Friday Obama Caption Contest and Kitsch Cover

Original caption: "President Barack Obama greets Jack Hoffman, 7, of Atkinson, Neb., in the Oval Office, April 29, 2013. Hoffman, who is battling pediatric brain cancer, gained national attention after he ran for a 69-yard touchdown during a Nebraska Cornhuskers spring football game. Hoffman holds a football that the President signed for him."

Todays' Kitsch Cover is Karmin performing Chris Brown's (yeah, sorry, but this is too ridiculous) "Look at Me Now". On the Ellen show. So, that's a thing.

Stern to Seattle: Drop Dead

"This is going to be short for me. I have a game to get to in Oklahoma City"
Christ, what an asshole.

I don't follow basketball that closely, but now that Chris Hansen's bid to move the Sacramento Kings to Seattle is officially dead, it's worth digging into the subtle differences in arena financing that give the NBA a strong reason to stay in California, even if such a move is not in the interest of current Kings' ownership.

On the surface, the two financing packages look fairly similar. The Seattle group would have bought the Kings in a deal valuing the franchise at $561 milllion; the new ownership group in Sacramento (if the Maloof family will sell to them) values the franchise at $525 million. Public financing costs in Seattle would have reached $200 million out of $490 million in total costs, or just over 40%; in Sacramento, the public's bill will hit $250 million out of $447 million, or 55% of costs.

So from the public's perspective, the Seattle financing arrangements are superior, though only slightly--what's $50 million between friends!-- but the story gets more complicated as we dig deeper. Here's a wire report on the signing of Seattle's public financing bill:

The plan calls for a $490 million arena built in the area where Safeco Field and CenturyLink Field are located, with $200 million coming in public financing. The public investment would be paid back with rent money and admissions taxes from the arena, and if that money falls short, Hansen would be responsible for making up the rest. Other investors include Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and two members of the Nordstrom department store family.

As part of the renegotiated agreement, Hansen has also agreed to divert a portion of arena revenues into a pool of money to help with transportation projects in the neighborhood around the arenas.

Compare this to what Sacramento will do for the new Kings' ownership, according to the local Business Journal:

Most of the city's $258 million contribution -- $212.5 million -- would come from the city's off-street parking assets. The city would form a nonprofit corporation to own the parking lots and structures; the nonprofit would issue bonds to finance the arena. The bonds would be repaid through the city's hotel taxes and other sources, the city's report said.
The rest of the city's contribution would come from:

• Sacramento's parking infrastructure fund: $1.5 million
• A rebate on sales taxes generated by the arena construction: $1 million
• Funds set aside for downtown development from the city's share of proceeds from sale of the Sheraton Grand: $5 million.
• Land transfers to the arena investors: $38 million. [The Seattle ownership group has already purchased the land it would need -- ed] This would include 100 acres the city owns near the current arena in Natomas.

Investors would contribute a 5 percent ticket surcharge to the city, cover operating expenses and improvements, and share profits with the city.

The city would agree to help the investors get necessary entitlements to develop up to 1.5 million square feet of commercial and residential space around the Downtown Plaza site -- a project worth more thant $500 million, according to the term sheet. This would include 475,000 square feet of office, 300,000 square feet of retail, 250 hotel rooms, and 600 units of apartments or condominiums.

The city report emphasizes that the city's general fund would not be hurt by the deal. The $9 million that the parking assets now contribute every year to the city's budget would be covered in part by the 5 percent ticket surcharge [would generate $1.5-3 million per year if the Kings sell out every game--ed.], the city's estimated share of arena profits -- $1 million a year -- and various tax revenues that the project would create.

The most charitable thing you can say about the Kings' arrangement is that they might actually turn the arena into a lynchpin of downtown redevelopment. A less charitable framing would be that the city has just given away almost $40 million in prime real estate. But more immediately, it seems likely Sacramento will find it difficult to make up the funding shortfall caused by diverting parking revenues. They're banking on a significant increase in tax revenue resulting from keeping an existing sports team in place. Meanwhile repayments from construction of a new arena in Seattle would basically come straight out of the ownership group's pocket.

In the end, had the NBA let Hansen buy the team and move them to Seattle, whenever the owners Memphis or Charlotte or New Orleans (or perhaps, some day, Oklahoma City) decide that they'd like to move to a more profitable media market like Las Vegas or Baltimore, local officials would be able to point to Seattle and say "we want the deal they got". And that's bad for the NBA, because it means that the surplus generated by sports teams would be more equitably divided between owners and the public.

Chema Madoz Takes Nifty Photos

If you haven't gotten your daily dose of clever pretty things on the internet, I recommend this.

A Reminder

During the height of America's long national nightmare
of journalistic obsession with the Lewinsky affair, the press corps
wasted not just President Clinton's time but also that of Prime
Minister Tony Blair. I suspect we will be treated to another
round of this "spectacle" today.

Today is a very good day to re-read "Why Americans Hate the Media" by James Fallows. Especially if you have written anything on either Benghazi or the IRS's investigations into right-leaning 501c4 organizations, or if there's an off chance you might ask a question during the Obama-Cameron joint press conference.

Gallup's polling on the most important issue facing America shows that, as is often the case, the economy is towards the top. But if you got your news from a typical political reporter, you'd think the most pressing issues in the country were, in some order: Benghazi, immigration, and potential impropriety at the IRS, with gun violence somewhere on the back burner.

If an alien scouting mission landed on Earth today and read the news, they would report back "no need to invade. Wait a decade or two and civilization will destroy itself."

Attention Threadless Shoppers

It's often inadvisable to make judgments about individuals on the basis of personal appearance. But sometimes personal appearance is a choice, or the result of choices, and these choices reveal significant things about people. On this note, I wanted to share pictures of 2012 Obama campaign CTO Harper Reed, who had previously worked at Threadless, and 2012 Romney digital director Zac Moffatt, from consulting firm Targeted Victory. Even without the logo behind Moffatt, it isn't hard to tell who is who.

I've said to people that the Romney campaign's difficulty with digital stuff was a result of bad Republican views on gay marriage. To set up your internet stuff properly, you need highly motivated young people. That's a solidly Democratic demographic these days, in part because of the parties' views on social issues. As long as Republicans are doing poorly with the young, they're not going to get enough of the Harper Reeds of the world to volunteer or work cheaply for them, and their stuff won't work as well.

Happy Birthday, Ezra!

Facebook tells me that today is Ezra Klein's birthday. I think he might even turn 30 this year, but I may be getting ahead of myself. In his honor, here's a chart showing the progress of his age.

Late-Term Abortions are For Medical Reasons. Today.

Ed Kilgore's now-two-week-old piece on the impossibility of a compromise on abortion rights reaches the right conclusion—that a political compromise on abortion would be primarily opposed from the right rather than the left (though the last time this was tried, during Bill Clinton's second term, it was brought down by a mostly-right-but-partially-left coalition). But it gets there through reasoning that relies on facts not in evidence:

Suppose it were possible to engineer a permanent national deal (it’s not, but just consider it as a thought experiment) wherein in exchange for a strictly enforced ban on post-viability abortions that didn’t involve direct threats to the life of the mother, we’d also start treating all forms of contraception and pre-viability abortions not only as legal, but as medical procedures that would be publicly funded just like other medical procedures, under normal (not prohibitive) inspection and regulatory regimes? I suspect a large number of pro-choice folk would go for that kind of deal, which isn’t that different from the situation in much of Europe. It would reflect the fact that most late-term abortions happen not because some bad girl has had sex and now finds motherhood inconvenient, but because she hasn’t had meaningful access to contraception, Plan B, or early-term abortions.

But would any antichoice activists go along with it? No. Because they don’t really care about late-term abortions other than as a lever to move public opinion away from legalized abortion generally.

My gripe here is that neither "some bad girl has had sex and now finds motherhood inconvenient" nor "she hasn't had meaningful access to contraception, Plan B, or early-term abortions" are the the root cause for most late-term abortions.

Just use your common sense. To carry a fetus to 26 weeks, you have endured first trimester morning sickness and other sickness, significant weight gain, increased fatigue, and myriad other discomforts. For crying out loud, if that's not evidence that someone is trying to have a kid, I don't know what is.

What's more, current constitutional law already allows states to put significant restrictions on late-term abortions, which they certainly do. Let's go all the way back to Roe v Wade itself (hang in there, legal pedants, we're getting to you):

For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe [ban—ed.], abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother

Legal pedants will note that Roe's standards have been superseded by Planned Parenthood v Casey, which allows states even more leeway in enacting abortion-restricting legislation. As interpreted by current members of the Court, even if a regulation is arbitrary, not-medically sound, and amounts to a de facto ban on late-term abortions, it might still pass constitutional muster.

2nd trimester ultrasounds are usually performed at 16-20 weeks
of pregnancy. If the ultrasound reveals the possibility of certain fetal
anomalies, additional testing is needed to determine the exact
nature of the defect. Only then, if testing revealed a lethal or
significantly impairing defect, would the potential parent need to
consider terminating the pregnancy,

In reality, the remaining late-term abortion providers limit their practice primarily to cases where the patient is at serious risk of death or injury themselves, or where the patient is carrying a fetus with a severe abnormalities—something that's either lethal or would grossly impair their quality of life. You can read more about this in Esquire's lengthy profile of Colorado late-term abortion provider Warren Hernn.

At the same time that advances in medicine have pushed fetal viability earlier and earlier, other advances have improved our ability to detect fetal defects. Some of these abnormalities cannot be detected until later in the pregnancy. To have the legislature substitute its judgement for those of the parents and medical professionals is to consign them to the potentially much more emotionally painful experience of giving birth to a severely deformed child and having it die within the first few years of its life.

Teenage Mutant Ninja PIGS

I've been wondering why we haven't seen more coordination between the governments of the troubled high-unemployment economies on the periphery of the Eurozone. What I'm thinking about is Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain all getting together and coming up with a general proposal for looser money or other economic stimulus in the Eurozone, with the implicit threat that if they don't get what they want, they'll all leave. (And join the Yen! If you haven't heard, they're turning it into Beef!)

If all of them can get behind a proposal, that would give it a kind of credibility that individual ultimata might not have. I'm not sure how much bigger a threat they all pose coming together, because a lot of people are worried when the Greece issue comes up that they'd better deal with it or it's the beginning of everybody leaving, which suggests that Greece is wielding a pretty big threat even without buy-in from the others. And I'm guessing that it would look impressive to a domestic audience, as it's a pretty clear sign that you're doing something. 

More on Sacramento Basketball & Municipal Policy

It appears that the attempt to build a new Arena to keep the Sacramento Kings is a microcosm for all sorts of consequential policy decisions at the state & local level.


On the "possibly a plus" side, the new arena may be a catalyst for state legislation that restructures the California Environmental Quality Act. The CEQA is often cited as a deterrent to construction in California,  especially in coastal areas, which has helped push up housing costs and contributed to sprawl. Now, it's possible that Proposition 13 is the larger culprit, but there's strong evidence that environmental regulations play a substantial role.

However, in the "total minus" side, Sacramento is going finance a portion of the arena construction costs by borrowing against future parking garage & parking meter revenues. Because the city is still paying off loans associate with those garages, the bond payments will be interest-only payments for almost ten years before the city can begin paying off principal. How this can possibly be a good deal for taxpayers is beyond me.

Overly Honest News Updates

Maybe the next time, the Seattle ownership group should get
Shawn Kemp to be a spokesperson.

"The Committee agreed to force current Kings' ownership to accept a smaller sale price in order to preserve the fiction that professional sports require the construction of stadiums at general taxpayer expense, rather than through raising private funds and revenues stemming directly from the stadium itself."

I'm not a huge basketball fan but I was really looking forward to proof that the NBA could join the MLB and NFL as sports leagues capable of financing stadium construction with substantial contributions from private funding sources. I guess we'll have to wait until the NBA thinks it's politically viable to move the Hornets Pelicans out of New Orleans.

Even Through Rose Colored Glasses, George W. Bush was Terrible

I don't see why we need to say nice things about George W. Bush these days. He presided over a decade of stagnant middle class incomes, the death of 3,000 citizens on US soil, led the United States into two wars which lasted a decade at a combined cost measuring $4 trillion, and left the financial service sector so deregulated that the entire world economy nearly imploded. About the best thing you can say is that in most of these decisions he was within the political Washington's political mainstream at the time. But that's an indictment of Washington, not a sensible rationalization of anything Bush did.

I keep trying to complete the sentence "Bush was the worst President since __________" and finding ways to claim that terrible presidents were better. Richard Nixon flouted the law, but so did Bush (the FISA act pretty clearly states that the entire warrantless wiretapping program is an impeachable offense), and Nixon ceded big chunks of domestic policy to the prevailing center-left mainstream. Warren Harding didn't have much going on, though he at least didn't totally suck on civil rights issues. A number of 19th century Presidents were awful on the issues of slavery, preserving the Union, and Reconstruction (Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Rutherford Hayes), so they might give Bush a run for his money. Lately people have been pouring haterade on John Adams, but pre-industrial America is just such a different place and time that I have a hard time evaluating how much good or bad an administration could do at the time.

Friday Obama Caption Contest & Kitsch Cover

Not many updates to the Whitehouse Flickr account this week.

Original Caption: "President Barack Obama holds a meeting in Situation Room of the White House on the ongoing investigation in the Boston Marathon bombings, April 20, 2013. From left at the table, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director John Brennan, and Lisa Monaco, Assistant to the President of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism."

 Today's Kitsch Cover is Anya Marina performing T.I.'s "whatever you like"

I Can Walk for Miles And Miles And Miles

I'm not surprised that best way to get diners to cut down on calorie consumption is to express menu calories in the number of miles it would take to "walk it off". Without using a pedometer, it's very hard to gauge how much you walk in a day.

I had a Fitbit for a few months until I inevitably lost it, which is enough time to get a good sense for what constitutes a halfway "active" lifestyle by fitbit standards. Fitbit's default goal is to get you to walk 10,000 steps in a day, which is roughly five miles. When I started I thought it would take an serious long-distance run to hit that target. But just a walk from the office to the gym plus 20 minutes of cardio was enough to get to 10,000 step goal. Alternatively, an hour's worth of lighter exercise--something like swing dancing--combined with plus the steps you take walking around a grocery store and the 4000 or so you take in day-to-day-life will get you close to the five mile mark.

Now, it's true that if you drive everywhere and do nothing but watch TV all day, you'll end up with 2500-4000 steps in a day, which is pretty sedentary. But it's very easy to introduce modest levels of activity into your life.

Demographics Won't Help Bush

To Jonathan Bernstein's list of reasons why George W. Bush's reputation won't improve in the next few decades, I think we might add demographics. The historians who will be judging him then are young right now, and they're in a strongly Democratic age group. So as time passes, you'll get a larger and larger share of influential historians whose formative political memories are of Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq and other terrible things he did (the response to Katrina, civil liberties violations). I'd be surprised if his reputation rose as that age group started getting full professorships.

Friday Obama Caption Contest & Kitsch Cover

Original caption: "President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, March 5, 2013."

Today's Kitsch Cover is Flogging Molly performing Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a'Changing"

Comparing Public & Private Spending in Health Care & Child Care

Since our household is about to grow in size by fifty percent, my wife and I have had an awful lot of interaction with both the health care and child care sectors of the American economy. Which provides a nice news peg for another piece of Dylan Matthews' interview with Jonathan Cohn. It's this bit here about public versus private spending:

I talked to some experts about what a true universal child-care program would cost. Nobody felt comfortable giving me a solid estimate. But you can extrapolate from the Center for American Progress proposal on universal pre-kindergarten, which they expected would be about $100 billion over the first 10 years. The assumption is that states would match that (ed. note -- given this spending structure, the total increase in government spending on child care would be $20B/year, which is roughly 20% of the cost of Obamacare, or about 40% of current child care spending-NB). That gets you a big chunk of the way there, but there’d be another big chunk to go. So I guess – and let me stress the word “guess” here – we’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars, across all levels of government, if it’s mostly financed by the public. But, as always, remember that a lot of that would displace existing private spending.

One thing worth considering when trying to figure out how the private sector would respond to a new, massive government expenditure on child care is the difference in consumer psychology when it comes to spending money on child care versus the other large piece of the welfare state, health care.

For those with insurance, health care spending is primarily after the fact. By the time you're spending money, you've already received the service, so there's no anticipation of things getting better. The amount you're billed is either what you expected, and you pay it; or it's in error in some way and you have to argue with your insurer and your provider. Errors are way more common than anyone wants -- we're up to five errors or ambiguities in eight visits, each requiring at least two phone calls to resolve the situation, if we can resolve it at all -- and it's incredibly frustrating. I'd much rather the government raise my damn taxes, figure out what to pay to providers, and just let me get on with living my life.

Dr. Hodgins may be panicking about being a dad, but
he has a better chance at picking a good child care
provider than he does a good doctor for Michael Vincent.

Spending money on child care is a little different. You get your choice of providers, which most people don't get with health insurers. Second, there are no unexpected bills to argue about*. Third, it's much easier for a lay person to understand the tradeoffs between high-quality, high-price care and low-quality, low-price care in the daycare market. Yes, the observable signals of quality in daycare are imperfect -- adult-to-child ratios, staff tenure & education levels can help, but they still only tell you so much. But these markers are much less imperfect than the observable signals of "quality" in health care. Proton therapy is expensive and sounds awesome, but there's very little evidence that it's doing any good. Last but not least, while the monthly tuition payment for child care is large enough that no one feels good about paying it, there's a real sense in which parents can say to themselves that they're doing what's best for their children. There's no such emotional reward for after-the-fact medical bills for semi-routine health care (though perhaps there is a reward for care that's truly life- or limb-saving).

I'm all for an expansion of child care and direct financial support to stay-at-home parents. But the  straightforward case for more government spending on child care isn't that it would displace private spending, but that it would supplement it. It seems likely that the result of new spending would be that poor and middle-class families would have access to higher quality child care options, while the upper-middle class would continue to pour money into extremely high-cost private daycare, bilingual nannies, etc.

*In fact, the largest after-the-fact hidden "fee" in child care isn't money but time. Lots of daycare facilities (and schools!) now expect parents to commit to a certain amount of volunteer effort per month or quarter, just to keep the place moving. This is something new parents should remember to ask about when they go on daycare tours.

Would the Frenchification of American Child Care Save Money? Some, But Not Enough On Its Own.

There's lots to read about today in child care news. Dylan Matthews, rhythm guitarist for Ezra and the Kleinettes, interviewed TNR's Jonathan Cohn on the state of American child care. There's lots of meaty stuff in there, so be sure to read both the interview and Cohn's reporting in TNR. Elsewhere, Jessica Gross of Slate looks at France's child care and spots their higher adult-to-child ratios as an opportunity to either make care affordable or increase caregiver quality by raising salaries:

Writing in the American Prospect in 2000 (which shows how little progress we’ve made on this front in the past decade plus), Victor Fuchs outlines a proposal to make American childcare more French—one that would not cost parents any more money. He recommends increasing the child-to-worker ratio. The French ratio of children to workers is nearly twice that of their American day care counterparts, which means that a French day care program with the same number of children as an American one pays each of its workers more.

Fuchs' data appears to be out of date. It's true that the adult-to-child ratio for pre-schoolers is much higher in France than in the US. But the ratio for infants & toddlers is not much higher. Here's the data from the OECD for infants & toddlers:

And here's the same thing for preschoolers:

Relaxing these ratios might produce substantial savings at the preschool level, but it's not clear that moving from a 4-to-1 ratio to 5-to-1 would suddenly lead to drastically cheaper infant care. Other factors are likely in play. After all, as Cohn points out, France spends has almost twice the per-child spending on child care as the United States, and most of that spending is public there, but private here.

Friday Obama Caption Contest & Kitsch Cover

Original Caption: "President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama host a Passover Seder Dinner for family, staff and friends, in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House, March 25, 2013."

Today's covers is Sia performing The Church's "Under the Milky Way":

More Techno-skepticism from the Technophile

Laura McKenna flags a piece in the NYT on rising inequality in college faculty pay and adds her own two cents (see also here). As she says, for all the talk about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) the real paradigm shift in academia today "is that a whole lot of house elves are doing the teaching work, and some day, they are going to get really pissed off". Replacing adjunct faculty with MOOCs just isn't going to save a large amount of money.

McKenna's Atlantic piece points out that given the production values of most online video lectures today, online education is more complementary than supplementary. The typical professor at a research university is not necessarily the greatest public speaker, and making an online lecture engaging is so far a fairly laborious task. We may eventually reach the point where self-starters can complete their entire freshman year of college online, and that would be genuinely useful, but we have a long, long way to go before we get there.

Exceedingly Stale Commentary on Bitcoin

If some libertarian-tinged, anti-government separatists with crackpot views on monetary policy decided they would set up an alternate currency backed by ... I dunno, rare seeds ... and start using it in the Interior West (Eastern Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Western South Dakota & North Dakota, etc.) to engage in anonymous, untraceable financial transactions, including illegal activity and semi-organized crime, and the total size of the market were a few hundred million or maybe $1 billion, we would either not notice or not care.

However, because the motherfuckers who came up with Bitcoin are "technologists" who are trying to "disrupt the status quo", people take them seriously.

The extent to which this lesson applies in other fields (education, transportation, etc.) is left as an exercise for the reader.

More on Whether You Should Stop Using Twitter

Since being picked up by Ezra Klein, I've seen several responses to my piece on giving up Twitter from around the web, and in reply on Twitter (direct twitter replies have a high enough signal/noise ratio that they're worth reading). Some assorted followups:

• Several Tweeps pointed out that, ironically, while I was busy giving up Twitter for Lent, Tweetdeck went and added the filtering features I really need. Maybe someday I will give this a try. This is a bit surprising since I thought I had read that Twitter was about to end-of-life Tweetdeck, but I guess only mobile Tweetdeck is being mothballed. Good job, Tweetdeck! Others recommended services such as paper.li to extract the links from your Twitter feed.
• There were lots of replies of the form "You're doing it wrong". The problem isn't Twitter per se, the problem is having the wrong people in your timeline. Snark isn't the problem, lazy & uninteresting snark is the problem. But this is something of a "guns don't kill people" argument. The format lends itself all to easily to lazy & uninteresting snark. It's basically open mic night at the comedy club, except that everyone in the audience is on the mic. Every once in a while, someone who's not a regular comedian hits one out of the park, and those are genuinely great moments, but it's a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. It's just not worth wading through the less great moments to see those.
  
  Similarly, there's no avoiding the personal preferences of your followers. If I want to follow a lot of DC journalists than my feed fills up with #nerdprom minutae for almost a week each year. But of course a robust timeline is diverse enough that there's always a White House Correspondence Dinner, or a Consumer Electronics Show, or a this or a that. Getting twitter to turn the volume down on these non-recurring events is ... hard.
• Matt Yglesias makes a bold defense of faffing about on Twitter.
  
  His argument is, roughly, hey, Twitter is both useful and fun, and having fun is an important part of life, so if you're in a position where you can combine something that's useful and something that's fun, you'd be a fool not to. I think this is where the kids these days say YOLO, but neither of us count as the kids these days anymore.
  
  This is a fair point, but again I'd bring up the signal-to-noise ratio. I rather get higher quality faff, perhaps from something like Cracked, Buzzfeed, or certain sites that are part of the Cheezburger empire (comixed, memebase, etc.)

When I can get Twitter to look less like this:

And more like this:

then I might come back. But until then I'll seek out other forms of information.

See also: Adam Brault: "I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly everything".

The Great Internet Fast of 2013: The End (Not Really)

More: On this blog, More on Whether You Should Give Up Twitter
Ed Morrissey, Back from my self-imposed Lenten Twitter exile
Kevin Drum, Twitter, Addiction, and Changing Social Norms

---

Now that Lent is over, I can go back to my regular daily consumption of approximately 200 blog posts (more when there is big news or some sort of gizmo/video game convention) and lord knows how many tweets, right?

Wrong.

I'm not going back to Twitter. Or rather, I'm not going back to Twitter until I find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. And on twitter there is a lot of chaff. This extremely accurate chart* suggests that up to 90% of a typical twitter feed is basically a waste of everyone's time. If I could write a filter that only showed me tweets that contained links, that might improve the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where twitter were useful.

After two days without Twitter, I barely missed it; by the second week, I was downright happy not to be thinking about "staying on top" of my feed. I've uninstalled Tweetdeck from my phone, and going forward will only use Twitter to post links to my own blog posts. So my first piece of advice is that you should just stop using Twitter altogether, or find a way to show only those tweets that contain links.

I was much worse when it came to phone noodling or other social media. Moving app usage off of a phone and onto a tablet is generally a good idea, since the temptation to fiddle with a tablet is smaller, and using it is a more pleasant experience all the way around. I suppose the thing to do would be to move my Facebook & forum usage onto the tablet. That leaves only the bus ride as suddenly dull, and for now I'm trying out this new fad called reading printed books as a replacement for checking RSS feeds and doing crossword puzzles.

Note: despite the fact that this is being published on April Fool's Day, I mean it. No more tweeting. I'm out.

* to a first approximation, at least

Teacher Quality: Roughly Like It Is At Any Job

Update: Dana Goldstein, who is an actual education reporter instead of a poor imitation of one, drops some knowledge. The most widely-used number is 5-10 percent of the teacher workforce. See this chapter from Eric Hanushek for more detail

The New York Times bemoans the results of recent teacher evaluation systems, which seem to give an overwhelming majority of teachers passing grades. The tone of the article seems to imply that this is a failing of the evaluation system; that principals do not have sufficient emotional detachment to rate teachers poorly; and that in general the efforts to deviate from more quantitative methods of teacher evaluation have stymied education reform. As a followup, it would be instructive if the  New York Times examined its own 2012 Performance Evaluations and published an article on how many employees were deemed ineffective.

The evaluation systems seem to place an extremely high number in the highest-two rating categories, and only identifying a handful of teachers--2-3% seems to be a common number--as ineffective. The reformers seem to have this hazy, not-very-well-thought-out view that perhaps 10, 20, or 50% of teachers (no one is willing to put a number on this) are inadequate to the task of teaching, which would be astonishing for any large enterprise. The 2% figure lines up roughly with the number of LAPD cops who averaged at least one excessive force complaint per year during the late '80s (keep in mind this covers allegations, not proven cases or even disciplinary actions). Over that same timeframe, 0.5% of officers averaged about 1.5 complaints per year, and a handful of cops were truly disastrous. Even if America's public schools were to have double or triple the number of bad apples as the LAPD, that would still mean the overwhelming majority of teachers are at least doing their jobs adequately.

The real problem is that inadequate teachers are more likely to be found in environments where their inadequacy hurts. If half a city or state's weak teachers are concentrated in high-poverty schools, then those schools are going to fit the mental picture that reformers seem to ascribe to the public school system writ large. And the students at those schools won't have the same growth opportunities outside the classroom that the children of middle-class parents have. If we can find a way to get high-quality teachers to take jobs in poor schools and stay there, it would probably result in a significant net boost in student outcomes.

The Center for American Progress has a decent writeup on America's teacher workforce if you're curious.

Being Naked On The Internet Should Be Okay

The latest Dear Prudence has a letter from a woman who's wondering whether to tell her family that she has a profitable side job doing online sex shows. Prudence's advice is unremarkable and, I suppose, prudent: "the idea that you can perform sex online and expect to keep that pussy cat in the box is ridiculous. Though your question is whether you tell your family you are a porn star, I think your concern about this coming out should give you pause about your line of work, no matter how lucrative. Someday you'll age out of this career, and you have to be aware what you've done can follow you for the rest of your life."

If this is good advice in your society, you have a problem. The fact that someone appeared naked on the internet says nothing negative about their ability to manage a business or work in a hospital or teach high school math. This is true of the whole spectrum of internet nakedness -- whether we're talking about acting in hardcore porn, or just having your college-age sexting appear on the internet. As far as I'm concerned, internet nakedness says nothing negative about them as a potential spouse, either. If we're disqualifying people for future opportunities because of stuff like this, we have an arbitrary prejudice that occasionally ruins people's careers while preventing us from taking advantage of people's talents in the way that best benefits us all. And in a digital age where pictures of everything are everywhere, the costs of this prejudice could be quite large.

Unfortunately, some institutions run by people who don't themselves have the prejudice I criticize here may still have reasons not to hire those who have appeared naked on the internet. That's because they may have to deal with prejudiced people outside the institution. Even if the people who hire math teachers realize that having done online sex shows in the past is entirely compatible with being a great math teacher, they may have to deal with parents who don't see things that way, even to the detriment of their children's math education. Social connections like this make prejudice hard to eradicate.

So it's important that we fight these kinds of prejudices publicly, through trying to show people how pointless and destructive they are. I would've liked it if Prudence had expressed the hope that in the next couple decades, people would come to accept her correspondent's previous occupation -- not even as a forgivable youthful indiscretion, but simply as an interesting and unusual past job. I hope this is the way things go in our society and the world, and I hope you share my hope.

How The Other 1% Lives

Twenty money-saving tips from bankers and their wives.

I can't pick a favorite. This list is too good.