Strangely Patriotic) on the Eve of This Election Day
We all shall stand in line
The voting booths await
Democracy's divine
The weather favors fine
Tonight we'll see our fate
We shall all stand in line
High turnout is a sign
That voters are irate
Democracy's divine
The others we malign
We will no more debate
We shall all stand in line
My vote, and theirs, and thine
All carry equal weight
Democracy's divine
This evening we define
What makes our country great
We shall all stand in line
Democracy's divine
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 5 |
| 2008 | 17 |
| 2006 | 4 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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