Tag: Premium

Balko proclaims that “Colorado’s poster boy for ‘stoned driving’ was drunk off his gourd.” Kleiman chimes in:

The involvement of alcohol is hardly surprising. Drunk driving is much more dangerous than stoned driving, and the combination is worse than either drug alone.

In a followup, Kleiman asks, “what are the actual risks of stoned driving?”:

The answer, from what seems to be a well-done case-control study, is that driving stoned is hazardous, but much less hazardous than driving drunk. (A relative risk of 1.83 – meaning that driving a mile stoned is about as risky as driving two miles sober – strongly suggests that cannabis-impaired driving is a problem, but also that it isn’t much of a problem; the relative-risk number for alcohol is over 13.) On the other hand, the same study shows that adding cannabis or other drugs to alcohol substantially worsens the odds: alcohol-and-something-else has a relative risk of 23.

Given those numbers, and the technical difficulty of identifying cannabis-impaired driving (because impairment doesn’t track cannabinoid levels in blood nearly as well as it tracks alcohol levels) I’d propose the following rule: anyone who tests positive for cannabis on a mouth swab (which detects use within the past few hours) should be considered guilty of impaired driving if that person’s BAC is detectably different from zero. All that means is that, if you’ve been toking and drinking, you need to wait as many hours as you’ve had drinks before getting behind the wheel.

Transgender activist and author Janet Mock tries to convince Colbert to substitute “they” for “he” or “she”:

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Meanwhile, linguist Gretchen McCulloch gets technical about why the singular “they” became nonstandard in the first place, arguing that it’s time to rescue the all-purpose pronoun from Middle English obscurity:

[I]n the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural…. Many excellent writers proceeded to ignore them and kept using singular they, just as English-speakers had been doing for some four hundred years by that point, although … a whole bunch of style manuals did end up adopting generic he. That is, until they started facing pushback in the 1970s from people like the incredibly badass Kate Swift and Casey Miller, who you should go read about right now.

Recognizing that it’s useful to have a gender-neutral (aka epicene) pronoun but that many people are uneasy with both generic he and singular they, various creative people in both language reformer and nonbinary activist camps from the 1850s to the modern day have developed and advocated for an assortment of options.

While some invented epicene pronouns never made it past 1850s obscurity (heesh) and others are deliberately more fanciful (bun, bunself), a few made it to relative popularity particularly in certain communities, including ey, eir, em (the Spivak pronouns) and xe, xir, xem, both with a variety of spellings. It’s pretty hard to change the most common words in a language though, so at the moment the only one that has really wide use is our old friend singular they.

Despite this occasional lingering sense of unease around it, these days reputable usage guides endorse singular they for a whole host of reasons and institutions from Facebook to the Canadian Government are increasingly accepting of it, so maybe in another couple hundred years we’ll have finally forgotten about this foolish vendetta.

David Despain observes the breast milk energy drink phenomenon:

Far away from government oversight or official scrutiny, hundreds of gallons of breast milk flow through online classifieds, according to one of the leading online facilitators, OnlytheBreast.com. The site officially caters to mothers who want to sell their “liquid gold” (their language, not ours) to other women, but about a third of the requests for milk on the site are posted by men. The demand has set off an arms race among the 10 percent of women willing to sell their milk to the other sex. One St. Louis provider catering to athletes boasts that her milk is best because she adheres to a “Paleo-style diet with added grass-fed butter,” only organic foods, and a daily regimen of supplements including charcoal and probiotics.

The “breast is best” believers drink this stuff up. They say they the milk is more nutritious than anything you can get from a cow, best for body building, the secret to fighting off disease, and a sure-fire way to boost energy levels. It’s the energy drink of the future, New York Magazine reports.

It’s too bad it’s soggy logic—on all counts, says Bo Lonnerdal, a professor of nutrition and internal medicine at University of California at Davis. “I don’t see much sense in it all,” she says. “It doesn’t provide more energy than other drinks with the same energy content.”

Marcotte is among the dubious:

Of course, the fact that this appears to be a male-only endeavor that involves boobs suggests that maybe, just maybe, all this talk about health and fitness is just a cover story. One of the men [Chavie] Lieber spoke with was refreshingly honest on this front: “All I’ll say is it’s a fetish for me.” And the discussion on Bodybuilder.com took a turn toward the pornographic, with men posting pictures of women pumping milk and making jokes about getting aroused thinking about it. I suspect these guys are never going to be convinced that eating a steak is as, uh, energizing as drinking breast milk.

But if you’re really set on unusual alternatives, there’s always “ass milk“:

Uber’s latest funding round broke Facebook’s record:

Will Oremus comments:

[N]o one has the foggiest idea how much Uber will be worth once it matures. Anyone who tells you that he does is not to be trusted. Investors are looking at a company whose possible outcomes range from “the Amazon of the transportation industry” to “the Webvan of the 2010s.” (Amazon, in case you were wondering, has a market cap of about $150 billion.) They’re taking semieducated guesses that attempt to capture both the sky-high upside and the steep downside of its prospects. Less than a year ago, the guess was around $3.5 billion. Today it’s $17 billion. Welcome to Silicon Valley circa 2014.

Mark DeCambre’s take:

Bloomberg notes that, at $17 billion, Uber rivals the valuation of well-established, publicly traded companies such as car rental firm Hertz Global and retailer Best Buy. Critics aren’t necessarily buying Uber’s valuation. “Uber’s uber-valuation is a stretch given Uber’s numerous legal and regulatory challenges not fully discounted in Uber’s $17 billion valuation,” said PrivCo president Sam Hamadeh via email. Maybe Hamadeh has a point: Uber is said to be battling more than a dozen lawsuitsstemming state and local agencies aiming to limit the company’s car-sharing business. However, that hasn’t driven investors away.

Yglesias ponders Uber’s worth:

Right now, Uber is in a fight with Florida regulators and taxi incumbents. If Uber wins, it will poach market share from existing Miami-area cab companies. But it will do more than that. It will significantly increase the number of taxi rides that people in the Miami area take.

And that is the fundamental Uber value proposition. That by making it much easier to drive a cab to make money on the side (you just need a decent car and time on your hands) and much more convenient to hail a cab, you can greatly increase the size of the paid rides market.

Mark Rogowsky makes similar points:

So long as you look at Uber as a taxi replacement, you’ll see it as something less than it’s already becoming in its early markets: A transportation app. In San Francisco, for years the taxi commission didn’t want to issue more medallions for additional cabs because there was ostensibly no real demand for them (As of last year, the city had 1,600 taxi medallions). Yet just 4 years after Uber’s launch, there are often well over 1,000 rideshare vehicles on the road during peak times.

Wait, what? Surely all those additional cars aren’t making any money, right? Actually, they are. In fact, demand is so strong Uber is guaranteeing drivers $40 an hour in gross fares throughout the summer during prime time (the company takes a 20% commission and $1 per ride for insurance, so drivers make less than the nominal amount — but typically far more than they would driving a taxi).

Last week, Ezra listed reasons he expects America to lose the battle against climate change. In a follow-up, he adds another cause for pessimism:

States like Kentucky and Montana and West Virginia care much more about pulling fossil fuels out of the ground than other states care about keeping them in the ground. And the American political system, which makes action hard under any circumstances, cares much more about the strong objections of individual states than the weak preferences of the country.

As I wrote in the original piece, “if you were going to weaponize an issue to take advantage of the weak points in the American political system – to highlight all the blind spots, dysfunctions, and irrationalities – you would create climate change. And then you would stand back and watch the world burn.”

In response, Plumer insists climate change is still worth fighting:

Different models have different estimates for how costly global warming will be. But everyone agrees on the general point — risks and damages keep piling up as the world gets hotter. So if the world can’t prevent 2°C of warming, it’s still a good idea to try and avoid 3°C of warming. If we can’t avoid 3°C of warming, it’s still a good idea to avoid 4°C. And so on. …

Setting hard boundaries — and framing things in terms of success and failure — is a much more intuitive way to think about the issue. (I’ve been guilty of this sort of talk myself.) But it doesn’t really make sense to declare “game over” at any point.

Ronald Bailey wonders about international cooperation:

International climate negotiations are somewhat similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Assuming man-made global warming is costly to all countries, the optimum solution is for all countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But for an individual country, the better option is to keep burning low-cost fossil fuels while other nations reduce their emissions. Since all countries recognize that other countries are likely to cheat and continue to use fossil fuels, they all fail to cut their emissions.

Is there a way out of that dynamic? Two political scientists, Scott Barrett of Columbia and Astrid Dannenberg of Princeton, tried to find one in a 2013 study using game theory experiments. They concluded that if game players know for sure where the threshold for huge losses is located, they will cooperate to avoid it. The catastrophe threshold acts a form of punishment that encourages cooperation.

However, the experiments showed that “when the threshold for catastrophe was even slightly indeterminate, the players crossed essentially every time”:

The current uncertainties about the effects and intensity of future climate change suggest that countries are unlikely to follow the Obama administration’s lead. Based on their experimental results, Barrett and Dannenberg hold out the hope that climate research that reduces threshold uncertainty might help spur countries into mutual cuts of their greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week, in response to Ta-Nehisi’s cover-story, Frum laid out why he sees reparations as unworkable:

Affirmative action’s quirks and injustices are notorious. But they will be nothing compared to the strange consequences of a reparations program. Not all black people are poor. Not all non-black people are rich. Does Oprah have a housecleaner? Who changes the diapers of Beyonce’s baby? Who files Herman J. Russell’s taxes? Will their wages be taxed and the proceeds redirected to their employers?

Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured? Will convicted criminals be eligible? If not, the program will exclude perhaps one million African Americans. If yes, the program would potentially tax victims of rape and families of the murdered for the benefit of their assailants.

TNC pushes back:

The problem of reparations has never been practicality.

It has always been the awesome ghosts of history. A fear of ghosts has sometimes occupied the pages of the magazine for which David and I now write. In other times banishment has been our priority. The mature citizen, the hard student, is now called to choose between finding a reason to confront the past, or finding more reasons to hide from it. David thinks HR-40 commits us to a solution. He is correct. The solution is to study. I submit his own article as proof of why such study is so deeply needed.

Frum goes another round:

Ta-Nehisi does not wish to deal with fine details of who pays, who receives, how much, and on what basis. First we are to agree to his proposal. Only then will he tell us what the proposal is. But it seems to me the time to discuss an idea is before it becomes law, not after.

Especially since, in this case, the reparations idea actually distracts from understanding—and overcoming—the continuing disadvantages of black America. By Ta-Nehisi’s own telling, for example, his protagonist Clyde Ross was a victim not only of housing discrimination, but also of Ross’s lack of financial sophistication.

Taking the conversation in another direction, Matt Fletcher spotlights the difference between African Americans and Native Americans when it comes to the idea of reparations:

Tribal fights for hunting and fishing rights, education, sacred sites, and natural resources are all rooted in self-determination. When tribes settle claims against federal and state governments, the funds invariably go toward governance. Even Indian gaming, which many people think of as a form of reparations, grows out of tribal government activity, and Congress has mandated that gaming profits be spent on governance.

America’s moral debts to African-Americans and American Indians are shockingly deep and wide. African Americans point to slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and redlining. And American Indians point to land and resources theft, boarding schools, and cultural and religious persecution. But while African-Americans eye individual payments, Indian tribes seek control over lands and natural resources taken from them by the United States and state governments. The advantage in the tribal strategy is to make Uncle Sam the bad guy. African-American strategists should take note.

Previous Dish on the reparations discussion here, here, here, and here.

A reader emails using “not my real name, of course”:

I was thankful to see you mention the recent “This American Life” episode on non-offending pedophiles. I’m a long-time Dish reader. I’m also a pedophile. And like many others who are attracted to children, I have never acted on my attractions, and am committed to never doing so.

I’d also like to make you aware of an online resource for pedophiles who are committed to abstaining from sexual contact with minors: Virtuous Pedophiles. We provide information and a list of resources, and an online support group for those who believe that sexual contact with children is always wrong. Thanks for raising awareness of the issue.

The intro message from Virtuous Pedophiles sums up the predicament:

We do not choose to be attracted to children, and we cannot make that attraction go away.

But we can resist the temptation to abuse children sexually, and many of us present no danger to children whatsoever. Yet we are despised for having a sexual attraction that we did not choose, cannot change, and successfully resist. This hatred has its consequences; many of us suffer from depression and sometimes even commit suicide. Paradoxically, the hatred actually increases the risk of child sexual abuse by making us afraid to admit our condition to others, thus discouraging us from seeking treatment. More of us could lead productive, happy, law-abiding lives if we could open up to people who would treat us not as monsters but as human beings with an unfortunate burden to bear.

Another reader adds:

I have provided psychiatric care for similar men. Supporting pedophiles in not acting on their attraction helps these men and helps prevent victimization of children. In Sweden, there is a helpline called PrevenTell, which provides phone counseling and referrals for help for pedophiles to not act on their attraction.  It is a program of the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, under the leadership of sexologist Katarina Görts Öberg. But even in Sweden, funding for such programs is a challenge.

Perhaps if we had more funding and support for non-practicing pedophiles at a young age, when they are most treatable, not as many of them would enter, say, the priesthood and become non-non-practicing.