Self-Care

"The Problem With Telling Sick Workers to Stay Home" is a journalistic whine on behalf of America's low-lage workers. Which is nothing new. And that's the problem; it's nothing new. People have lined up time and again to remind us of how unreasonable it is to tell people who are living paycheck to paycheck that they should miss a paycheck or two, rather than risk exposing other people to diseases that may severely sicken or even kill them. And now, with COVID-19 (COronaVirus Infectious Disease {20}19) likely to spread through the United States, the lament that the working poor must work at all costs is winding up again.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the point. I stopped in Whole Foods on Thursday, and I drew a cashier who was obviously ill. He blew his nose quite thoroughly before ringing me up, and it was clear from his voice that he was very congested. While driving home, I considered dropping an e-mail to Whole Foods, noting that they may want to evaluate whether they gave enough sick leave to their grocery workers. Because while I understand that doing so increases labor costs, having someone working in the store whose job more or less requires them to touch every single item that someone is purchasing is just asking to spread diseases when that person is sick.

In her piece, author Amanda Mull notes: "(NYU School of Global Public Health epidemiology professor Robyn) Gershon emphasizes that having what feels like a head cold or mild flu—which COVID-19 will feel like to most healthy people—often isn’t considered a good reason to miss a shift by those who hold these workers’ livelihood in their hands." But the thing that struck me when I was driving home was that "those who hold these workers' livelihood in their hands" is, ultimately, the public.

When people complain that corporate America or the federal government aren't doing enough to protect public health by offering, or forcing offers of, generous time-off and sick-leave policies, beneath that lies an unspoken criticism of the public as a whole. It's a common joke around here, even with all of the Microsoft Millionaires and other people who are living large from technology company salaries, that the name of the grocer should be "Whole Paycheck." Laying the blame on corporate greed or government inaction/corruption camouflages the fact that the American public is highly price-sensitive. When it comes down to it, most people would rather pay $5.00 for something that comes with few to no worker protections than $6.00 for the same thing but allows the worker to work less. Because for most of us, our standard of living, our ability to squeeze more leisure and a batter life out of the amount of work that we do, comes at the direct expense of someone else having to work harder to have less.

All up and down the chain, there is a drive to get "the most bang for the buck." And I think that advocates for the poor and low-wage earners recognize this. And so there is a habit of finding people to blame who it is perceived can easily pay the cost. But that cost will always come back to the people who have no choice but to pay it. And changing the set of people who have no choice is going to have to come from the public, at some point in time. It's all well and good to complain that government isn't doing enough, but, at least in the United States, government is answerable to the public as a whole; at least those members of the public who are active and engaged.

In the conclusion of her article, Ms. Mull claims that the United States is asking low wage workers to shoulder the burdens of preventing a COVID-19 epidemic in the nation, yet refusing to give them any way of bearing those costs. But there's no request of the United States, or even the readers of the article to a) do more to bear those costs themselves or b) advocate for a distribution of resources that better allows the people we ask to do things to accomplish those things and then compensates them appropriately for their efforts.

And so we're let off the hook again. To be sure, I don't know what the readership demographics of The Atlantic look like. I would guess somewhat slightly Left of center and well-educated. From their, I suspect that I could guess at least a moderate level of affluence. This should be a group of people who can take at least some security in their own position; enough so that they can afford some limited sharing. So why not request it? Why not call upon each of us to be the change we want in our own lives, if not the world?

Looking For Trouble

Now, as a grown-up who never has a fav she doesn’t want to see problematized, I was excited to see that Eli Cook, historian of capitalism and author of The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life, had written an article for the Journal of American Studies putting [the Choose Your Own Adventure] series in its historical place.
Rebecca Onion. “Oh My God, It’s Milton Friedman for Kids”

The link to this article from the Slate homepage read: "The Choose Your Own Adventure Books Indoctrinated Kids With Cutthroat Capitalism." As one might expect, it's basically a hit piece on the series. The basic problem that Mr. Cook and Ms. Onion appear to have with CYOA is that some people took the fact that the books placed the outcome in the hands of the reader, and the choices they made, as some part of a supposedly sinister neoliberal plot to convince children that they, and they alone, were the masters of, and responsible for, the outcomes of their lives.

Not being the sort who sees conservative hatefulness under every rock, I found the article to be something of a stretch, overall. But the quote above stood out for me, namely: "Now, as a grown-up who never has a fav she doesn’t want to see problematized [...]" It helped me put into words what always bothered me about "woke" culture; the impression that it's a deliberate affectation. It's sort of like the stereotype of a hipster; the one in which a person creates a sense of ironic detachment from the world around them, not because they're actually detached and find the world a rich vein of irony to mine, but because it becomes a way of proclaiming their "betterness" than the people around them. In this case, people find things, especially things associated with the past, as "problematic" because finding problems with things becomes a way of signaling that one is the "right" kind of person, the sort who believes the right social-justice things.

And while I don't necessarily have a problem with the ideals and goals of the social-justice movement, I find its desire for purity to be off-putting. And perhaps a bit ironic, coming, as it does, from a movement that has as one of its goals the end of mass marginalization. But in the end, it's to be expected. People often define "right" as the opposite of "wrong," and "pure" as the opposite of "tainted." And so pointing out what is wrong and tainted, and then defining oneself in opposition to that, becomes a shorthand for righteousness and purity, but one that doesn't require any sort of self-reflection or work to live up to anything.

Of course, this isn't unique to the social-justice movement. All movements have their purity wings. "Wokeness" stands out for me, because even the word itself strikes me as a sort of purity test. I get that it isn't intended as such; my own history is the source of that particular impression. But it bugs me nonetheless. Now I better understand why.

Make the Oscars American Again

As I'm fairly sure that you're aware, President Trump has been reported to have been unimpressed that Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The North American distribution house for the movie, Neon, hit back on Twitter that it was "Understandable" that the President didn't like the movie. "He can't read," they snarked.

I suspect that they missed the point. President Trump's alleged desire to always be the center of attention has been well remarked-upon by the news media since the 2016 primary campaign season. One would think that in the intervening four years, they would have come to the realization that some of the President's statements can be chalked up to that desire for attention. Of course, this does leave them in something of a quandary. After all, someone will dutifully report on anything that the President has to say, no matter how pointless, and the "What Has Trump Done Now" constituency will rush over to read it. Being left off the bandwagon in bad for clicks, and thus, advertising revenue, so nothing must be left to lie as unimportant.

But it's also just as plausible that the President really didn't care one way or another about the Academy Awards. His comments were made during a reelection campaign rally in Colorado Springs. This places the President in front of an audience that has been very receptive to his "America is the best" rhetoric, and the case can be made that his calling for more movies like Gone With the Wind and Sunset Boulevard to be made and, presumably, to win Best Picture, is simply pandering to an audience that believes that even if the United States isn't best at literally everything, that institutions that reside in the United States should always favor domestic productions above all others. And drawing attention to a disagreement (real or fabricated) with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their lack of patriotism plays well in "the Heartland," especially for those whose understanding of "patriotism" goes beyond "my country, right or wrong" to "my country is always right."

Partisanship often expresses itself in an understanding that the world is withholding from one what they truly deserve. And eventually, that deserving stops becoming due to having earned something in a way that can be objectively demonstrated. Rather, it becomes an assumed entitlement; the deserving becomes the proof of having earned it. Talking about these entitlements doesn't always have to be particularly dramatic, or bellicose. Sometimes, simply reminding people that the things they like aren't well enough appreciated by the people they don't like is enough.

Moldy But a Goodie

So, Burger King has a new ad out, in which a Whopper goes from pristine to decayed over the course of 34 days in time-lapse.

Early reaction to the campaign Wednesday was a mix of applause for the shift away from preservatives, to disgust.
Burger King portrays moldy Whopper in new TV ad

I've seen some of the negative reaction, and for me, the point is less about the daring or honesty of the advertisement, and more about the unrealistic expectations of food that are now commonplace in the United States. Food, especially perishable food, left unprotected for a month, is going to become moldy. That's a fact of life, or in this case, death. Nothing about a Whopper, or the majority of the food we eat is alive when we eat it. And decomposition is what happens to dead biomass. That's where new biomass comes from. Digestion and decomposition are different processes, but not completely so; it's reasonable to say that mold digests food. And food in the middle of the digestive process is pretty gross, too.

It's also worth noting that we have an inconsistent relationship with preservation. The (false) idea that Twinkies are so loaded up with chemical preservatives that they have a shelf life measured in decades is often cited as proof that they lack any real food ingredients. Even the actual shelf life of Twinkies, twenty-five days, is often viewed suspiciously.

This paints a picture of a society that wants things to be a certain way; in this case, wanting food to be safe and visually appealing over time, but doesn't really want to understand how it is made to be that way; in many cases, through chemical additives (natural or synthetic) that arrest the decomposition process. And this can contribute to a dialog around food that is fundamentally dishonest. Food companies tell the public what they understand the public wants to hear, and, in turn, the public treats it as the truth for long enough that they lose sight of the fact that it's a lie.

I Declare!

So, the Washington state Presidential primary is coming up, and ballots have been arriving in the mail.

I'm not a partisan, and so I've been debating whether or not to participate, because the parties are requiring a declaration of party. In any event, I checked the ballot, and on the return envelope are the party declaration statements. What I hadn't expected is that the verbiage is different for each one. To wit:

Democratic Party:

I declare that my party preference is the Democratic Party and I will not participate in the nomination process of any other political party for the 2020 Presidential Election.

Republican Party:

I declare that I am a Republican and I have not participated and will not participate in the 2020 precinct caucus or convention system of any other party.

I suppose that I shouldn't have been surprised that the parties themselves had written these declarations, and therefore, they're worded differently from one another, but I had expected simply checkboxes with the party names next to them.

This is the first time that both parties are using the primary to select candidates at the state level. Previously, the Democrats used a caucus, and the primary was simply an afterthought, and I hadn't really paid any attention to the process as a whole. And given how late it was in the overall primary season, neither had anyone else.

In any event, it's an interesting piece of trivia. The actual election isn't for another two weeks. We'll see if it produces anything interesting this time around.

Misinvestment

I came across a Black History Month post on LinkedIn. The focus was the topic of exhaustion. Here is a snippet of it:

What I hear is this:
- I’m tired of having to educate others in why their statement/actions are racist;
- I’m tired of having to fight so hard to prove my value;
- I’m tired of constantly being on the defensive;
- I’m tired of having to defend my actions;
- I’m tired of others assuming things about my intent;
- I’m tired of my impact being minimized.
And, the list goes on.

What this translates as to me is: "I'm tired of people making choices that have negative impacts for me."

Which is understandable. One of the side effects of being outside of social norms, whether the norm is about race, sex or anything else, is that people are going to be more likely to respond to, and treat one, differently. And this is often a disadvantage. (One can make the case that for people with "model minority" status, that the different treatment they receive is an advantage, bit they tend to be the exception that proves the rule.

But the fact of the matter is, we don't have control over the choices that other people make. And "white leaders" don't, either.

We need black women and men to contribute positively to our business and bring their best selves.

I would counter this with the observation that if this were that much of a business need, one would see money and effort spent on initiatives to bring it about. The fact of the matter is that for many businesses, this falls somewhere between a "nice to have" and a worthwhile luxury. But American society has long been content to waste vast amounts of human capital, largely because there isn't an observed need to be more efficient with it. There's always another person looking for a career, whose "hunger" means that they're willing to work harder, sacrifice more or sabotage others for the reward of being employed. If there were a distinct need for everyone to bring their best selves, those expressions of hunger would, for the most part, be unnecessary effort.

How can they do that when we make them so tired all the time?

I have had a problem with the idea that we make one another feel or do things for some time. Mainly because it absolves the individual for any responsibility for their part of the interaction. Someone making a racist statement or assuming things about my intent doesn't somehow reach into my being and extract energy. When someone doesn't value me to the same degree that I value me or prefers to see themselves as having had an impact that a more objective observer would have attributed to me, that becomes a tiring infraction when I expend energy on it. This isn't to say that there aren't good reasons to expend that energy. After all, the people who taught me that I should expend it were intelligent, wise and thoughtful individuals. But if all it does is move me closer to a point of exhaustion, is it really energy well-spent? Does it really help me contribute positively to the business that I work for and/or bring "my best self" to what I do? If not, does it really make sense for me to persist in doing it? Was I taught to respond to perceived slights against me by others with no other intent than to feel drained?

Investing in circumstances where one has no control over the outcome is a risky endeavor. Note that this is not to say that it is a worthless one; a lot of people have made themselves very wealthy by putting money into other people's businesses and then sitting back and raking in the returns on that investment when the businesses turned out to be wildly successful. But that element of risk is always there. For every success story, there are some number of failures, where people's investments have simply evaporated; or been appropriate by people who knew how to better work the odds (or the rules). And so the question becomes: Is an investment in other people's treatment of me likely to pay off?

Personally, I'm of the impression that it isn't. Investing energy in defending myself against the statements and actions of someone who sees me as a threat to their status and position will have no worthwhile returns. And that's energy that I can put into better things. If my employer doesn't need it, so be it, let me spend it on myself, then. If some "leader" is going to step in, and create a focus on giving me energy to be used to advance their cause(s), great. But if not, I have to be the manager of my energy. I'm the one who needs to value it. If I don't view it as too precious to waste on things that I can't directly control and are unlikely to have a payoff, I'm not sure that it's worthwhile to wager any on the idea that others will. But if I am carefully and thoughtfully investing my energy where it will do the most good, have the best return on that investment, then I suspect that I will find that the people around me who want to share in that return will also be willing to invest.

Because in reality, it's not like White people don't experience negative statements and actions tied to their skin color (or lack thereof). They may have to fight harder than they feel is warranted to prove their value to others. And people assuming things about their intent? I'm sure that they could tell you some stories. But I believe they don't suffer the same level of exhaustion with this that many Black people report for the simple reason that they're not taught in invest energy into it without a concrete understanding of what they will receive in return for that. Yes, their circumstances are different, that's part of the reason why they have been assigned the label "privileged." But there's no reason why we should cede those circumstances to them, now that there is much less willingness to hold on to them by force.

Brown-eyed Bird

I find crows to be strangely photogenic birds. Perhaps because, while they are skittish around people, they will stand still long enough for a close-up.

My Sandy Valentine

Another chance to indulge my enjoyment of found object photography.

Failing Grade

Who is afraid, for example, that [former New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg would try to reimpose unduly punitive policies like that on black people now?
John McWhorter "Bloomberg Flunks the Wokeness Test"

I think that this is the wrong question. Professor McWhorter notes that:

Until recently, Bloomberg was unapologetic about stop-and-frisk. At the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, Bloomberg stated that “95 percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one MO. You can just take the description and xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25.” On why cops were stationed so disproportionately in minority neighborhoods, he mused, “Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”

I don't know that a lot of people are concerned that one of the first acts of a President Bloomberg would be to have stop and frisk implemented at the national level. Mainly because one can't imagine the FBI having agents walk local beats, and there isn't another nationwide police force that would do it instead. But I can imagine people being concerned that a Bloomberg administration would be staffed by people who agree with Mr. Bloomberg's assessment if the the problem and its solution. After all, William Bratton, one of the architects of New York's stop-question-and-frisk policy is currently Vice Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. One could see him moving to a role of greater prominence. While Mr. Bratton believes in honest policing, carried out by people who represent the make-up of the people they work with, his no-tolerance policy towards anti-social behavior (the "broken windows theory" of social order) could lead people to believe that he'd be willing to look the other way when police aggressively target people they believe might be up to nefarious ends. To be fair, Mr. Bratton argues that stop-question-and-frisk and "broken windows" are not the same and don't have the same goals, therefore they can't be enacted interchangeably, but this distinction is lost on many members of the public.

But perhaps the real problem that people have with Mr. Bloomberg is that they don't believe that he's repented of the policy; or it's consequences. As Professor McWhorter points out in his article Mr. Bloomberg's apology came late, and seemed to have been forced on him by political pressure. While President Trump calling Mr. Bloomberg out as a racist is certainly disingenuous (and a case of the pot calling the kettle black), a primary requirement in convincing people that one has changed their ways is the appearance of sincerity.

In the end, Professor McWhorter argues for forgiveness of Mr. Bloomberg because he'd be a better person to have in office than President Trump. And this may be true. But that doesn't mean that must matter. One can imagine two students who both do very poorly on a test. The fact that one of them scored 5 points better than the other doesn't matter once they've both been assigned an F. People who seek to disqualify Mr. Bloomberg because they don't trust him on matters of race have decided that this is the criteria that's important to them. And one candidate who doesn't meet the minimum requirements is pretty much like every other candidate who doesn't meet them, in the same way that every student who earns an F for a class isn't receiving credit for it, regardless of what other positive traits they may have. One can call that out as false equivalence, but that tends to reveal false equivalence for what it is; a form of disagreement over what is important.

As we head into the Primary season for the 2020 election, it's evident that the broad range of Democratic party leaders, elected officeholders, activists and voters haven't been spending the past four years coming to a consensus as to what a broadly acceptable candidate would look like. And so various constituencies have started in on the process of blackmailing one another into supporting their chosen savior. We'll see who blinks first in this game of chicken.

Snark Attack

This is one of those things that I wrote up, and then, for some reason never got around to posting. While I put it together only three weeks ago, it seems like forever ago. Time flies, I suppose, and never moreso than when you're old.

So this all starts with Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin taking aim at Greta Thunberg's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.

Personally, I think that the young Ms. Thunberg is sometimes held up as a sort of human shield for climate change activism, and so I understand the impulse to strike at her. That doesn't mean it's an impulse worth acting on, however. After all, anyone can snark about a teenage girl's apparent lack of understanding of economics. And given that Ms. Thunberg is said to be on the autism spectrum, she's something of a rather large sitting duck.

I'm going to admit to being something of a climate change fatalist. Not because I think that humanity can't do anything to combat or blunt the impact, but that people won't do anything. Secretary Mnuchin is correct when he notes that drastic measures to combat climate change are going to have serious economic consequences. And, at least for right now, people are more concerned that they'll be the ones left holding the bag. Developed nations don't want to give up the economic growth that they associate with fossil fuel use, and developing nations don't want to lose the chance to become fully developed in the near future. Of course, as global temperatures rise, there are are also going to be serious economic consequences. We'll see if the people who are betting that those consequences will be someone else's problem have guessed correctly.

The fundamental question is straightforward, although by no means easy: What does the "standard of living trendline" (for want of a better name) look like moving forward? We can imagine a trendline for a "carbon-restricted" future. It's generally understood by many people (although it should be said that this is open to dispute) that some sacrifices will have to be made to substantially lower carbon emissions and thus prevent or lessen certain climate change impacts. The end result of these sacrifices can be seen as a loss of efficiency in converting work into standard of living. So for a given level of effort, standards of living will be lower than they are today, in the aggregate. For defenders of the status quo, business as usual leads to the best trendline. There may be problems ahead, but human innovation and technology will solve them, and thus allow people to have a better standard of living than would be possible in a carbon-restricted future. Climate activists, on the other hand, see a catastrophic scenario, where climate change impacts cause a sudden and steep dive in standards of living; one that can't be recovered from in the foreseeable future, if ever.

Of course, there are people on each side of the debate who argue that some or all of the other side are knowingly acting in bad faith. President Trump, for instance, says of climate activists: "These alarmists always demand the same thing - absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives." Climate reporter Robinson Meyer, on the other hand, accuses "America’s elected and appointed rulers" of "concern-trolling about whether the planet is warming at all," rather than actually engaging with the problem. Once can make the point that they are both correct to varying degrees. In emergencies, there is an impulse to control things; one can imagine what a Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Combat and Reverse Climate Change Act might look like, if it's anything like the USA PATRIOT Act. (Of course, one expects that the actual title would condense into a similarly contrived initialism/acronym.) At the same time, simply coming out and saying that at this point, we'd rather privilege the economy over climate concerns is politically unpalatable, so politicians have to deny the problem, instead.

Right now, the resources and the social institutions are roughly aligned with the status quo. Whether that's because of wealthy people cynically protecting their own interests or out of a genuine understanding that carbon restrictions aren't needed is beside the point. At present, people like Greta Thunberg can bluster and demand, but they can't simply go and implement the changes they want to see in the world; and they aren't in a position to move the needle by being the change, either. While this may make them strident, I don't think it should also make them targets. But this is the way that arguments over interests have evolved in our society. And, as untoward as it may seem at time, people are rewarded for behaving in this way. I might think that snarking at Greta Thunberg should be beneath a cabinet secretary. But someone was applauding Secretary Mnuchin, and those people matter more to him than I do.

Anybody Home?

Today, Linkedin asked: "Are we tired of living alone?" That wasn't really the right headline, although I understand that it's more likely to generate views than "Decline in household size slows." I suppose they could have gone with something closer to the headline of the Bloomberg article they were following on, "U.S. Household Size, at a Record Low, May Finally Be Bottoming Out," but Linked in doesn't leave space for long titles. In any event, as someone who doesn't fall into the category of "tired of living alone," I'll admit that I was curious. So I popped over to the Census Bureau to check out the numbers. Some of the same numbers, it turns out, that the Bloomberg article references.

With 36,479,000 single person households in the United States, it's the second most-common household size, and it has been for some time. (Two person households, as might be expected, have always held the top spot in the data given.) Living alone took over the number two spot from three person households in 1971, after surging from a distant fourth place in 1960. Now, there are nearly twice as many single person households as three person.

When I looked at the numbers, what stood out for me was the decline in large households. The percentage of households with five or more people in them is less than half of it was in 1960, having declined from nearly 23% down to a little above 9%. (And at six or more people, there has been a decline in the absolute numbers of households.) Three and four person households have also seen percentage declines, but much less steep. The percentage of single person households appears to have started leveling off about a decade ago, and it's mostly two-person households that have grown, at the expense of larger ones.

The Bloomberg article posits: "One possible cause: Americans are tired of living alone," and this seems to be what the LinkedIn headline writer picked up on, but the numbers don't bear this out. From 2015 to 2019, the percentage of single person households increased by .4%. At the same time, the number of two person households increased by .9%. Slight decreases in the percentages of three+ person households explain this.

I would presume that there is some anecdotal data that points to a rise in people moving into larger households, but the Bloomberg article doesn't offer any. In fact, the "Americans are tired of living alone," conjecture isn't even addressed within the body of the article. It's a subtitle, which is then forgotten about. And that's too bad. A shift in Americans' attitudes towards living alone is meaningful. That's useful information for any number of industries, and an interesting data point for many of the rest of us. It's worth noting that one and two person households are nearly 63% of all households, according to the Census Bureau's numbers. They've been the majority since 1975.

David Brooks recently had an article published in The Atlantic, titled "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake." In it, he argues that the nuclear family is an artifact of a particular period of time, with particular circumstances, that has now passed, with the result being the forces that came together to make small households viable are disappearing or already gone. (Interestingly, Mr. Brooks also references the Census data that I found and that Bloomberg uses.) Mr. Brooks' conclusion is that "Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged (self-selected) families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time." And he does back this up with some anecdotes. (Worldwide, according to the Pew Research Center, about 38% of people live in extended families. Pew acknowledges households with non-relatives, such as roommates, but doesn't break out the numbers.) Overall, his analysis smacks of the "it was better in the past" nostalgia that one might expect of a conservative author, but at least it doesn't seem to have been pulled out of thin air or wishful thinking. (Although I suspect that I'm going to start hearing about the Brooks article from other people I know, if they read it. Pretty much any time someone notes that "unmarried men are less healthy—alcohol and drug abuse are common—earn less, and die sooner than married men," people decide that I need to know about it.)

If the hunger that Mr. Brooks sees were to translate to larger household sizes, it would mean an important shift. Something that people here on LinkedIn would find valuable. The numbers, it seems, are out there. What we're missing it what they mean for the future. And that takes more than looking at some numbers and then conjecturing. And it's important to remember that there's nothing that says that larger household sizes are on the horizon. Larger families, whether they're due to closer integration with extended kinship networks or closer relationships with roommates, friends and other non-relatives, don't have to live under the same roof to be close.

P.S.: Note that how you crunch the numbers matters. While the Census Bureau says that the average household size in the United States is 2.52 people, according to Pew, the average American lives in a household with 3.4 people in it. Which makes sense: While there are more small (one or two people) households than larger ones, there are still enough larger households that the majority of people live in them.

Differentiated

When I was younger, I was often outraged that the justice system didn't treat those whose crimes made me angry as harshly as those people I sympathized with. Now, I find it a pity that the law doesn't treat those I sympathize with as leniently as those whose crimes strike me as less justifiable. But in the end, our society is too enamored of a system of justice that deals out suffering in return for suffering, because, I think, that for many people, the suffering of those who have wronged them feels like being valued.

But I suspect that the system doesn't value any of us, because we don't genuinely value one another. We live in a society where "average" is often used as a synonym for "mediocre." This is not a recipe for seeing those around us as having worth. Part of the reason is, quite simply, that our society is efficient enough that not all of us are needed for people to have relatively good lives. When the unemployment rate rises, the people who are out of work may go hungry, but the rest of us do not find that we want for the goods and services that we need. This means that most of us are, in one or another way, expendable, because we cannot make enough of a contribution to the overall society that it would be missed, were we to go away.

And when I was young, and angered by the idea of plea bargaining, it was because I believed in the rules, the idea that the laws were intended to be applied equally to everyone, not just to those that lacked something they could barter away for reduced accountability. I think I still believe in the rules, and in the idea that laws should be applied equally. And so I am saddened when the lack of something to trade becomes a lack of value. But value, I understand, is a choice. And human choices are never as fair as our ideals may want them to be.

This Seems Familiar

So after all of the recent rain, a sunny weekend was a nice change of pace. And a good time to go out with my camera. One of the things about Seattle is that the Space Needle and a ferry make for an instantly recognizable photograph. Anyone who knows anything about the city will immediately recognize it. And so snapping a picture that just screams Seattle requires about a five to ten minute wait, and that's about it. Still, they make for good practice.

Rain, Rain

Another rainy winter day in the Seattle suburbs. The place may start floating soon.

Place Your Bets

How many who would prove to deserve their freedom should stay locked up to prevent the release of one who would prove undeserving?
Conor Friedersdorf "Why Second Chances for Prisoners Are So Hard to Come By"

That depends. How willing are people to accept a false positive that ends in a serious crime? The answer tends to be: "not very." It's a fairly safe bet that people will be watching Alice Johnson, and if she turns out to commit a serious crime while President Trump is still in office, his campaign's Super Bowl ad featuring her will come back to bite him. A cynical case can be made that this is the very reason why. Ms. Johnson was featured in the ad, and possibly even granted clemency in the first place. Middle-aged women, even those who have few other prospects, rarely go on to become murderers or armed robbers. To a degree, the Trump Administration made a safe choice, and then requests credit for radical reform of the criminal-justice system.

Clemency for prisoners is a form of decision theory that resembles Pascal's wager. If a person is released, and they go on to commit a crime, the public feels the direct harm of that criminal act. But if a person remains incarcerated when they would have avoided recidivism, there is a lot less notice of the unnecessary expense of keeping them behind bars. For many in the public, given that they don't follow the data on the costs of incarceration, keeping people in prison who could be released has no downsides; the money spent on incarceration may as well be a sunk cost, and the human potential has already been written off. In the end, Mr. Friederdorf's question can be considered a corollary to Blackstone's ratio: How many guilty persons should escape, rather than one innocent suffer? Interestingly, according to the Cato Institute(https://www.cato.org/policing-in-america/chapter-4/blackstones-ratio), early core supporters of President Trump said that it's preferable to punish the innocent than to allow the guilty to go free. They were also more likely to support warrentless police stops and other shortcuts of due process.

Generally speaking, I suspect that people are more likely to support protecting innocence over punishing guilty to the degree that they identify with (or fear they may become) the unjustly convicted innocent. Likewise, people who identify with the "deserving" incarcerated are likely to support early release for those who seem harmless than those who don't identify with them. And as there is greater distance between the reformed guilty and the general public than there is between the public and the prosecuted innocent, there is less of a desire to take risks, even small ones, for their sake.

For all that President Trump likes to proclaim that the United States is the best it's ever been, a large part of his message is still about the need to have him protect people from clear and present (not to mention possible) threats. Alice Johnson made a good subject for a commercial specifically because she was non-threatening. Even those people who would use a lapse into recidivism on Ms. Johnson's part as a weapon against President Trump would, I suspect, be surprised to actually see it happen. But for many other people, the idea that if given the chance they'd resort of violence and mayhem is much less of a stretch. And when a society as a whole is risk averse, it's easier to guess which side of the Wager they would come down on.

What would really drive a greater predisposition to seeking out and freeing those who could thrive in society, or at least keep themselves out of further trouble, is need. The public has a certain fear of released criminals going on to commit more criminal acts, and doesn't have any need to see those people as a resource. And so they can eal with their fear by leaving them locked up, and not feel any cost for having done so. Only when there is a need for human capital that has people searching under every stone for more of it will releasing the once-guilty be seen as worth taking a risk for.

... Tock

I think Donald Trump has broken the Democratic Party. They are defined now just by hating him.
Senator Rafael "Ted" Cruz, R - Texas. Quoted in: Ted Cruz: 'Donald Trump has broken the Democratic Party'

At this, the choir raised their hands in the air and shouted "amen." Everyone else went about their regularly-scheduled business.

It makes sense for Senator Cruz to be seen publicly calling out the Democrats as haters who have given up on their former convictions to rail against President Trump. To the degree that being a loyal Republican is to side with the President in all things, making his enemies your enemies is simply good politics. And even people who support President Trump find it so difficult to make the case for him to other people that they've given up. Someone who says that Democrats "are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage," and "want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it," is pretty clearly not looking for any Blue votes this time around.

And in the same way that President Trump casts Democrats as an active threat to his voter base and the nation as a whole, many Democratic voters see President Trump as an active threat to them. And in that sense, Senator Cruz may be correct. President Trump may have, well, "broken" is too strong a word, but he might well have redirected the Democratic Party. If President Trump's election was driven by an idea on the part of the people who voted for him that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have represented the United States turning its back on them and leaving them to fend for themselves, President Trump and a lot of other Republicans appear to be engaged in a campaign to convince core (or even marginal) Democratic constituencies that they mean to have the United States force them to fend for themselves. It's an interesting strategy of demonstrating that the President has the right enemies, while at the same time attempting to avoid frightening those same enemies into turning out en masse to protect themselves. It makes for an interesting dichotomy, because the President's base of support is not broad enough to bring him a victory in the face of heavy opposition turnout, his message of conflict only works if the supposed enemy doesn't actually have it in for him. The President doesn't appear to have substantially grown his base since the 2016 election, where he lost the popular vote. If "swing-state" voters who stayed home in 2016 feel threatened enough to come out this November, President Trump may be our first one-term President in a while.

The pendulum that started swinging with the Reagan or Clinton presidencies, depending on how one looks at it, will swing back. President Trump is too disengaged from the hopes and fears of the population outside of his base for them to stay quiet forever. He may be able to prevent his own voters from becoming complacent, and thus not coming out for him in this next general election, but without actively adding people to his coalition (or finding some way to effectively pseudo-gerrymander the nation as a whole to lock up the Electoral College) Republicans won't be able to maintain their hold on the White House. (Although their current control of large swaths of the federal judiciary may serve as something of a bulwark for a perhaps considerable time.) Senator Cruz calling out the Democrats as deranged isn't going to change that calculus. Eventually, demography looks set to carry the day.

Mountains

One of the things about the Seattle area that strikes me as odd is that the Cascade Mountains are close enough that they're easy to drive to, and through, for that matter within a couple of hours, but far enough away that they're mostly out of sight. And so I commonly forget that they are there. Today, however, I was out driving and wound up in the foothills. I'm not a climber, so I didn't find a trailhead for a trek up the side of anything. But still, it was nice to just spend some time watching them, and taking them in.

Unempathic