three-headed-snakeRegulation in DC is taking down a food truck icon.

Progress! Bill Gates’s condom challenge is about to be met! This is important!

An Iowa truancy law wants you to drop the dime on your homeschooling neighbors. As an aside, we can have truancy laws, or we can require childhood vaccination to attend school, but I’m not sure we can do both.

Big Data is making some real headway on the human resources front. Uncle Steve points out that this isn’t new.

In 1992, Nugget II, the University of Southern Mississippi live mascot, died in a cloud of controversy. The case is back on.

New York is making the case that it no longer matters who can breathe whose air, we don’t want to watch people smoking (or looking like they are). Meanwhile, Heathrow Airport is setting up a vaping zone.

I am, on certain things at least, rather cynical. I rarely hear “smart growth” in contexts that lead me to believe that it is a referrence to anything but “limited growth” which is fine as long as you’ve got yours. Owen Courreges argies that easier growth is the real smart growth.

More distracting to drivers than mobile phones? Children. And since mobile phones are as bad as drunk driving, kids make drunk drivers out of the lot of us.

Here’s an argument against density: It allows you to smoke in your own home.

Bring the apprentice model to the US.

Mormons tend to like things upbeat, which presents problems in a cultural scene that prefers the dark.

Introducing, the $20,000 house!


Category: Newsroom

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6 Responses to Linkluster Year of the Consulship of Pius and Pontianus

  1. Φ says:

    “limited growth” which is fine as long as you’ve got yours

    As far as I can see, neither our political nor our legal system is especially optimized for pricing the costs of “growth”, identifying the people bearing those costs, and compensating them from the revenues of growth’s beneficiaries. And I don’t even have any ideas on how to do this; the whole subject makes my head hurt. But if the only outcome of “cutting red tape, cutting bureaucracy, and making laws clearer and more accessible” is to deny the cost-bearers a voice in the process, then the “neighborhood veto” starts to look good by comparison.

    • trumwill says:

      For my part, “growth management” I see is mostly “growth prevention” is mostly people who have theirs trying to prevent people who don’t from coming into the community. Which, ultimately, I don’t consider a legitimate aim.

      I am not entirely unsympathetic to the notion that “Why do I have to pay the cost for the new condo getting built? Why should I endure more traffic?” when some developer and some builders are the ones making a profit off it and the people moving in are benefiting from it.

      But absent a good solution to that, “neighborhood veto” primarily becomes a mechanism by which communities with greater pull (more wealth, more influence) deflect to communities with lesser pull. Which I can’t really get on board with.

  2. New York is making the case that it no longer matters who can breathe whose air

    It’s interesting that you note this, as the last time I was waiting for a train to leave Penn Station, there was a woman smoking an e-cig that gave off a decent bit of vapour. It’s a bit disconcerting to see somebody smoke on board a train since it’s been illegal to due so for years, but once she explained that it was an e-cig, most people (including me) stopped staring at her.

    Regardless, I suspect that if the overall goal is to stop people from intaking nicotine, then e-cig bans are helpful lest the population make the switch, and more people take up smoking due to reduced fears of lung cancer and other diseases.

    • trumwill says:

      Ecigs are easier to quit than regular cigarettes, though. So even the whole “this might prolong habits” rationale doesn’t work. You could see a mild uptick in the number of nicotine consumers, but I suspect that 33% of the population using these things is overall healthier than 15% using tobacco products.

  3. Here’s an argument against density: It allows you to smoke in your own home.

    Europeans smoke and don’t have such rules. 🙂

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