2013 – Page 212

Smoking On The Job

China’s professional cigarette taste-testers embody the country’s relationship with tobacco:

As one of hundreds of “tobacco appraisers” in China, Li Hui, a petite, pony-tailed mother, has been smoking up to 30 cigarettes a day for more than 20 years. “It’s my job, and I like it,” Li explained in a long profile in the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper. “Besides, I haven’t seen anyone around me or my friends getting sick from smoking yet.”

Li’s attitude, and the fact that she works for an officially-sanctioned company, Heilongjiang Tobacco Industrial, encapsulate the paradoxes China faces in dealing with a smoking epidemic. The country has over 320 million smokers, more than the population of the United States and over one-third of the world’s total, and the government has been taking small steps to try to discourage smoking, as Quartz previously reported. But with the country’s tobacco regulator and much of the tobacco industry controlled by the state – and tobacco taxes making up as much as 10 percent of state revenues – it’s a tough battle.

Why Don’t Americans Have Bike Barriers?

They’ve been proven to save lives in countries such as the Netherlands and Canada, so why their absence in the US? Architectural historian Steven Fleming argues that macho bike culture deserves some of the blame:

A sad irony in the history of bicycle transport is that keen cyclists aided and abetted motoring lobbyists, who wanted the whole road for cars.

Bike store owner John Forester was a keen “vehicular cyclist.” He could keep pace with cars, assert his right to a lane, and gracefully somersault onto the grass if ever a driver looked but didn’t see him. He published these tips in his 1976 book Effective Cycling, with some good intentions, but also a hint of male pride. By the way he opposed the Dutch-modeled cycle tracks he feared would spread to the US, you could be forgiven for thinking his secret fear was being made to ride beside women and children.

Authorities throughout the Anglosphere nations where Forester’s book was read most were happy to listen to a male voice of cycling. There was no way though that Forester’s ideas were going to have sway with the Dutch. Too many Dutch mothers were already active in the Stop the Child Murder rallies that began in 1973 after 450 children were killed on their bikes in one year. The Netherlands was developing feminine and juvenile bike infrastructure that did not exclude men. Australia [and] the U.S. did the opposite.

(Photo of a separated bike lane in Vancouver by Paul Krueger)

Hill Staffers Speak Out

Lizza e-mailed congressional staffers about the Vitter amendment, which would deprive them of any employer contribution to their health insurance. A response from a Democratic staffer:

I guess what I find most outrageous about the Vitter Amendment is that it most hurts the youngest, least well paid staff who already make 25-35k a year in one of the most expensive cities in the country. We have several who fit that description in my office—they all went to top schools, got sterling GPAs, have awesome resumes that could get them hired at an Investment Bank or anywhere else, but they came here to try to make a difference. I make a somewhat healthier salary, and I’m married so I can hop on my wife’s insurance if necessary. But they don’t have those options. We’ll do what we can to make them whole if Vitter becomes law, but most offices won’t—especially on the R side. They’ll just ask another group of 22-25 year olds who came here for the right reasons to live on $20k a year. And they’ll get them to do it, but they’ll be less qualified, less intelligent, and they’ll be looking for the exit almost immediately.

It’s especially galling since they also could achieve the exact same purpose of being able to tell their base that they repealed Congress’s fake exemption from ACA by the “Vitter-lite” proposal which would only hit Members, and not staff. That they apparently decided that wasn’t good enough leads me to the conclusion that screwing staff is a feature, not a bug. The GOP would like to hollow out Congress, just as they have tried to do to many other federal agencies. The only thing better than getting rid of a federal agency is keeping it on life support, while the political hacks take their swings at it.

It’s short-sighted, it’s cruel, it’s unnecessary. I just don’t get it.

Weigel got similar e-mails about the Vitter amendment. One House staffer’s thoughts:

I can guarantee you that if our subsidy were taken away, I would immediately start looking for work in the private sector. I have absolutely no problem with participating in the health exchanges—this is, as many have pointed out, not about Obamacare. But there is no way I could stay in this job indefinitely if I had to shoulder the entire burden of my family’s health care. I care deeply about Congress and have always felt extremely privileged to work here and more than willing to sacrifice the higher pay, better hours and other perks I might find off the Hill. But there’s a limit to what we can absorb, and I know I speak for a great many of my colleagues.

Great Moments In Fact-Checking

Many of Snapple’s “Real Facts” aren’t facts:

Elephants actually sleep three to seven hours a night, not two (#35), according to the San Diego Zoo. The Statue of Liberty wasn’t the first electric lighthouse (#179); that distinction belongs to the Souter Lighthouse, according to the UK National Trust. And the average American doesn’t walk 18,000 steps a day (#89), not even close. The real tally is more like 5,116 steps, according to a recent study.

Other “Real Facts” are misleading or outdated. A mosquito doesn’t really have “47 teeth” (#50); it has a serrated proboscis — the sharp tube used to suck blood. Pennsylvania isn’t really misspelled on the Liberty Bell (#300) because “Pensylvania” was an accepted spelling in the 18th century, according to the National Park Service. And while the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows (#85), it’s not necessarily because she was painted that way. They just eroded, some art historians now believe.

The larger point of the exercise:

[A]ll of this raises larger questions about our relationship with information, not least of which is why we’d trust a beverage maker to inform us about anything other than its product. Perhaps it’s naive to expect any truth in advertising but there’s still the lingering expectation that if someone explicitly says “this is a fact,” then it should be.

(Image: A photoshopped “Real Facts” cap.)

Canned Laughter Has Passed Its Expiration Date, Ctd

A reader sends the above video:

Someone hates “The Big Bang Theory” so much that they used this clip from Annie Hall and superimposed the image from the show onto the TV monitor.

Another reader:

There is a good point to be made here, but this article seems to use the term “laugh track” like it is solely some artificial thing added in post-production, rather than the fact that the shows mentioned are taped in front of a live, laughing audience. And the shows deemed less “reliant” on laugh tracks, aka single-camera shows, are actually not taped in front of an audience. So, yes, shows taped before an audience include the audio of the audience, and shows without audiences can’t and, therefore, don’t. Whether we need these cues anymore is something to ponder, but this lazy oversight kills any broader point.

Here is a site where you can get tickets to show tapings. Notice all the shows mentioned that add canned laughter in post-production are all taped before live audiences. All the others mentioned that don’t, aren’t taped with an audience.

Another:

I went to a friend’s sitcom taping a few weeks ago, actually next door to “Big Bang”. The audience was awful, and they’re reason sitcoms are as well. They have been conditioned by years of watching sitcoms to laugh at every line. Every single line. No matter what it is. The warmup guy told them in the beginning that it’s critical to laugh outwardly, but they would have done it anyway. Seeing these people truly belly-laugh at almost nothing was one of the weirdest things I’ve seen.

The Best Of The Dish Today

As I’ve watched today’s Republicans take the world to the brink of a serious economic collapse because of the pending apocalypse of a national version of Mitt Romney’s healthcare law, I find myself searching for the kind of sober conservatism I used to respect. So I give you … Winnie the Pooh, as explained by the late and great Henry Fairlie:

There are two sides in every Tory. In all that concerns his society he is unexcited, patient, and not inclined to do much. This is the Pooh in him. Pooh was a Tory … [H]e did not set much store by either plans or brains. In their place, he had wisdom. He knew the Forest was governed, season after season, by laws he did not understand. Left to himself, he would have done nothing. The Forest would be there when he woke up; even more assuring, he knew that it was there while he was asleep.

But he was not left to himself. Most of the other animals in the Forest were anxious and overexcited. Since Pooh was never excited – never – they came to him with their worries; and it was with considerable skepticism, but also with an understanding that they needed to be reassured that he went in search of the Woozle, and even of Eeyore’s tai …. The Tory knows that one should not meddle with society and that if anything goes wrong, it will not go wrong for very long or with much harm done … But surrounding Pooh were lots of agitated conservatives: Rabbit and Kanga, even Piglet, and especially Tigger. They were all afraid of the Forest. They were like liberals who had been mugged. Tigger was the most agitated. When he saw something unfamiliar, it sent him into a whorl of anxiety and a whirl of activity.

No Tory would ever come even close to forcing his own country to default on its debts. Ever. Just saying. And when these maniacs of crisis and brinksmanship tell you they are conservative, just understand that they are abusing that term to an extent that very few other Western conservatives would understand, let alone agree with.

Today, we surveyed the ups and downs of the careening crisis: the Republican revolt this morning; the threat of a one-man default; the economic damage already done; the unbelievably petty and vindictive new GOP demands; and the possibility of a GOP-Tea Party split.

It was such a tense day if you actually care about this country – which Washington doesn’t seem to – that we offered not one, not two, but three Mental Health Breaks; and a beard of such magnificence it almost robbed a British hack of words.

The most popular post of the day was This Is Where We Are, with more than 3,000 Facebook likes. The second was “The Sabotage Is Already Happening.”

See you in the morning.

(Photo: a scene from the Surrey/Sussex countryside where I grew up, at the bottom of my brother’s garden, which is just a short ride away from the original Hundred Acre Wood.)

The House Fails, Again

Boehner doesn’t have the votes. Barro is no longer surprised by the House GOP’s incompetence:

Can you imagine the situation this country would be in if Republicans controlled both houses of Congress right now? Or if we had a President whose administration gets jerked around by Heritage Action in the same way that House Republicans do? It would be a trainwreck, and “reasonable” Republicans like Nunes would still be on television saying they understand it’s a trainwreck, but by golly, operationally, they had no way to stop it.

There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power. A party that is this bad at tactics can’t be expected to be any good at policy-making.

It’s in the Senate’s hands now. God help us.

Who Supports The Shutdown?

Little jerks like this one:

Dan Amira explains:

One of the ripple effects of the White House shutdown is that Michelle Obama’s White House garden is now rotting away as the staff that typically picks its fruits and vegetables is barred from doing so. … To us humans, this is a depressing metaphor for America’s wasted potential. To the White House squirrels, however, it’s Valhalla.

Eddie Gehman Kohan reports from the scene:

Right now, the many squirrels who live at the White House seem to have gotten even more aggressive with the low level of human intervention. The squirrels are always a problem in the garden, eating the berry crop in the summer months. But they’re now kids in a candy store, gorging themselves.

(Photo by Flickr user Doug88888)

Face Of The Day

A woman protests in support of affirmative action outside the Supreme Court during the hearing of “Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action” on October 15, 2013. The case revolves around affirmative action and whether or not states have the right to ban schools from using race as a consideration in school admissions. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

The Land Of Legal Weed

Sullum delves into Colorado’s cannabis legalization process:

Customers [of a pot shop] will not be able to buy alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis-free snacks or drinks, and they will not be allowed to consume marijuana on the premises. The latter rule apparently puts the kibosh on dreams of Amsterdam-style cannabis cafes sprouting on the streets of Denver and Fort Collins. But what if you buy marijuana in a pot shop and take it with you to a bar or restaurant? In an effort to forestall such BYOW arrangements, legislators added marijuana to Colorado’s Clean Indoor Air Act, which bans smoking in bars and restaurants. But as amended, the law applies only to “combustible marijuana” and “marijuana smoke,” leaving open the possibility that bars and restaurants could allow patrons to use vaporizers or consume cannabis-infused foods purchased elsewhere.