Tag: Premium

by Zoe Pollock

William Breathes, who writes under a pseudonym, reviews dispensaries and their various strains of pot for the alt-weekly Denver Westword and runs its cannabis news blog, Toke Of The Town. The best part of the job? Normalizing the drug:

[Readers] can go to westword.com to get news about the state legislature, or about education, about the prison system—and about marijuana. It’s not the old-school media approach to marijuana, where it’s like, “Let’s see how many pot puns we can cram into the lede and how many jokes we can make at the expense of marijuana smokers.” We definitely make jokes at the expense of marijuana smokers, but we also take news very seriously.

We’ve seen other news outlets come around on that.

The Denver Post—and I’m not trying to pick on another news media outlet—but for the longest time, their pot coverage was shit. It just was. Every time it was just them making fun of the pot smokers. But in the last year, they’ve realized that it’s important, and it’s not just 20-something stoners tuning in to figure out what’s going on. People wanna know because it’s a viable, million-dollar industry. In the sense of the media, that’s been an important role for my job.

But I think the obvious one is that I like to think I’m helping patients find really good places to buy medicine. Whether it’s for price or quality—for some people, as long as it’s clean, that’s fine to them, they just don’t want to go somewhere scuzzy. That’s why I still focus on what the interior of these places look like. I always think about it like this: if my mom was to read this and she had a medical marijuana card, what would she get out of this? ’Cause it’s not just people like me, it’s not just 20-somethings. It’s also baby boomers [and older people, too]. Our average-age patient is 41.

by Doug Allen

David Hilfiker, diagnosed with a “progressive cognitive impairment” which is “almost certainly Alzheimer’s” in September 2012, is blogging the deterioration of his capacities:

Friday I decided to walk the family dog and join my grandchildren at the nearby park.  The dog sometimes slips out of her collar and needs a simple harness to keep her on-leash.  But after at least ten minutes of confusion, trying unsuccessfully to figure out how to put the harness on, I had to settle for the collar, stuff the harness in my pocket and, after I’d reached the park, ask my 8-year-old granddaughter Madeline to put the harness on.

But Hilfiker says he doesn’t feel any shame about his confusion:

I’ve been through this [kind of helplessness] before: I suffered from a severe depression for decades before I realized the cause was an organic brain disease. During that period, I was ashamed of my inability to enjoy life; I considered a character defect that I should have been able to overcome.  After I understood that the cause of my depression was an unavoidable chemical imbalance in my brain, however, the shame disappeared.  I was still helpless, but I didn’t have to “try harder” to get over it.

It’s the same thing now.  I’m not embarrassed when I can’t remember ever meeting a person with whom I had a long conversation recently.  I’m not frustrated when I can’t fix a simple problem with my file drawers.  My helplessness is unavoidable.  I am not going to get better no matter what I do; my capacities will decline further.  This is not my fault.

So I don’t fight my inabilities.  I can accept this part of myself as real.  The sadness continues but not so much the pain of helplessness.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

All of the responses to your post about the stigma of cheap weddings pretty much underline the point Noah Millman was making in his response to Ross Douthat’s column. Douthat asked proponents of marriage equality to own up to the fact that the rise in interest in same-sex marriage has coincided on a timeline with the “decline” of marriage in our society and to admit that there might be some connection, whether it is apparent or not.

I believe the exact opposite. At a time when so many societal factors, including economics are making marriage less and less popular, the fight for marriage equality is one of the few things that actually promotes the benefits of marital bliss.

Two of your commenters point out that the typical wedding doesn’t cost $27,000, but actually costs $15,000. And what does that say to the larger point? That marriage is so inconsequential to so many heterosexuals that a price tag of $15,000 (not $27,000) is enough to dissuade them from tying the knot. And keep in mind that’s not the minimum cost of getting married… that’s just the cost of having a wedding that keeps up with the Joneses. And again, that price tag isn’t just dissuading people from having a big wedding… it’s keeping them from getting married altogether, something you could do at City Hall for a minimal cost.

That’s part of the bigger point. For a lot of people, getting married is as much about the wedding as it is about declaring your eternal love. It’s about dieting down to your best weight ever, buying an expensive outfit you’ll never wear again and inviting all your friends to witness it in the hopes they’ll talk about, tweet about it, envy you for it and shower you with enough gifts to offset the cost of throwing the party in the first place.

Weddings and marriage are all about stigmas, and once large parts of society removed the stigma of living together and raising children without the party and without the paper, similarly large segments of society just opted out of the whole thing. Once we stopped stigmatizing divorce and went from a society that wouldn’t elect a divorced President to one that doesn’t blink at having morality preached to it by a thrice-divorced man, divorce rates shot up too.

At a time when the sanctity and status of marriage appear to be at an all time low, the fight for marriage equality is reminding us that marriage can still be a beautiful and treasured institution. Suggesting that it is part of the problem is akin to noting that every time there is a fire, fire trucks show up and maybe if we got rid of the trucks, we’d have a lot fewer fires.

Andrew Sprung recently made related points:

Gay activists, or simply the rising visibility of gay couples, have made marriage cool again. They’ve raised its value in my eyes, or rather made me a little more conscious of its value, which is pretty much the same thing.  And I think that the drive for gay marriage has raised the institution’s value materially by making the whole society think hard about what it’s really about.

The west has valorized marriage for true love, as the free choice of two people who decide they’re right for each other, for more than a century. That ideal was getting a little worn around the edges, pecked at by perspectives from biology, and psychology, and probability, and economics, and political ideology — and by postmodern skepticism generally. In real terms, too, the institution as we knew it has eroded, thanks first to divorce and then by advancing tide of out-of-wedlock births.

Gay marriage is not going to change that, or arrest change in this ever-changing but indestructible human institution. But it has made the enduring reality of individual choice and the eternal viability of lifelong commitment and the value and utility of two-parent families a bit clearer.

by Doug Allen

Amy Fairchild weighs the arguments for and against Bloomberg’s suspended soda ban:

From the glass-half-empty perspective, the policy is a drop in the bucket of what would be required to solve the obesity problem. Setting limits on just a single behavior, in the face of all the other unhealthy choices we must avoid (fried foods, excessive portions, carbohydrates galore), can hardly be expected to turn the obesity tide. Moreover, because the ban contains all kinds of loopholes — it doesn’t set limits on refills, for instance, and it excludes (“on suspect grounds”) “other beverages that have significantly higher concentrations of sugar sweeteners and/or calories” — the charge that it is “arbitrary and capricious” may strike opponents as more descriptive than acerbic. (1)

But from the glass-half-full point of view, the ban is not about attacking individual choice but rather about limiting corporate damage. If we see supersized drinks not in terms of the individual’s freedom to be foolish but instead as a kind of industrial pollution that is super-concentrated in impoverished neighborhoods, (2) limits on drink size become a far different kind of regulatory measure. The target is not the individual: it is the beverage industry, corporate America.

I’ll admit, I have a much more favorable view of this particular act of Bloomberg “nannyism” than Andrew does.Part of that comes from growing up with a pediatric endocrinologist in the house: I spent a lot of my own childhood hearing about children struggling with obesity. I also view this policy as more of a Sunstein/Thaler-style “nudge” than a real ban. If you really need 64 ounces of soda, you’d be able to get it, either through refills or another purchase. In fact, contra Fairchild, I think the refill loophole is a plus as it helps to make this a much softer form of paternalism.

I think that the climbing obesity rates, especially among children, are problematic enough that they merit some sort of action. If the ban is ever reinstated by the courts, it may well prove to be ineffective at reducing caloric intake, at which point I would argue for its repeal. But I think we have to start somewhere, and this seems like a reasonable first step.

by Brendan James

Maysoon Zayid eviscerates Hamas and stresses that their policies of religious persecution and gender-segregation are not what Palestinians are fighting for:

I’m sick to death of hearing that ignorant mantra, “Hamas was democratically elected.” The operative word is “was.” Their term has been up for four years. They are no longer democratically elected; they are warlords, and the Palestinian Authority has gifted them free rein. … Hamas claims to be fighting for freedom while invoking laws that oppress women and religious minorities. As Palestinians, we are striving for equality, not more oppression.

In 2006, I hung out with The Carter Center as they monitored the Palestinian elections. Nobody thought Hamas would win. Hamas did not think Hamas could win. The lion’s share of folks I spoke to who were voting for them were not actually voting for Hamas but against Fatah. They had gotten sick of the blatant corruption and inaction of the Palestinian Authority. They wanted to teach them a lesson. While Fatah was accused of stealing from the people, Hamas provided impeccable social services to the downtrodden. The idea was to put the fear of God in Fatah so they would straighten up, but instead Hamas won—and so did Israel.

Zayid conveys a larger point often lost in the coverage of this conflict: Hamas is not popular in Palestine. They are has-beens and opportunists. Occasionally they receive a boost in support when Israel strikes or the party leadership scores a release of prisoners, but generally they’re a huge disappointment. (A recent poll of both the West Bank and Gaza shows Hamas with support around 12% with Fatah, hardly beloved, around 36%.) If a national government came together and ushered in fresh elections, Hamas could lose serious clout.

On the other hand, Hussein Ibish warns that recently reconfirmed Hamas leader Khaled Mashal may use any reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah as cover to maneuver his way to the head of the PLO:

[I]t’s important not to underestimate the harm this could cause to the Palestinian national movement. Hamas’ policies are strictly inconsistent with those of the PLO, and contradict its treaty obligations. If Hamas joined the PLO with its current policies unchanged, let alone usurped it, the international standing of the PLO – one of the most important achievements of the Palestinian national movement, the value of which no one really questions – would be placed in dire jeopardy.

Palestinians want and need national unity. But the terms are crucial. If such unity in effect means abandoning the positions that underscore the PLO’s standing at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, and diplomatic relations with well over 100 countries, the price will be exorbitant and disproportionate.

Time I spent kicking around the West Bank originally convinced me that the US and Israel are simply not doing enough to incentivize the formation of a unity government, whose elections would spit Hamas out of the PA soon after it brought them in. After all, the first incarnation of the Arab Spring that cropped up in Palestine was a wave of protests calling for ‘unity’ between Ramallah and Gaza City (which Hamas chose to handle with billy clubs). What if Palestinians got their national unity? The US could bite the bullet, encourage the merger, let Hamas in, watch them shrink into a minority party, and let Fatah lead and handle future negotiations.

But now, considering Mashal’s scheming and some good counterarguments by Michael Koplow in the aftermath of the latest Gaza mini-war, it’s not so obvious it would be that easy to dethrone Hamas. They have a lot of guns, for one thing. And maybe that’s the only thing that really matters.

(Photo: A Hamas militant takes part in the funeral procession. By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)

by Brendan James

Commenting on a new adaptation, Alyssa Rosenberg complains that the play “hasn’t aged well”:

[T]he vision of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a “won’t they miss me when I’m gone” pout. There’s a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony’s death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Anna Williams suggests the exploration of “deeply childish love” is the point of the play:

The play’s criticism of the lovers becomes explicit in the speeches of Friar Laurence, who considers their relationship shallow, hasty, and immoderate. Amazed at the news that Romeo has suddenly stopped loving Rosaline and fallen in love with Juliet, the friar concludes that “young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.” (Just as Rosenberg says, “Romeo’s age isn’t specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man.”) A love that lies more in the eyes than in the heart, in the friar’s analogy, is deficient.

The rapid progress of the lovers’ relationship worries the friar, too: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast,” he cautions the eager Romeo. Although Juliet calls their love “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” the night that she meets Romeo, she does not actually slow their courtship, as they marry the very next day. We are, in Rosenberg’s phrase, watching them “behave like early teenagers.”

I agree with Alyssa that most modern-dress productions don’t come off well—I haven’t been the same since sweating through a bleak, grey staging at Edinburgh Festival a few years back. But is the play itself really “outdated?” Probably not until self-destructive love is out of our system. In the meantime it seems odd to fault Shakespeare for the relatively recent butcherings of a drama that has been staged for roughly 400 years.

by Doug Allen

Jeff Robbins, founder and CEO of Lullabot, defends Marissa Meyer’s ban on telecommuting. His rule of thumb is that a “conventional company with several remote employees is a company with several alienated employees”:

My feeling is that most conventional co-located companies simply don’t know how to manage, and more importantly, how to include their remote workforce. … This discussion isn’t all about productivity. It’s also about culture, relationships (both romantic and platonic), understanding office politics, in-jokes, birthday parties, and general inclusion. Without these things, a company’s work-at-home staff won’t feel like they’re part of the team. … Feeling alienated sucks. These employees can become myopic, focusing only on the work that comes to them via email and nothing else.

He explains how they maintain the office camaraderie despite their “distributed” workforce:

[I]t’s built into our DNA to avoid remote worker alienation. We bend over backwards to make our team feel connected and involved in the company. Being a good proactive communicator is a requirement for any job at Lullabot. And our company’s infrastructure is built around facilitating many different types of communication. We can easily and quickly see who’s working at any given moment. We can easily get quick answers from anyone on the team whether they’re online or off. We can post questions company-wide for discussion. We spend a lot of time on conference calls, but people are often multitasking and we rarely feel like a meeting was unproductive.

Previous Dish on working from home here, here and here.

by Patrick Appel

Readers’ stories of their small, simple weddings continue to trickle in. The contrast with how wedding celebrations are typically depicted in pop culture is striking. There is nothing inherently wrong with big weddings (my own wedding, which I loved, wasn’t particularly small), but there is something perverse about how our culture focuses more attention on having an ideal wedding, which lasts a day, than on having an ideal marriage, which lasts a lifetime. Another reader shares:

Our family has a long history of avoiding big weddings. My husband’s grandparents ran off to New York City back in the 1920s and got married quietly at the Little Church Around the Corner. My parents were married back in the 1950s in my grandmother’s living room with no more than half a dozen participants (including the minister). Around the same time, my husband’s parents were married in a church with two friends of the bride in attendance as legal witnesses. In each of these cases, the decision to go small was based largely on family dynamics—the mother of the bride objected to the groom—but each of these marriages lasted for many decades until the death of one of the spouses. (And no, nobody was pregnant, in case you were wondering.)

So when my husband and I got married almost 26 years ago, we continued the family tradition and had an extremely small wedding of our own, saving a lot of money and stress in the process.

We gathered at the Justice of the Peace’s tiny office right across the street from the courthouse. The wedding party consisted of ourselves and four immediate family members. I wore a largely white summer dress, and my husband wore his suit. The Justice of the Peace was a veteran lawyer who clearly had done this many times before and played his part to perfection, even changing into a special suit coat for the occasion. That evening, we invited a dozen close friends and immediate family members to dinner and champagne at our favorite Afghan restaurant, followed by homemade cake and present opening at our apartment. I don’t remember how much all of this cost, but it was well under five hundred dollars. Everyone had a great time. And we’re still happily married today.

We sometimes joke about doing it all over again in a more scenic location like a beach or park, and I would definitely have invested a little more money in the wedding rings and gotten solid gold bands instead of bottom-of-the-line gold-plated ones. (Mine was so cheap and so light weight that it fell off my finger a few years later and got eaten by a lawn mower.) But we have no regrets about the size and scope of the wedding.

The funny thing is that even today, most people are shocked when I share this story with them. They simply cannot wrap their brains around the idea that a couple could possibly get legally and happily married with fewer than 200 people in attendance. Perhaps it’s time for us ultra-small wedding supporters to come out of the closet and let people know that it is possible to get—and stay—married without spending a lot of money.

Another reader’s story:

We held our wedding and reception in a community center located in a lovely historic building which cost us a quarter of what we might have spent to rent a generic room in a hotel. We had a potluck reception; rather than our friends and family looking down on us for not spending $50 or $75 a head for banquet food, they loved the chance to be part of the day and it added to the community spirit of the celebration. The food was great and the atmosphere festive. Be true to yourselves and trust those who love you to be happy for you. And if you think someone is going to judge you for how much you are spending on your wedding, is it really worth having them there?

Another reader:

After more than twenty years together, my wife and I found ourselves in Iowa (just after marriage equality arrived there) visiting friends, and got married in a simple ceremony with a magistrate. Our friends and family were irate: how could you have gotten married and not invited us?? So that fall, we had a blow-out wedding for almost 200 of our closest friends and family. I made the invitations myself. Generous friends with a big house and yard hosted, and we also set up a tent outside with tables and chairs for extra room. We asked for no gifts, but made the event pot-luck for local people (we asked out-of-towners to donate to our church’s food and clothing cupboard). We bought wine and beer, and a friend served as bartender. Another friend served as DJ. A couple of family members footed the bill for flowers, and another friend arranged them. Yet another friend took photos. Our church choir, which my wife directs, sang. The food was amazing, the music super danceable, and many folks declared it “the best wedding ever.” We spent about $5000 — for a wedding for 200, that included food and drinks!

Another:

It seems crazy to me that so many people let the intensely intimate act of committing one’s life and love to another person get overshadowed, or consumed, by so many distractions – how much to spend per guest, the politics of guest lists, selfish parents who insist in hijacking the ceremony for their own ends, etc. My wife and I ‘eloped’, but not in a sneaky way. We told (we did not ask) our families, friends and work colleagues we were doing it that way well in advance. We were married in New Orleans before a judge and 2 witnesses. Our wedding day was completely calm, stress-free and focused on each other. We had multiple celebrations with various family members over the next several weeks that were likewise intimate and memorable. Six months later we hosted a big party with a very relaxed guest list – we cared a lot less about who to include and not include for a cocktail party than we would have had it been an invitation to a wedding.

This was definitely not an economically driven decision. This was the way we wanted to do it. I would highly recommend foregoing the traditional wedding for a private exchange of vows and a party later for any couple. Who gives a rat’s ass what other people think about how you do it? It’s your moment as a couple, nobody else’s.

by Patrick Appel

Neil Irwin summarizes today’s report:

The 88,000 net jobs added in March, if that or a similar figure holds up through revisions, is a tragedy: Nearly four years into the economic recovery, with the unemployment rate still close to 8 percent, the nation recorded a month in which too few jobs were added to keep up with the growing American workforce (that number is more like 125,000). The headline read that the unemployment rate fell to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent, but it was almost entirely for bad reasons. A whopping 496,000 people dropped out of the labor force, and 206,000 fewer people reported having a job, meaning that the proportion of Americans currently working actually ticked down, not up.

Kevin Drum makes the numbers look even worse:

The American economy added 88,000 new jobs last month, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth was actually slightly negative at -2,000 jobs. That’s terrible. It’s yet another spring swoon, but even earlier than usual. Ever since the end of the Great Recession we’ve been stuck in an odd pattern where employment growth looks promising in winter and then falls off a cliff in spring, but usually the dropoff doesn’t happen until April or May. We’re early this year.

Ryan Avent’s perspective:

[T]o some extent, this report simply drags expectations back to where they were early in the year, when it was anticipated that fiscal policy would meaningfully slow growth in the first half of the year but allow for an improvement later on. If surprisingly good numbers led some to believe that the American economy could shake cuts off without any effect, then perhaps they were a bit overoptimistic. Hopefully just a bit.

Tomasky fears that the worst is yet to come:

The sequester is not in these March numbers, the pros say. Too early. So that doesn’t necessarily augur well for April. Or May. There are going to be more job losses, particularly in the public sector. Good, you say? Question: How many public-sector jobs have been shed in the last three years? Answer is 648,000. That’s 18,000 every month. I don’t think this has ever happened since the birth of the welfare state, not under any Republican president or Democratic one.

Derek Thompson compares the stock market to the jobs market:

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 and the Dow closed at nominal all-time highs. Three days later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added a shockingly low 88,000 jobs in March. How bad is 88K? Well, put it this way, we’re theoretically in the midst of an accelerating recovery, and 88K new jobs per month won’t get us back to full employment for another 20 years, or more. I suspect that this will be one of the defining national stories of 2013, and beyond: The big, sustained, and accelerating gap between the working opportunities of most Americans and the profits produced at the top.

And Krugman asks why Washington is focused on budget cuts.

(Chart from Calculated Risk)