Politics

Gapification

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Radley Balko argues that it’s not Walmart, it’s regulation:

People who decry the Wal-Mart-ification and Gap-ificaiton of America need to realize that regulation often does more harm to local businesses than predatory pricing, loss-leader business models, or some other imagined corporate evil.

I’ve lived in or near Old Town for most of the last 10 years. It’s not at all common to see an independently-owned antique shop or art gallery get boarded over, only to be replaced in ensuing months by a franchise. It’s not difficult to see why. Franchise operators can tap the resources of the parent company, particularly when it comes to accessing legal help with experience navigating through and working with local zoning laws and business regulations.

Local officials who simultaneously decry big box stores and national chains while doling out burdensome regulatory structures and complicated permit processes should understand that regulatory burdens hit the smaller, independent places hardest, because they’re the places that have the smallest amount of discretionary cash to hire legal aid (or, if you’re really cynical, to make the appropriate campaign contributions). They’re on a tighter budget and, therefore, have a smaller margin of error when it comes to hassles like delaying an opening because some bureaucrat determined their signage is a couple of inches out of compliance.

There’s a larger lesson in all of this, too. Those who push for federal regulations to rein in “big business” often don’t realize that the biggest of big businesses don’t mind heavy federal regulation at all. They have the resources to comply with them, not to mention the clout in Washington to get the regulations written in a way that most hurts upstarts and competitors.

Big businesses know that a heavy regulatory burden is the best way to make sure small- and medium-sized businesses never rise up to challenge them.

'Culture'

Sex in Spaaaaaaaace!

Hmmm.:

US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday.

Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place.

I’m sorry. My bullshit meter twitches like crazy on this one. I just don’t think NASA could keep it quiet. You know how the French like to make stuff up.

Sports

Live-Blogging the BCS

Watching the selection show now. Let’s see what happens.

Rose Bowl: USC vs. Illinois. What? This should have been Georgia’s spot. How the hell did Illinois get in here instead of Arizona State going to the Sugar Bowl? Illinois lost to Mizzou, Michigan and Iowa. Arizona Sate lost to Oregon and USC. Granted Illinois’ noin-conference schedule was tougher by virtue of Mizzou. Illinois will get eaten alive by USC.

Fiesta Bowl: Oklahoma vs. West Virginia. No comment needed. Oklahoma should win this one easily.

Orange Bowl: Virginia Tech vs. Kansas. What? What?! How the hell did Kansas vault over Mizzou? Simple. Mizzou made the huge mistake of winning the division, which meant they played a conference championship game. If they had lost to Kansas, they’d be ranked higher. This shows you how stupid the BCS is — it encourages teams to lose. Virginia Tech will take this one easily.

Sugar Bowl: Hawaii vs. Georgia. Now if Arizona State gets in ahead of Illinois, they end up playing Hawaii, a much better matchup, while Georgia goes into a monster game against USC. Hell, Illinois or West Virginia would have been a better match to Hawaii. The Georgia that has been playing for the last two months should destroy Hawaii; the Georgia that played the Vols might lose.

Championship: LSU vs. Ohio State. I’ve already said everything I can on this subject. These might be the two best teams in the country. We’ll never know.

Update: Thinking about it some more, I think the BCS really screwed the pooch here. Mizzou ranked higher than Kansas in the BCS standing, but they picked Kansas. Arizona State ranked higher than Illinois but they picked Illinois. What is the point of having the God-damned BCS system if you are just going to ignore it when it comes to picking the teams?

And if anyone says, “I love the controversy”, I’m going to punch them in the face. That’s like saying you would like to be in a bad marriage because of the entertaining fights. Two teams — Kansas and Illinois — are playing in BCS bowls who shouldn’t. Two teams — Mizzou and ASU — are saying, “What the hell did we do wrong?” And five teams — Georgia, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, Hawaii and USC — are saying, “Why don’t we get a chance?”

This is how we pick a national champion?

Sports

Keeping Your Concentration

Chicago just went stupid against the Giants. After a heart-breaking drop on a long pass to Devon Hester, they just went to sleep mentally. Delay of game. Sack. Punt. A long run to the goal line by the Giants. I think Lovie Smith threw the challenge flag not to look at the spot but to get a long time out to calm his team down.

And it worked. They just stuffed Draughens. Twice.

Why am I better analyst than the idiots on TV?

Sports

BCS

Good gravy.

A few scattered thoughts while we wait to see if Hawaii or Illinois gets the last BCS slot and who the hell ends up at #2.

  • It turns out that Ohio State was the smartest team in the country — they stopped playing games.
  • Mack Brown was right. If you want to win a national championship, don’t schedule anyone. Ohio State’s non-conference schedule included Youngstown State, Akron, Washington and Kent State. They played one ranked team — although Michigan and Penn State were ranked when they played ’em. Now that’s a championship schedule! Kansas, a potential BCS team, played one ranked team — Missouri — and got beaten.
  • By contrast, LSU put Virginia Tech among their roster of non-conference patsies. Georgia didn’t have any powerhouses but did get decent opponents in GT and Okie State. USC had Nebraska and Notre Dame — which might have looked impressive two years ago.
  • Les Miles is a great con man. I, for one, have been less and less impressed with LSU every week. They started strong by crushing Virginia Tech. But it’s been a slow slide since — edging Florida at home, losing to Kentucky, edging Auburn at home, barely beating Bama, losing to Arkansas. The team has talent but they play like shit – undisciplined and disorganized. A true national champion would tear them apart.
  • Is anyone going to take the national championship seriously? If it’s LSU-OSU, which looks likely, you will be facing a team that played one ranked opponent against a team that blew its #1 ranking *twice*. I defy anyone to take *any* two teams and convince me that these are the two best teams in the country. They might as well be drawing the teams out of a hat.

    I have no idea who are the top two teams in the country. None. I do know that six teams won their conferences on the field. I do know that two other ranked teams — Hawaii and BYU — won their conferences on the field. We need to put those eight teams in a tournament and let them play.

  • This week puts the lie to the SMT assertion that the BCS makes the entire season a playoff. LSU lost the #1 ranking twice to unranked teams. USC lost twice. Virginia Tech lost twice. Ohio State lost to its only ranked opponent. Georgia pulled two choke jobs. And yet, all those teams are in the national title discussion.
  • This is only going to get worse. The league has amazing parity right now and is likely to move toward greater parity.
  • It’s clear that the system is affecting the polls. The writers are going to leapfrog LSU over Georgia tomorrow even though most of them think Georgia is one of the best teams in the country right now. But they don’t want Georgia in the championship game so they wil keep them at #3 or #4. Now that’s fine. I’m a Bulldogs fan but I don’t think the Dawgs deserve to play for championship after losing to the Vols and Gamecocks. But if the voters are going to engineer the polls to produce the matchup they want, they need to stop pretending they are ranking teams in any objective sense but trying to engineer a good game. This was obvious last year when Florida vaulted to the top of the polls. It’s even more obvious now.

    If we had a playoff system, the writers could happily vote Georgia #1 if they wanted to and sleep well with the knowledge that the most it would do is give them an at-large bid in the playoff.

    • My prediction for the bowls? As I type this, Hawaii is already down 14-0 and if they lose, they’re out, which is a shame. But that’s what they get for scheduling a real opponent. Assuming Hawaii goes on to lose, I’d make the following matchups using what I see as the likely rankings tomorrow:

    BCS Championship: LSU vs. Ohio State

    Rose Bowl: USC vs. Georgia

    Fiesta Bowl: Mizzou vs. West Virginia

    Orange Bowl: Virginia Tech vs. Oklahoma

    Sugar Bowl: Illinois vs. Arizona State

    But if we had a fricking playoff, which used traditional bowl pairing as a first round, it might look like this:

    Rose Bowl: USC vs. Ohio State
    Sugar Bowl: LSU vs. BYU (or Georgia)
    Orange Bowl: Virginia Tech vs. Oklahoma
    Fiesta Bowl: West Virginia vs. Hawaii (or Mizzou)

    'Culture', Law and Order, Politics

    Friday Linkorama

  • Women like shopping. Gee, ya think? Next they’ll be telling us there are similarities to our mating process.
  • Take your kids to the park? $250 fine. There are a lot of people — left and right — who wants us to live like this. “Take your kids to the park or you will be punished! No, not that park or you will be punished! Take them home and read them a story! No, not that story!”
  • Vanity Fair on the batshit crazy governor of New York. Jeez Louise.
  • An outrage in Ann Arbor. What country are we living in?
  • When judicial activism is a good thing:

    It’s a powerful argument, and it may well resonate with the conservative justices who think that judges often overreach and “substitute their own policy preferences” for those of the people’s elected legislators. But I wonder if Helmke really believes that judges should respect the will of legislators and not strike down laws. Does he believe that the Warren Court should not have struck down school segregation, which was clearly the will of the people’s elected representatives–and no doubt the people–in Kansas, as well as in South Carolina and Virginia, whose similar cases were combined with Brown? Does he believe that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down Virginia’s law against interracial marriage in 1967? The Texas law outlawing sodomy in 2003? The Communications Decency Act in 1997? Does he indeed think the John Marshall Court was wrong to invalidate a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 in Marbury v. Madison? That’s the implication of his ringing words in defense of legislative absolutism.

    • 'Culture'

    Lips

    1 Comment

    What the hell is up with actresses getting their lips blown up until they look like fish? Who finds this attractive?

    My wife likes to watch Las Vegas for some reason (my theory, she likes Josh Duhamel). Catching the occasional ep wasn’t so bad since it starred Vanessa Marcil and Nikki Cox. Then last year, I caught an episode, and Nikki Cox looked hideous. And she’s not the only one to get her lips exploded.

    If I looked anything like these women and some surgeon did this to me, I’d sue his ass off. But they think having scary trout pout instead of nice normal lips is attactive. Who thinks this?

    Sports

    Write on Rice

    The baseball Hall of Fame voting is about to take place. Let’s look at two players, one of whom is on the ballot.

    Red Sox Outfielder A: 2452 hits, 373 2B, 382 HR, 1249 R, 1451 RBI, 670 BB, 315 GIDP, career line .298/.352/.502, 57 runs below average with his glove. Baseball Prospectus estimates he was worth 83.2 wins over a replacement-level player during his career and about 9.8 wins in his best season.

    Red Sox Outfielder B: 2446 hits, 483 2B, 385 HR, 1470 R, 1384 RBI, 1391 BB, 227 GIDP, career line .272/.370/.470, 68 runs *above* average with the glove. Baseball Prospectus estimate he was worth 120.2 wins over a replacement-level player during his career and 12.2 wins in his best season.

    No comparison, right? I mean Player A hit for higher average and slugging while driving in more runs. Player B matches player A in hits and homers. Player B beats the snot out of him in doubles, runs, walks, double plays hit into, on-base percentage, fielding runs, career and peak value.

    Player A is Jim Rice, whom the Red Sox nation has almost gotten into the Hall of Fame.

    Player B is Dwight Evans, who dropped off the ballot after three years from lack of support.

    Red Sox minions will tell you that Jim Rice was the most feared hitter in baseball. Even if that were true, which it isn’t, you would think that terror would show up in his stats. That he would have been walked a few times to pitch to the weaker, um, Yastrzemski? Fisk? Lynn? Evans?

    Dwight Evans was 1.5 times the player Jim Rice was. And these voters tell the fans they’re too stupid to vote for awards.

    Sports

    On Santana

    It’s behind the subscription firewall, but Joe Sheehan today says what I’ve been saying for weeks:

    Like Alex Rodriguez in 2000, like Barry Bonds in 1992, like Greg Maddux that same winter, Johan Santana is an elite talent irreplaceable through normal means, and as durable as any pitcher can be in modern baseball. If the standard in six years and $140 million, or seven and $155 million, as ridiculous as those figures sound, they may be well worth it if the alternative is spending two-thirds of that over that same period for half the performance.

    No baseball team has benefitted from trading or letting go to free agency a multi-Cy-Young winning durable pitcher in his prime. The Cubs with Maddux, the Dodgers and Expos with Pedro, the Red Sox with Clemens, the Expos and Mariners with the Unit, several teams with Schilling. It has always been a disaster.

    HOF-caliber pitchers who don’t get hurt are rare. Pitching prospects are a dime a dozen. And when you’re moving into a big taxpayer-funded stadium, you don’t slap the fans in the face by letting your best pitcher since Bert Blyleven walk.

    Law and Order

    He’s Our Baby Too!

    1 Comment

    Man, some lawyers are disgusting.

    Once again, the combination of contingency fees and law enforcement spells trouble: an article by Tresa Baldas in the National Law Journal reports that controversy is mounting over the activities of private firms that go after noncustodial parents’ child support obligations in exchange for a percentage share of the bounty (“Suits collecting around child support collectors”, Sept. 17, no free link). “Critics of the industry — many of them lawyers — claim that private collectors of child support are engaging in predatory practices, such as charging excessive contingency fees as high as 50%, and using aggressive collection tactics that run afoul of federal laws.” The private agencies escape the scrutiny of federal debt collection laws and have been operating effectively without regulation, but state lawmakers are now moving to fill the gap, with 13 states having passed laws intended to protect the services’ clients (if not always their adversaries) by capping fees, prohibiting the agencies from collaring state-directed payments, and giving clients more leeway to withdraw from contracts.

    The National Council of State Legislatures details a range of complaints made against some of the collectors:

    * written and oral communications with obligees designed to look or sound like they are from the state child support agency or other government entity,
    * repeated harassment of employers, family members and neighbors of obligors,

    * keeping as payment for services 50% or more of support collected,

    * intercepting current support payments from the state agency to apply to back support they contracted to collect for the obligee,

    * charging a fee for collections made by the state agency,

    * refusing to terminate contracts when requested by the obligee, and

    * requesting income withholding from employers without proper authority.

    Literally taking money out of the mouths of kids. Nice.

    Culture War, Law and Order

    Emily

    On the way home, I was hearing news reports about Emily Sander, a college student who was just murdered in Kansas. Turns out, she was posing naked (probably just topless) for her own website. The idiot news media called her a “porn star”, which isn’t even close to true. She was one of hundreds of young women who are making money on the side posing naked on their own web sites. I don’t have a problem with this. They’re doing it of their own free will and men get vicarious pleasure out of looking at women who aren’t surgically enhanced bulemics.

    It will be interesting to see what happens to these women. Many of them are — or claim to be — college students. Will their websites cost them future jobs? For some reason, I doubt it. I think our society is getting a lot less puritanical about such things.

    However, the “porn star” slur that has leaked into the media is a preview of what is to come in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy. No matter why Emily Sander was murdered, this will be blamed on her web site. And we will get all kinds of dire warnings and calls for legislation. Because, as I noted, there are a lot of girls out there doing this. And a nation of 300 million certainly has no shortage of monsters.

    I have a friend who, whenever I support the freedom of women to be nude models, porn stars, prostitutes or whatever, asks me if I would want my daughter to do these things. Of course not. But I do want her to live in a country that treats her like an adult and respects her freedom to do what makes her happy — as long as she doesn’t harm anyone else.

    Sports

    Thus Spake Posada

    Why is it news that Jorge Posada thinks the Yankees should get Johann Santanta? What’s he supposed to say?

    “No, I don’t think we would be a better team if we got the best young pitcher in baseball, a proven durable Cy Young winner who is not a head case.”

    In other news, Posada said we should bring peace to Middle East, end poverty and do something about sick people.

    Astronomy, Sports, Mathematical Malpractice, Whatever Else Pops Into My Head