"Abortion Rights Without Apologies"

Nicely put.

Dear SEPTA,

When I moved close to the Jenkintown train station I rode the train almost daily to Warminster for work.  It was (if I recall) $68 for a monthly (2-zone) pass.  Over the years, my travel increased a bit, that pass price kept going up and I started buying only in months I knew I was commuting to work for the whole of.  Now that pass doesn't exist and I would need to buy the $109 cross county.

I now ride SEPTA to/from the airport and occasionally to/from the city but otherwise not at all.  If the pass had been kept at the (already too-high) $75 level, I would still get a pass for months I wasn't travelling otherwise (e.g. I would have gotten one this month).  If that $75 was for the cross county I would consider buying it every month (except maybe Dec) regardless of whether or not I was travelling.  So SEPTA could be getting $600-800 a year from me, a single counter-flow rider whose ticket purchases are pure profit for you and who doesn't crowd out others (i.e. not riding peak to/from city), but instead you get $0 because your pricing for tickets is too high for non-center city commuters (especially considering your much worse scheduling for us).

SEPTA really should realize this: There is far more space on the counter-flow trains so extra commuters are pure gravy.  But it is cheaper than $75/month and MUCH more convenient for me--and for most suburban workers--to drive to work, so people with cars [who are not going to the city for work] currently have no good reason to ride SEPTA because the prices are just too damned high.

If I were in charge of their pricing I would try making the cross county pass $60/month, would market it to weekend city riders as well as suburban commuters, give it a year and see what happens.  I would buy that every month even though I wouldn't always be riding.

Commuters to the city have to deal with crappy traffic and paying for parking in the city: I don't.  I like the train because 1. the walking at both ends does me good and 2. reading on my commute is much easier.  When I drive, however, I can stop off at Costco, my Co-op, the beer store, or Target on my way home, so even months that I mostly take the train, I will likely want to drive occasionally.  If the pass price is so high that I can only justify it by riding every day...I won't buy it.

Zoning Laws

At some level zoning laws make sense.  There are good reasons for me not to be allowed to pave my entire property on a whim, and there are good reasons that I can't just decide to run a bar out of my basement, and there are good reasons that I cannot build a 30' wall on my property line.  That said, a lot of zoning is parochial nonsense.

Setbacks are my current gripe (for personal reasons, and because of this mention by Atrios).  Between being able to maintain your property, not invading on a neighbor's or public space and not being a fire hazard a few feet of setback, in some cases, makes good sense.  10 - 30' (depending on zoning and structure) almost never does.

The only thing a 10' setback does is break up your property into smaller and less usable pieces.  It is particularly galling to have such in a neighborhood where lots of earlier built structures are right on the property line.

Because This Time It'll Work!

Doing Iraq Wrongish

I don't think I really disagree with Obama's (stated, apparent) policies on Iraq and ISIS (or ISIL or just IS or the evil hobgoblins of doom riding the four horsemen of the apocolypse to destroy America and make the world a terrorist paradise of...but I digress).  It's the way he talks about them, and the way that most other news outlets and media people and politicians talk about them.

Digby's put together a piece that covers how I feel about this.

I'm More Optimistic But It's Gonna Take Change

David Atkins seems a little oddly pessimistic in this post.  On the one hand he is very correct about the progress of technology and what it will be able to do in the future.  On the other he seems to ignore that a future in which all jobs are performed by machines is one in which either people must either all be enjoying immense prosperity or we are hiding from the robot death machines that are keeping insurrection in check (whether they are controlled by an AI or the future's 1% is kind of irrelevant).

While there are times I feel like the doomsday scenario is where we are headed, mostly I don't.  There are a few reasons for that, some positive some negative.  Let's start with the negative...

I don't know that we will really develop machines/software that can truly replace human creativity.  It could be our limit, or that we realize it is a bad idea (more likely the former).  I mean AI's will either enslave or kill us.  It is the sensible thing to do.  Whether our history is actually one of violence and destruction interspersed with periods of peace and prosperity, or the other way around doesn't matter much because our current trend is not good.  Particularly with respect to...

...Global warming, which will vastly change how we live on this planet over the coming decades.  Peoples will move, starve, thirst, die, and wars will start.  Or we will resolve all these issues via a combination of technological development and a vast, global political force for good that sees that that development is distributed to maximize the aid to humanity. (Stop laughing!)

On a more positive note there is the fact that if you replace all people in the workforce with machines: who buys the products the machines make?  In that world either governments/corporations would need to ensure that somehow the bulk of the population had the wherewithal to consume, or the wealthy could move to enclaves where the rabble couldn't kill them.

In reality I suspect that we will not approach any of these things (except global warming which we can't stop at this point and so will have to deal with).  If machines displace enough middle class the economy will suffer so there will be less impetus for further development.  There could be an asymptotic approach, but I think we would find there are local minima/maxima that would really require some heft to get past, and in our current political state we're nowhere close to having it.

I think in the US we will mostly be not as well off as we would like--with the wealthy being increasingly distant from the others--but still sufficiently comfortable that revolution doesn't really happen.

I'm not sure that is really optimism, but it isn't the downward spiral or killer robots of doom so it's something.

Puppy

We were planning on waiting on getting a new dog until after a bit of travel coming up, but a "Puppy Adoption" sign put an end to that thinking.  We adopted Ripley--nominally a border collie/lab mix, but who knows for sure (or really cares)--took him home and really pissed off the cats.

New puppy, day 1:

Day 2: ~26 hrs later he vomited everything he had eaten that day and a few hours after that at about 2:30 am he woke us up with very vile smelling bloody diarrhea.  Now we know what an intussusception is.  He had parvo, which is likely contributor to getting the intussusception, and the surgery alone was $4k.  I don't know what kind of person it takes to choose to put a puppy down (or let it die) rather than fork over the $4k for the life saving surgery, but I know I'm not that kind of person.  So he is now Ripley, as in "Believe it or not this puppy was $5000!".

He is doing quite well now--staples out and back to eating anything he can get in his mouth...and still pissing off the cats by his mere presence.

But you don't need that much!

I find retirement calculators like this one (I know, CNN's crappy Money section again) incredibly frustrating. The single biggest issue goes to methodology where (burried) you can find:

We then assume you can live comfortably off of 85% of your pre-retirement income. So if you earn $100,000 the year you retire, we estimate you will need $85,000 during the first year of retirement. For each subsequent year, we increase your income need by 2.3% to keep up with inflation...

Here's the problem: what you need and what you earn don't scale this way.  Someone making $50k/year at 35 who has a house and kids, is someone who, may be making $100k in 30 years, but who, at that time could well have a paid off house and grown kids they are no longer paying for.  No fucking way does that person need $85k/year (plus inflation) to retire on!  What you need in retirement is only a large fraction of what you earned if you still have lots of debt.  But anyone with that level of debt probably isn't a candidate for this calculator, as they probably can't afford to put away the 15%+ of their income necessary to have a secure retirement!  The whole thing is just fucked.

No matter how much you earn, if you can actually manage to put $1-2 million into retirement, own your residence, and be otherwise debt free at retirement, then that'll be plenty.  There are people who don't believe that, but they are pretty much all delusional financial types.

Shorter President Obama

"Torturers are patriots"

Not Learning Good

I would have thought that after Hillary lost to Barack in 2008 she would have learned that the Democratic base likes their candidate to be less warmongery.  It even sounded like she had really come to see how badly flawed her judgement was on Iraq.  Guess not.  I really want to like Hillary, but it is exactly this kind of right-wing sounding militaristic crap that I find outrageous coming from anyone, much less a Democrat.  I hope that we get a better candidate on military/intelligence that can displace her.  What is more likely is that such a candidate would make her pull back and lots of people would believe she is less of a warmonger than she is.

She's probably worse than Obama...who, still dissapointingly, was not a whole lot better than Bush Jr.  Why the fuck can't we get a presidential candidate that doesn't want to arm and then bomb the hell out of the middle east?!?

"We're F'd"

Probably.  Not a very happy read, this, mostly because no matter how scary the outlook I don't see us (US or globally) doing nearly enough to head off very bad things.  More, I'm not very confident in our being able to successfully deal with said very bad things when they arrive.

At a global level this is insane, and there is no reason we couldn't do something but at an individual level, it's just too hard and too expensive.  I would love to get off the grid and go carbon neutral, but it isn't very feasible.  For commuting: award winning SEPTA kind of sucks for me: too expensive and very inconvenient relative to driving, and the roads I would need to take are kind of dangerous for bicycling (plus riding 10 mi to work in the summer morning would leave me in such a state that no one would want to come near me for the rest of the day).  At home: solar/wind/etc plus the energy storage for load leveling is very expensive, and there isn't enough back from energy companies to offset by feeding the grid.

I think that there is basically no hope without a carbon tax--including gasoline--coupled with a massive [federal] push for renewable energy and more efficient use of that energy.  We need fully electric transportation with more mass transit.  We need more efficient heat pumps.  We need a smarter, more efficient grid.

I suspect we will have most of those things eventually, but I also suspect it will be too late.

How Anti-Torture of Him

What Digby said.

So the president called torturers patriots at a press conference yesterday.  Yea, we'll never torture anyone ever again, thanks to how well President Obama has handled things.  I mean, if you torture someone, then a future president (and Nobel peace laureate), after admitting it was torture and saying it was horribly wrong, will then call you a patriot!  How will you be able to look yourself in the mirror after that?!?  Or, really, after torturing people, but let's not ignore the way that you will be publicly ridicule-praised.  The Shame!

Why can't we have good Democrats politicians people?

GPS Prevents You From Learning

I've had this thought about GPS (and know I've told people about it), and it's nice to see it validated by a real study.  If you use GPS navigation to get from point A to point B there's a really good chance that you will have no idea how you got there.  If, however, you look at a map (even mapped directions) and figure out where you are going.  You will then have to pay attention on the trip and will have a much better idea of where you are, how you got there, how to get back, and even how to get around problem spots that may occur.

I think GPS is great for navigation if you are someplace you are not likely to return (say on vacation, or a road trip), but it is a much better idea to get around without it as much as possible in the place you live.

Information Everyone Should Know

Considering that everyone (i.e. all the very serious people) know that high taxes hurt job growth...it should come as no surprise that they are wrong and high taxes don't hurt job growth.  They may actually help create more jobs as is now being seen in CA.  A couple paragraphs I like (in part because I've made similar points here 4 years ago):

Neumark said he asks his students, “Does raising income tax rates reduce hiring?”

“The answer is no. What firms care about when deciding how many workers to hire is the marginal product of workers and the marginal cost of those workers. So if you are an employer and your personal income tax rate is increased, that does not raise the marginal cost of your workers, but it may encourage you to work a little less hard,” Neumark noted, applying standard economic theory.

continuing:

Some research into tax rates indicates that high rates have the opposite effect: People may work harder, trying to make more money to achieve a desired after-tax income and may slough off if tax rates are lowered.

Hmm...On the one hand I'd like to gloat about being right.  On the other it is so frustrating that the people who are constantly and so badly wrong have so much influence, that I can't really feel good about it.

Also in that article and following a recent discussion regarding high taxes driving people away and low taxes attracting them:

The empirical evidence also shows that the best-paying jobs tend to be clustered in states (and countries) with high taxes. The same tends to be true of wealth creators, including the most money-motivated among scientists, and existing wealth holders not actively engaged in business.

Manhattan, home to the highest taxes in America, is also home to many centimillionaires and billionaires drawn by the proximity of other dealmakers, as well as taxpayer-supported amenities such as museums and performing arts halls. [emphasis mine]

If you want to live in a really nice place that place being really nice costs something and that something is tax dollars.  So nicer places to live have to be higher taxed. Looking back on the first thing I bolded, you see this seems to be true even among people who have the freedom to live wherever they want: "those not actively engaged in business"--i.e. the retired and/or people who have inherited their wealth--should be most tax sensitive...they choose to live in high tax areas.

I understand that in government there is waste (less than people think) and abuse (ditto) and money spent on "things you don't like" (say, the military), but tough.  In the end, if you vote for and/or support tax cuts you are championing a shittier country/state/municipality than you currently live in.

Things I Wouldn't Know About If Not For the Internet

Giant Flemish Rabbit.  As tiny Elvis would say: "Woah, look at that thing.  Man that sucker's huge."

Always Good to Laugh When You're Down

Weird Al tends to provide that.  Plus, I can certainly be tacky too.

Goodbye Zoé

In January 2003 a cute and playful little puppy suckered me into bringing her home.  She was 3 months old at the time, playful, gregarious, and cute as they come, and she pooped in my car in the 2 miles from the shelter to my house...seriously pooped, like she must have weighed half as much when she was done pooped, and while she was small she wasn't tiny:

In the first year she managed to be very cute while destroying the carpeting in my apartment...and my recliners...and my boots...and my wallet...and my PDA (remember those?  Mine was a Sony!)...and the moldings...and the vertical blinds...and the feed line for the toilet (flooding the bathroom)...and the bathroom wall, removing insulation behind it...and eating a pound of the 50% off chocolate I picked up after easter--it didn't seem to do anything but give her colorful foil poop for a day or two.

But still, she was cute, so she managed to get away with all that...it was particularly cute that she did these things when I was gone because she missed me (everyone: "Awww!").  She was the devil, but that was ok.  Eventually she got through that phase, and no one who has met her since believes she was ever capable of such wanton destruction. 

In fact, pretty much everyone agreed she was the best dog in the world, including her...

She loved going for walks particularly at Wissahickon...

She managed to get herself invited onto stranger's beds...

She even put up with us when we would make her pose for silly pictures like this...

 And this...

And we couldn't just leave her sleep when she was being this cute...

She'd like you to think she was indifferent toward the cats

But we knew the truth...they were conspiring together...

At the young age of 9 she developed an animosity toward dead tree limbs that lasted through her final years...

And to anyone who doesn't think she was the best dog ever...she's got something to say to you...

In July 2013 she was diagnosed with lymphoma.  One round of chemo and a very short remission took her to January 2014, when the vets gave her 2-3 months (3 months with further treatment).  Because the chemo had been rough on her we decided to forego.  She decided that she should be around longer than that.  At least long enough to see us get married (remotely):

Zoé passed away on July 14 2014 after nearly twelve years on earth, eleven and a half with me, and a bit over four years with Debbie.  She will be missed, but really, now, it's...

Time for her to go exploring...

We love you Zoé.

Infused Water

I like cucumber water (generally with some lime juice), but most infusions don't do much for me because low temp extraction is just not very good: you use a lot of fruit for a pretty small effect.  Cucumber is an exception (watermelon works pretty well too), and cucumber seeds in particular.  In fact, splitting a cucumber (or two) and scooping the seeds out for cucumber water still leaves the rest of the cucumber for salad/salsa/whatever so you get the best of both worlds.  Maybe I should try the stringy goop around the seeds of a cantaloupe.

As for other things: muddled mint does ok but if you really want to get all the flavor out you have to cook that (hard, i.e. boil not steep), at which point you're maybe technically drinking infused water but most people would call it "tea", and other fruits certainly taste good infused, but in almost all cases, you get better flavor for less fruit by mashing and/or cooking them down and adding as a concentrate/juice/syrup.  Now if you are planning on eating the fruit out of your water, then go for it.

...also, alcohol does well for extraction so infusing a vodka or gin is useful, though its too bad cucumber infusions doesn't last long.

Are You Stupid? "Included for Free" Addition

First off, the answer is probably "yes" because we all are, and anyone who thinks they aren't is just being stupid.  Still, there are some varieties of stupid that are particularly egregious (see Justice Alito's recent opinion).  Try this fictional example...

Ferrari sells you a particular model of vehicle with every option "included for free" at $250k.

Porsche sells you a car with a base price of $130k and $120k in optional upgrades that bring it to about the same point as the Ferrari (yes, enthusiasts for one or the other will disagree but that's not the point here).

The question: Do you complain to the Porsche dealer that Ferrari includes their options for free?
The answer: Only if you are stupid.

This doesn't mean that one isn't better than the other at one thing or another, or that you wouldn't be better served by one or the other, but if you think the Ferrari options are "free" you are monumentally stupid.

"Included for free" means that the price is already factored into the base price of whatever you are getting.  Unless you are someone who needs all the included items, you are probably paying for things you don't need so that someone else who does can get them at a slight discount.

Bad Decision, Interesting Take

This sounds more hopeful than expectant, but about as good as one can do to try and feel better about the rather horrible Supreme Court decision in favor of Hobby Lobby.  Essentially: the made up religious liberties of a business/corporation trump the civil liberties of its employees.

There really isn't any logical way to back the majority's decision.  One can hope that future cases will show what a horrid bit of legalese they've released upon the world and it will be overturned, but I have a hard time seeing that happening in my lifetime.  While our country and its people have become much more accepting in the last couple decades, it seems that our institutions are stuck at the turn of the [last] century.  It's no wonder people's confidence in all parts of government (and corporations) is in the toilet.