Tweets for the Fourth Month

Oh, April. You're over so soon and with so much rain. Bye now!

Took all I had not to tell the 10-year-old that the book he read to me to illustrate how parents don't GET kids AT ALL was written by a parent.
By Monika Bauerlein

Celebrity racist coverage reminds me of dictator coverage. So much on the man, so little on the system that sustains him or people he hurts.
By Sarah Kendzior ‏

When people ask, "What time in history would you like to travel to?" I'm like, "Um, I'm a woman. I'll stay right here, thanks."
By Sara Benincasa

If you add up the historical impact, the U.S. is by far the #1 cause of the CO2 in the atmosphere:


By William Lindeke

White male journalists in mostly white male newsrooms who don't think they have agendas. Ironic.
By Jose Antonio Vargas

Each 1% increase in the top 0.01% share of income was matched by a 10% increase in 0.01% share of campaign dollars.
By Demos_Org

One problem with the new Minneapolis parking system is I can't remember a 5-digit number for half a block.
By Chris Steller

This is what a long exposure photo of fireflies looks like:


By Learn Something

Sarah Palin is what you get when a YouTube comment gets political power.
By Sr. WH Official

Laptop backwards is potpal. This is my contribution to humanity for today.
By Aparna Nancherla

Imagine a black man refuses to pay taxes, rallies his boys to take up arms against Feds. Brother would be dead before he could say "freedom"
By Baratunde Thurston

Don't let anybody tell you that manually entered data is inconsistent:



By Noah Veltman

Annoying but true: really good things happen when you work at being kind.
By Julieanne Smolinski

I love how Americans view 35,000 annual motor vehicle deaths as acceptable and unremarkable but traffic cameras as extremely pernicious.
By Angie Schmitt

The system makes it so the student's job is to gather points and the teacher's job is to offer points. Learning may be a byproduct but also may not be.
By Sisyphus38

The first & last portrait photos of Lincoln as President: May 1860 & Feb 1865:


By Historical Pictures

If you're an introspective, thoughtful person, interviews expecting you to have brilliant answers in real-time are the absolute worst.
By Matt Haughey

I reject Western AND Eastern Medicine in favor of Southern Medicine. Which is drinking this jug of mayonnaise.
By Janine Brito

Asparagus can grow up to 10" in one day, which means that you could actually sit and watch your asparagus grow!
By Wheatsville Co-op

US beef has 28x climate impact of wheat per kg. Pricing carbon would raise the cost of wheat 2%, beef by up to 40%.
By Erik Stokstad

What's the 2nd law of thermodynamics?


By Belle de Jour

If we made a Choose Your Own Adventure Book for the entirety of human existence 97% of the pages would end "You have gotten the flu & died "
By Mallory

Cycling awareness street art by Peter Drew:


By Classic Music Pics

White people found Native Americans harvesting and eating it and were like "It's not wild, nor rice, but we're calling it that forever."
By mikki halpin

The paper clip from Microsoft has fallen on hard times:


By Halloween Costumes

In apocalyptic films the familiar landmarks are the first to be destroyed; but in post-apocalyptic movies they are all that remains."
By Samuel Arbesman

My fav thing to hear is "she's a good guitar player - for a girl." Vaginas do affect your musical ability. But only for cool instruments.
By Aly Leibow

You never hear "she's a great clarinet player - for a girl" because the vagina can sense that clarinets aren't super cool and only for boys.
By Aly Leibow

Why is it that you run on a parkway but park on a runway oh yeah because you make destructive decisions.
By Aparna Nancherla

This is heart-breakingly true. Think of this the next time you subtly suggest medicating THAT kid:


By Sisyphus38

The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty.
By Nicoll Hunt

100 nations with < 10 million people jointly have less than 5% of world population, but are 52% of UN member states.
By Hans Rosling

"...the nerdiest thing I've ever seen in my life, which undoubtedly explains why I like it so much."


By Maud Newton

There will always be a place for design agencies because the one thing you can't cultivate in-house is an outside perspective.
By Erika Hall

The jack-in-the-box has done pretty well for a toy where children open a box to be startled by half a clown's body.
By Bridger Winegar

I'm gonna guess this person meant to write tongs. Though, I could be wrong:


By Nick Bilton

A favorite definition from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary: Impunity, n. Wealth.
By Cathy Davidson

Wanna bust ass for 2 hours and then not really be able to tell if anything got done? Clean your baseboards!
By evelyn pollins

Never ask Jesus to "take the wheel." Jesus would be unfamiliar with motorized vehicles and if he drove you'd likely die in a fiery crash.
By highly irritable

 Playground designer you had one job:


By paper folder

People are absolutely desperate to find arguments for why we can't successfully reduce poverty. Wished they just say they don't want to.
By Matt Bruenig

Muslims always asked to condemn any terrorism among religious brethren, so I expect to hear from Christians about the wacko Klansman in Kansas.
By brittrobson

Aren't most moratoriums really lessatoriums?
By Chris Steller

Pfc Chelsea Manning has spent more time in custody than William Calley, leader of the My Lai massacre that killed more than 340 Vietnamese civilians.
By Chase Madar

This is what a snail shell looks like x 2500 [photo: eye of science]:


By Ziya Tong

A size comparison between the Titanic and a modern cruise ship:


By Chuck Norris

The problem isn't overdiagnosis of ADHD & its ilk, it's underdiagnosis of the adult-imposed need to manage schools like Taylorist factories.
By Zeynep Tufekci

 I don't get this idea that noting the existence of racism is a "weapon." I'm pretty sure racism itself is the weapon, and an effective one.
By Jamil Smith

Pay more attention to compassion and you’ll find you’re happier. It’s that practical and simple.
By Dalai Lama

Do people listen to these guys?


By almightygod

imagine the consequences if "single" didn't rhyme with "mingle"
By Aparna Nancherla

Drugging kids out of daydreaming? I’d like to muster a more eloquent response but srsly fuck ALLL of this.
By Erin Kissane

 I will forever be grateful for being a child in the 1980s, when you could daydream and be strange without it being a disease.
By Sarah Kendzior

"feminism is a cancer" he typed, vaping and chugging mountain dew. "it's killing us men." The microwave dinged, his taquitos were ready
By Nick Mullen

This:


By Sarah Beech

School report card: Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
By Steve Cushing

What message do we send to kids when we acknowledge that at no time during the school day should they be unsupervised?
By Sisyphus38

Just turned on CNBC. Can someone explain why the men wear business suits but the women look like they're heading out for a night on the town?
By Helaine Olen

If only the world would look as hard for a clean alternative to oil and coal as it is for that damn plane we might be alive when they find it.
By Bill Maher

If a pedestrian took up as much space as a car...it would look like this:


By Taras Grescoe

#Autosprawl is not a planning failure, it's just that the plan was for profit not people.
By Free Public Transit

Too often "partnership" means "enforce school procedures at home."
By Sisyphus38

Life of U.S. Born on stolen land. Weaned on stolen labor. Fattened on coal. Drunk on oil. Bragging, swaggering, and lecturing the world.
By Free Public Transit

god i do not miss school at all:


 By Ellis Hamburger

How do you say "Women make less..." but then say "it's worse for Black & Hispanic women..." Yet again: WOMEN = WHITE WOMEN.
By Elon James

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to Fish and he'll drive you crazy asking: "Got any Sevens?"
By Josh Stern

My 8-year-old son knows about software version numbers (e.g. Minecraft 1.7.2) but not decimals. So he thinks all decimals are "a kind of version."
By tomstandage

Danziger's brilliant political cartoon on SCOTUS political donations ruling:

By David Cay Johnston

Scientists tend to be more liberal than the general population. Hypothesis: It's a function of dealing with/accepting uncertainty. -Gallant
By Maggie Koerth-Baker

There is no cost argument against #freetransit, so they are saying it crowds the buses. Yeah, that's the point, then you add more buses.
By Free Public Transit

I don't think they proofread this sign before putting it up...


By Calvin

"You can win the rat race but you're still a rat." —Banksy
By Nikhil Goyal

Pro-Tip: Write down what you are outraged about on a good old-fashioned index card in case you lose battery power or are away from a device.
By pourmecoffee

1. It's not happening.
2. It's happening, but it's natural.
3. It is man-made, but we can deal with it.
4. Why didn't you TELL us?
By Philip Pullman 

A group of pedants is called an "actually."
By NonCombosMentos

This 2002 political cartoon become reality:


By Davey Hobbesian 

All you need to know about American culture is that we explain how magnificently large things are in terms of football fields.
By Neven Mrgan

When I grow up I want to be a worksheet completer. What do you mean there is no such job? Then why the hell have I been doing all these worksheets?
By Sisyphus38

Dept. of Irony:


By pharmagossip

According to 538, movies that pass the Bechdel test make $1.37 to the dollar of movies that only have one or no women.
By Sasha Geffen

If I ever run for office, I think "turn the safety net into a hammock" will be my slogan.
By Matt Bruenig

Can't sleep. Trying to wrap head around history of slavery in the U.S. Made this:


By Tim Maly

"I have never seen a lazy child. What is called laziness is either lack of interest or lack of health." —A.S. Neill
By Nikhil Goyal

"The new generation is lazy and entitled!" - every generation as they start getting saggy and resentful
By Jesse Thorn

5 months [since birth of my daughter] and I'm already sick of the clothing choices being "human" or "PINKGIRL" Ugh.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker

How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music. How to feel time: write. How to waste time: social media.
By Matt Haig

Presenting the greatest Venn diagram shirt I've seen in months:


By Wil Wheaton

Ugly Memes

I've been saving some of the worst meme graphics I've seen on Facebook for a little while. Here goes.

So far we've seen a lot of Comic Sans, a bit of Papyrus, wince-inducing art, at least one unneeded apostrophe, and enough sentiment to drive a sane person under the desk.

This one isn't badly designed generally, but it has a cloying message mixed with some of the worst-set type (at the bottom) I've ever seen:



And just to prove I dislike bad graphics even when I agree with what they say:


Wow. Unreadable. Here's a hint: If you feel as though you need to put a dark outline on your letters, there's something wrong with your design. (Among other things, in this case.)


What a mess of a good message.

What Would Orwell Think?

Reading Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia." Per Google Maps, Barcelona plaza he mentions as site of street battle is now home to an Apple store.

When I saw this tweet a few mornings ago, two things went through my mind:

1. I have to read Orwell's essays.
2. That sounds like Steven Pinker's point from The Better Angels of Our Nature about there not being any wars between countries that have at least one McDonald's.

The fact there's an Apple store in Barcelona indicates two things:

• That it's safe enough to protect the company's property with rule of law.
• That there are people who can afford Apple's products.

Once a company invests in a place, though, it becomes a further force in making sure those criteria remain in place -- especially the rule of law.

That may or may not be a perfect system (as Matt Bruenug has discussed in his series of posts about property equaling implied violence), but it seems better to me than the alternative.

All of that gives me hope that the Obama administration's economic sanctions against prominent Russians may help to prevent an outright war between Russia and the Ukraine.

________

Orwell tweet by Jason Noble (@jasonnobleDMR).

Thirsty Critters

This is a mural I pass by pretty frequently:


It's on the side of Zipp's Liquor Store on Franklin Avenue (procurer of kegs to generations of University of Minnesota students), and was painted a few years ago.


It's notable how much the color has faded already, though it still looks good.


The spiders made me think of Aragog from Harry Potter.


In case you can't tell (and I have done my best to hide it from you by shooting only parts of the mural) the animals are all gazing in admiration at a huge, winged can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

If you want to see the whole thing instead of these details, Murals and Graffiti in the Twin Cities obliges.

A Post About a Post

Your sign says no, but your smokers' pole says yes yes yes.


Seen at the Midtown Exchange (next to the Midtown Global Market) in Minneapolis. A place that anyone visiting the Twin Cities should see, whether you are a smoker or not.

Who's Getting the Subsidy?

Yeah, Cliven Bundy is a straight-up racist, but he's also in big denial. He rags on people he sees sitting outside on a hot day for having no jobs or ambition (how the hell does he know that from seeing people sitting outside one time?), but he doesn't recognize that he's the welfare queen, if there is such a thing.

Not only has he not paid for his cows' grazing for 20 years...even if he had ponied up, he'd be paying an incredibly subsidized rate:


So learn to deal with your cognitive dissonance just a bit, Cliven, and get the heck out of my news.

___

Here's Tom Tomorrow's most recent cartoon, about Bundy, written before the news of his blinkered racial analysis came out.

Two Notes on Style

I'm more A.P. than Chicago, I confess. I've never looked too closely at the Chicago Manual of Style, though I own one. Parts of it, such as spelling out numbers like twenty-three, seem ridiculous to me.

I just heard two style facts in the past couple of days:

1. A.P. recently announced that as of May 1 it will no longer recommend abbreviating state names. I was just discussing this with an editor the other day. As you may remember, I hate postal abbreviations, which are generally considered inappropriate in text unless you're listing an address. (Although you would never know this from the way many people write.)

But I don't like the A.P.-approved abbreviations much better, especially the one for Illinois (Ill.), which looks terrible in just about every typeface. I constantly have to correct writers who think California is Cal. when it should be Calif., or that Wisconsin is Wisc. when it's actually Wis. No more of that. Thanks, A.P.!

2. I saw a link to this post by web designer Khoi Vinh, writing about a site called TitleCapitalization.com. The site helps users figure out what part of a title to capitalize, if you're using what Microsoft Word calls "title case" (as opposed to the more readable "sentence case" preferred by most newspapers these days). Way too many websites publish headlines that look like this:

Town To Take Back Land From The County

Those unneeded capital letters on To, From and The make me wince. As I learned in school, you shouldn't capitalize articles or prepositions, though I seem to recall an exception for ones of five or more letters. I've forgotten what I was taught about conjunctions, but Vinh quotes Chicago as dictating lowercase for coordinating conjunctions and uppercase for subordinate conjunctions. Whew. I missed those terms at some point in my education, but here's a list of the two types (source):

Coordinating (set in lowercase):
and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet

Subordinate (set in uppercase):
after, since, when, although, whenever, as, where, because, than, before, that, though, whether, if, which, while, who, until

I note that most of the subordinate conjunctions are five or more letters long. The ones that aren't (when, as, than, that, if, who) I have mixed feelings about. I can't imagine setting as with a capital letter in a headline. Who and when clearly seem as though they deserve capitalization. That and than seem debatable. I would probably look those up to be sure.

There was one more rule from Chicago about capitalization that Vinh cited:

Capitalize the first and last word.

Well, obviously the first word is capitalized. But the last word? Why do you have to include that, when it's almost always going to be a part of speech that's covered under the general rules? And if, for some reason, a title ends with a preposition, why would it make sense to capitalize it?

Especially when so many people seem to think the word is doesn't require capitalization in titles, even though it's a verb.

Let's Get Rid of Right Turn on Red

Right turn on red laws seemed like a good idea at the time. Why not save a little gasoline by letting cars go instead of waiting for the light to turn?

When I drive and take advantage of the option, I sometimes appreciate it. But at other times, it makes me anxious, knowing there are cars behind me that want me to turn even though I can't see well enough or can't judge the speed of an on-coming car. It would just be simpler to have to wait for every red light than judge when it's safe to proceed. As we've all seen, there are all too many cars that use it as an opportunity to roll through a red light or race an on-coming car that has the right of way.

I had already come to a soft conclusion that we'd be better off without right on red, and then I read this case against it by Sam Rockwell from StreetsMN, via MinnPost. Now I'm even more sure we should do away with it.

It's not just that pedestrians and bicyclists get hit by turning drivers who don't yield the right of way:

Even when someone on foot or a cyclist is not hit by right-turning vehicles...right turning vehicles still do a significant disservice to vulnerable users. Right-turning vehicles often pull into the crosswalk so that the driver of the vehicle can actually see oncoming car traffic. As a result, people crossing the intersection on foot lose that small stretch of street that is supposed to be temporarily theirs. That person must then walk around the front or the back of the imposing vehicle.

If the person walks in front of the vehicle, he or she must be on guard in case the vehicle attempts to leap into traffic. If the person passes behind the vehicle, he or she must weave between multiple vehicles, any of which could move. Therefore, right turns on red mean that people can never walk across the street, even when they have the right of way, as if they own the space. People on foot must be constantly aware of their vulnerability, can never go on a walk and let their mind wander.

Shouldn’t pedestrians – people – be able to simply be in their community without wearing “light colors” and “retro-reflective materials,” as the State of Minnesota suggests?

Right on red does save a bit of fuel, but Rockwell makes this excellent point:

The Federal Highway Administration estimated that right turns on red would save between 1 and 4.6 seconds for each driver at a red light.

While turning right on red does in fact save fuel for car drivers, the Massachusetts DOT points out that “[t]he best way to reduce fuel use is to drive less.” With 65% of trips under a mile in the U.S. made by car, improving the experience of being a pedestrian or biker, as well as improving actual safety, could result in significant fuel savings by encouraging people to walk and bike more.

 Let's get rid of right turn on red.

Recommendations from Jo Walton

I don't think I've ever read a novel with so many recommendations for other novels in it. Jo Walton's Hugo- and Nebula-winner Among Others deftly integrates critiques of much of the science fiction published before 1980. Written in diary form, it seems like a natural way for a voracious reader like the main character, Mori, to express herself.

I'm not sure what it would be like to read this book if you were new to science fiction, but for someone who has read pretty widely, it's like talking to a friend about books you didn't know anyone else had read.

Ursula LeGuin, Sylvia Louise Engdahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Silverberg, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner. The authors and their books go whizzing past.

One of the things I loved about the story, and Mori, was her total innocence about how publishing works. If she had read one book by an author, she didn't know how to find out whether the writer had published other books (it takes place in 1979-80... so no internet for Mori). But then she starts to go to the library and finds out about inter-library loan. Soon, the books are flying out the door.

And now I have to go find copies of books she mentions that I've never read, despite the fact that they're by some of my favorite authors:

• The World Inside and Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
• Time Without Number by John Brunner
• Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh
• Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny
• Babel 17 and Triton by Samuel Delany. I was scared off of Delany by a mistimed attempt at reading Dhalgren when I was 18. But Mori describes Triton as Delany's response to LeGuin's Dispossessed, so how can I not read that?
• Pavane by Keith Roberts (an author completely new to me)
• The Charioteer by Mary Renault. I know, it's not science fiction, but Mori shares my affection for Renault's ancient Greek stories and I haven't read this one.

Time to go check the used book stacks at Uncle Hugo's.

Oh, and one last bonus: Mori dislikes Thomas Hardy, too.

_____

There are three books that Mori never mentions, and whose omissions seem odd, given her interests. I wonder if they were not available in the U.K. at the time?

• The King Must Die by Mary Renault (though she specifically mentions the sequel, The Bull from the Sea)
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (a much better book than Creatures of Light and Darkness, which is discussed)
• The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner (one of his very best)

Who Decides When a Hyphen Dies?

It was fun to read Stephen Wilbers's business writing column from today's Star Tribune. He tackled the question of compound phrase and words: when to use a hyphen or not, and when to use a space or not.

Over time, adjectival usages tend to go from hyphenated to a single word. Sometimes it happens with nouns, too -- he gives the example of weekend (which went from week end to week-end). Though, he notes, "Curiously...certain compounds such as high school resist evolution. Go figure."

Other examples are still in transition, such as health care -- which Mayo Clinic, for instance, has transmuted into healthcare. This appears to be a common practice in health industry writing (when they're talking to each other).

In my work, I frequently encounter the question of when to make a compound into a single word. In writing or designing for an industry or trade audience, there are many usages that begin to make sense as a single word. A couple I've come across:

• Foodservice -- the industry that makes food for large numbers of people, whether in an institutional setting or in grocery store prepared foods.
• Fairtrade -- the movement to pay producers, usually in developing countries, a fair price for their goods and work with them to build their businesses and economic power.
• Layout -- part of what a designer does. This becomes two words when used as a verb, but as a noun or adjective, it's one word.
• Startup -- whether talking about new tech companies or new food co-ops, I lost patience with hyphenating this one.
• Proofreading -- funny, I know, but I never feel quite confident about this one. Maybe it's that fread combination that looks like a strange word.

Wilbers discusses log on/in and set up and decides that they're all comparable to my usage of layout -- two words as verbs but one word as adjectives (and nouns, if appropriate). Why do login and setup sound wrong to me as verbs, when proofread doesn't?

It's a mystery how or when it becomes acceptable to make a formerly hyphenated word into a single compound word. My guess is it starts with writers addressing specialized audiences, then moves to the more general rules once it's recognized by dictionaries and style guides.

Who decided that nationwide and worldwide were one word, but city-wide wasn't, for instance? Is there a committee meeting in an obscure room of the New York Public Library?

Three for Easter

I toyed with the idea of finding out if that local megachurch would be dropping eggs from a helicopter yet again this year, and going to see the spectacle of all those parents jockeying to put their kids first. But nah. It's too nice outside.

So here are a couple of Easter tweets instead:

Just took my kid to an Easter egg hunt, which I’m realizing is basically just training for a Black Friday sale:


By Khoi Vinh

Jesus is like Frank Zappa: a talented, forward thinking guy with insufferable fans.
By rachel lichtman

And this from Mac Danzig:

Peeps on the Ceiling

I imagine tomorrow's Pioneer Press will include the winners of the paper's annual Peeps diorama contest. But before those are announced, I wanted to share a couple of photos of one that I saw while wandering around the studio art building at Macalester College.


The title: Michelangelpeep's Peepstine Chapel Ceiling.

Here's a close-up of the ceiling and the artist, lying on his back atop the scaffolding with his paint pots:


God, Adam, and everyone else gets the Peep treatment.

The accompanying card reads:

As the peeple of Rome peep in, Michelangelpeep puts the finishing touches on the Peepstine Chapel ceiling. His Holiness Peep Julius II looks on, accompanied by the College of Cardinals and guarded by the Swiss Peeps.

Down Is Up at Reuters

Did you hear about the odd chart that ran on Business Insider, though it was created by a Reuters graphic artist?


This graph accompanied a BI story about gun deaths in Florida after the passage of the nation's first Stand Your Ground law. The text of the story makes it clear that deaths went up suddenly after the law passed. But looking at the chart, you would think just the opposite happened.

That's because the Y axis runs in the opposite direction than it does conventionally. Here's a version submitted to BI that fixes it:


Oh, right, there's a spike after the law passes, not a decline.

Was this just a ploy to make it look as though the law decreased violence, kind of like the Fox News graph that truncated the ACA enrollments so it looked like hardly any had happened?

No, it appears to be a case of an incompetent graphic artist. Reuters designer Christine Chan said on Twitter that she was inspired by this graphic, which depicts the death toll of the Iraq war:


(click to see it larger)

Which would be all well and good, except for several major differences:

• The Iraq art is a bar graph, not a fever graph. The many bars, with their rounded ends, look like dripping blood, which of course goes down, not up, and therefore makes the inversion make sense. Chan's fever graph, with its black line and big black dots at the data points, doesn't look like blood. There's no reason for it to be upside down.
• The Iraq graph puts the Y axis labels at the top to call the reader's attention to it and make the inversion more obvious. Chan's does not.
• The Iraq graph puts other graphs, in gray, over the white space, making it clear that white = background and red = foreground. On Chan's Stand Your Ground graph, it's reasonable for readers to see the white as foreground since there is no reason not to, given the usual up-down conventions used in graphs. 

 This is where an editor should have stepped in and required changes to the graph.

Hoping for a Speedy Recovery, Diane Ravitch

Education historian Diane Ravitch, author of Reign of Error, took a fall a few days ago and is probably going to have to have total knee replacement. She's cancelling pretty much all of her public schedule for the next few months.

Get well soon, Diane!

In the meantime, a photo of two of my favorite hell-raising women together in February:


(This way we can be sure they are not the same person. Except Photoshop. Hmmm.)

More on the Case for Government Programs

If you haven't yet taken the bait from one of my recent posts mentioning writer Matt Bruenig, here's another chance. He recently published a piece called The one part of the charity vs. social welfare argument that everyone ignores.

It's about status quo bias and the effect it has on policy debates. Basically, it's harder to take away a benefit than it is to prevent one from being given because "the way things are" has a lot of power with the human brain.

My favorite quote:

If you believe, as most claim to, that the aged and infirm should not die hungry on the streets, why exactly would you want to take their existing public benefits from them, give the money to other people instead, and then hope that those other people give it right back to the aged and infirm through charity? Even if it did somehow work out as planned, it would be a whole bunch of work to arrive at the same outcome.

That's based on not only status quo bias, but also on the efficiency argument.

A couple of other recent pieces on the question of the best way to provide a humane life to the most people:

Does Christianity really prefer charity to government welfare? "While often overlooked, there is a strong Christian case for their coexistence." By Elizabeth Stoker.

The Voluntarism Fantasy. "Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed—and we’re better for it." By Mike Konczal.

...the Great Recession offers the perfect case study in why the voluntary sector can’t solve these problems. If people like [Utah Congressman] Mike Lee are correct, then the start of the Great Recession would have been precisely the moment when private charity would have stepped up. But in fact, private giving fell as the Great Recession started. Overall giving fell 7 percent in 2008, with another 6.2 percent drop in 2009. There was only a small uptick in 2010 and 2011, even though unemployment remained very high. Giving also fell as a percentage of GDP (even as GDP shrank), from 2.1 percent in 2008 to 2.0 percent in 2009 through 2011.

The problems of philanthropic insufficiency were on parade in that example. But there are also philanthropic particularlism (giving to the "deserving" is common, for instance) and philanthropic paternalism. "As the judge Richard Posner once wrote, a charitable foundation “is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody” that closely resembles a hereditary monarchy. Why would we put our entire society’s ability to manage the deadly risks we face in the hands of such a creature?"

Plus my earlier ruminations on the question of private charity vs. government programs.

These Problems Are About Policy

The first time I read Eli Saslow's now-Pulitzer-winning article on a family that gets by using government programs, including SNAP (food stamps), I was a bit depressed by the reality of it. The family just seemed like they weren't trying to get out of the trap they were in.

The second time I read it, though, several passages stood out that are both more important and more actionable. The mother in the family, Raphael Richmond, who is 41, has six children of her own (ages 11 to 25) and also feeds other kids from the neighborhood and her extended family.

Only once, when [Raphael] was in her early 30s, had she lived without government assistance. She had moved her children into a two-bedroom apartment near the Southwest waterfront and signed a lease for $925, working as a home health aide during the day and as a prep cook at RFK Stadium at night. "Climbing the ladder," she said, but then came the reality of what that meant. The increase in her income disqualified her from food stamps, and buying food with cash left nothing to pay the gas bill, and cutting off the heat made the winter seem endless, and the combination of the cold house and the 60-hour workweeks aggravated her arthritis, damaged her heart and compelled her to quit work and apply for disability.

After nine months, she packed three duffel bags and took a bus to the homeless shelter. Her family spent two months in the shelter and two years in transitional housing and then received a voucher for a four-bedroom house in Anacostia with a leaky ceiling and a front-porch view of a highway underpass. The subsidized rent was $139 a month.

This bit of detail points up a problem that is fixable. Why don't we figure out how to better cushion those transition points when benefits cut out, so people can continue to make progress to self-sufficiency, rather than driving them back to survival mode?

The other passages concern Raphael's daughter Tiara:

For 22 years, Tiara had successfully avoided what she referred to as the "ghetto woman traps." She had arrived at adulthood single and childless, a talented musician with a high school diploma and a clean record - "a miracle," Raphael called her. And yet none of those successes had earned her anything like stability, and she had little in her life that qualified as support. Her mother, fearing the next trip to the emergency room, had made her the default guardian for four younger siblings. Her absentee father, a Puerto Rican, had given her nothing but smooth brown skin, soft dreadlocks and, with some reluctance a few years earlier, a phone number where he could be reached in case of emergencies. Believing her life consisted of one long emergency, Tiara had called him the next day, only to learn the number was fake.

At the moment, the only "options" she could list for her caseworker were the new EBT card with her name on it and a food training class hosted by DC Central Kitchen. The class was free, but it was also three months of training that didn't guarantee a job. The class flier had been sitting on the kitchen table for weeks. "Must be able to lift 50 pounds," it read. Must stand for hours. Must work in a noisy environment.

And:

The ads made it sound so easy to get a job in the budding economic recovery of 2013—"Hiring now!" one read; "Start tomorrow!" promised another—but recent experience made Tiara believe she had better odds "playing lotto," she said. The unemployment rate in Ward 8 was 24 percent, triple the national average, and there were an estimated 13 job seekers for every open position. She had been offered a security job, but first the company wanted $500 to train her. Marriott had openings at a new hotel, but the application required her to submit a background check online. So she had gone to the police station and paid $9 for a form showing that she had no criminal record. And then enrolled with a nonprofit group that gave out free computers and scanners, since the ones at the nearby library always seemed to be broken. And then learned that she could only pick up the computer in Rockville, four bus transfers and a Metro ride away.

The latest advice from a caseworker assigned to help with her job search was to "make a list of options" and "stay prayerful"...

Yeah, stay prayerful, Tiara. That'll help. But not as much as if we were using the federal tax dollars that go to subsidize oil companies, agribusiness, and other big corporations to instead fund a jobs program like CETA.

These problems are about policy. As Matt Bruenig points out, single motherhood doesn't have to cause child poverty. That's something we as a society let happen.

Immigration Detention: An Invisible Assault

A young woman named Cynthia Diaz is on a hunger strike in front of the White House. She's going hungry to protest the detention and incarceration of her mother, who was picked up by Immigration and Customers Enforcement in May 2011.

Watching this interview with Diaz on Melissa Harris Perry's show Saturday was painful. Did you know that mothers with legal-resident and citizen children and husbands are being held in prisons for nothing more than having come into the country or overstayed a visa?

Adding to the Diaz story was the report in Sunday's Star Tribune that ICE in Minnesota contracts with jails that put detainees in with the general jail population, including the case of one 18-year-old man who was housed with a sex offender who repeatedly molested him.

Sherburne County, a northern exurban county, makes money by renting its underutilized (taxpayer-funded) jail space to ICE. It has 85 ICE detainees, 183 other federal prisoners, and 136 state (not county) prisoners. Sherburne County is paid over $11 million a year for all this incarceration, with about $900,000 in profit. Who needs private prisons when counties can make the profits instead, right?

According to the Strib,

The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act, which passed Congress unanimously, set a “zero-tolerance standard” for prison rape. It created guidelines to hold correctional facilities accountable for protecting inmates.

Until recently, though, the rules didn’t govern immigration detention facilities overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.

The story goes on to say,

ICE does not prohibit the mingling of its detainees with prisoners, including at its contracted facilities like those in Minnesota.... Pat Carr, Sherburne County’s jail commander, said the jail’s classification officers make a determination about who can be put in the same cell.

Carr said the staff will take action if informed that detainees are threatened. Detainees can report threats or accusations of abuse directly to staff, through a telephone hot line, through ICE grievances and communication forms, Sherburne County grievance forms, and in letters to the jail administration or to ICE.

Yet the young man in this case was left in the same sell with sex offender for eight days after he complained of the abuse, according to the Strib.

The 2 millionth person to be "detained" since Barack Obama became president was picked up last month, according to Vox.com. 1,010 people per day. That's more than were picked up in all the years of George W. Bush's presidency.

This all-but-invisible assault on common decency has to stop. It not only does no good, it actively does harm to millions of people and their families.

An ACA Anecdote

At dinner last night with a friend I haven't seen in about 10 years, the conversation turned to the effects of the Affordable Care Act. She's been self-employed for decades, so I wondered what she had done since the launch of MNsure.

She signed up in October, she said, having some trouble with the website, but not having any difficulty figuring out which plan she wanted. So she contacted the company directly and signed up, no problem. That way of signing up is possible for anyone who isn't eligible for subsidies. Because of her method, she's not sure if she's been counted in the state's enrollment numbers.

She had been paying $400 a month for a plan with a 20 percent deductible. Because she is about to turn 55, she had been told that the cost under her old plan would be going up to $700 a month.

Her new coverage under the ACA still has the 20 percent deductible, but costs her $325 a month. So she's saving either $75 a month or $375 a month, depending on how you look at it.

That's my contribution to the "plural of anecdotes equals data" effort.

Dinosaurs Afloat

From the National Geographic Twitter account @theretronaut:


Showing a barge moving the Sinclair Oil dinosaur statues that populated the company's display at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

I was 4 years old during the fair, and was a fan of the Sinclair "brontosaurus."

__________

An earlier encounter with the World's Fair.