lincolnThis remains untrue, and insisting that it is over and over again doesn’t make the new one better. (It may be good! I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t even think it will be terrible.)

How facial recognition may introduce us to our doppelgangers.

Well, this is a long-time coming!

Businesses are coming up with an ingenuous way to get more employees: raising wages.

Kevin Williamson explains how higher wages make Buc-ee’s great, but that you can’t universalize from their experience. {Related}

Congratulations, Tobacco Control, your dishonesty is working.

According to some research, being who are overweight have less grey and white matter in the brain, leading them to make poorer food choices. I’m not sure I like where this goes.

Artificial light, and the loss of the light-dark cycle, may be making us sick.

Family-friendly policies, such as childcare and family leave, may not do much to increase fertility rates, but they may have the non-trivial effect of making parents happier.

takenochancesSarah Grant looks at coding boot camps, and attempts to ascertain their effectiveness for loan purposes.

Isochronic maps are GoogleMaps before there was GoogleMap. Sorta.

Alan Sepinwall goes to bat for self-contained television episodes.

Book of Tamara asks What is a University?

Unsurprisingly, I am on Team Separate Bedrooms. Spousal benefits come with being married.

How other countries see American food and throw “American” parties. And a Mexican July Fourth!


Category: Newsroom

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16 Responses to Linkluster Twin Cities

  1. Concerning sharing bedrooms: for some reason, I feel unexpectedly strongly about this. (Unexpectedly because I don’t plan to be a parent and the issue never came up with my parents because I started dating at a very late age.) While I concede the prerogative of parents to set such rules for their houses, my gut reaction, at some very visceral level, is to really dislike the rule. I can’t think of a good reason against it other than some emotional baggage I have about how my family handled things like personal privacy. And I can kind of see–about as much as a non-parent who doesn’t want to be a parent can–where parents who have that rule are coming from.

    But it seems intrusive. Who one chooses to sleep with seems to me like such a personal matter that even parents shouldn’t concern themselves overmuch with it when it comes to their adult children.

    As for the “drama” the article talks about, two things. 1) I side more with the part of the article that says the drama is a sign of immaturity than I side with the part that seems to imply it’s a sign of millennials being a new generation. 2) All families are different, etc., but I suspect the parents in some such situations share some of the guilt for the drama. They’re the ones setting the “not in my house (unless you’re married)” rule.

    All situations are different. I wouldn’t propose a rule for all parents (or any parents) to follow. And I wouldn’t take away their prerogative to impose the rule. I’d just ask them to reconsider whether their rule is really a good one.

    • trumwill says:

      It may be a personal matter for a couple to decide how they want to live on their own, but when it comes to staying in the parents’ house I think it’s more of a personal matter for the parents.

      For our part, if Lain decides to live with a guy, we’re not going to make a big deal of it as long as we’re not paying (half of) the rent. We will probably forbid them from staying in the same room visiting us.

      • I guess I see it (sharing a room while visiting and not married) as a personal matter for both the parents and their child + partner. How that ought to be parceled out? I guess if we’re speaking of “right” and “prerogative,” then I’d cede it to the parents. If we’re thinking purely of the personal aspect, I’d probably say that it depends on the dynamics of each family. Within a given family, with its own set of values, it could be or not be “wrong” for the parents not to allow it.

        In other words, yours is a reasonable approach, I just see it differently.

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    I suspect that the reason the one guy mentioned in the Buc-ee’s article disapproves of the relatively high pay is that there’s a movement to force all businesses to pay that much, and that he sees this as cashing to that pursue. If there were no minimum wage, or at least no one agitating to make it higher, it seems unlikely that anyone would have a strong negative opinion about this.

    Likewise, no one complains about Ernie Hudson in Ghostbusters, because he wasn’t cast in the context of a full-court press for affirmative action in casting. No one actually has a problem with casting minorities and women in lead roles. But in the current political context, Ghostbusters with a female cast is inevitably going to be seen as pandering to feminists, where in a different context it might be received as an interesting twist on the original.

    • Brandon Berg says:

      It also doesn’t help that leftists are pointing to the success some companies have with efficiency wages and trying to use them to justify dramatically increasing the minimum wage.

      • Oscar Gordon says:

        Oh yeah, more of that idiocy, please. That won’t play right into the whole “Conservatives hate the poor & working class” narrative at all, will it?

        PS not suggesting you are the idiot Brandon

    • Brandon Berg says:

      “Cashing to that pursue” => “caving to that pressure.”

    • trumwill says:

      I think that’s part of it, but only part. There’s also a “spare the rod, spoil the child” mentality among some. More among conservatives than libertarians. The former tend to approach things intuitively, the latter philosophically.

  3. Brandon Berg says:

    How do you reconcile a generally accepting attitude towards premarital sex with being on Team Separate Bedrooms? Premarital sex is okay, as long as you pretend you’re not doing it?

    Also, if it means I get to sleep in my own bed, I might just never get married.

    • trumwill says:

      The piece deals with a case of going to visit the family and getting to stay in the same room or not, which is slightly different than cohabitation per se. In this case a matter of public decorum and recognition, which I believe should be extended to those who marry and not to those who don’t (excluding cases where they can’t marry, which are fewer than they used to be). Some related thoughts here.

      On cohabitation more generally, there is a similar argument where what you do in your bedroom (sex) is a matter of privacy where residence is a matter of public decorum. But mostly, I think it’s just not a good idea individually or socially for people to live together before marriage blah blah blah. Not that for some it isn’t the best option available… but only as an economic argument, really.

      I could be convinced that premarital sex is a bad idea, too. I’d probably believe that if we weren’t trying to encourage people to wait so long to get married. Since we’re doing the latter, though, I think we shrug off the former. People should not be abstinent throughout their twenties.

      • Michael Drew says:

        I certainly respect the sensibilities of anyone in whose home I am a guest. But you go a lot further than that. Your position is that I myself should not extend recognition in the form of offering a single bed(room) to people in relationships in which marriage is being opted against when they stay as guests in my home. That seems like quite a strong position. Unless what you meant to say with, “recognition, which I believe should be extended to those who marry and not to those who don’t” was, “…which I believe I should extend to those who marry and not to those who don’t.”

        • trumwill says:

          Sort of? It’s a relatively low-signal opinion. When I run across a situation where people aren’t doing what I would do, I don’t think negatively of it. I don’t think anything of it, really, except for logistics if that’s something I have to consider (in the “who is sleeping where”) sort of thing. (This sort of thing mostly comes up at in-law family gatherings. The rules differ between sub-units of the larger family and that goes into logistical planning.)

  4. Peter says:

    That isochronic map is a beautiful work of art. Reddit recently had a 2016 version, once again showing travel times from London. Nowhere in the world is more than two and a half days away.

    What might make more sense is a map showing the _cost_ of getting to various parts of the world. There would be some surprising results. For example, I could get from NYC to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut in the Canadian Actic, in under eight hours, as compared to just under 23 hours for Sydney, Australia. Except for the price of a single round trip ticket to Iqaluit I could make TWO round trips to Sydney and have several hundred dollars left over for spending money.

  5. Michael Drew says:

    The attempted takedown of the 1984 film was remarkably underpowered given that it is the crux of the social point she is making. Almost as if it;s a position she holds more for the purpose of making that social point than because she actually has a strong take on the film. (Obviously she’s wrong; her argument really is astonishingly thin. It’s a hilarious film and a masterwork.)

    And then her argument about how maybe this year’s film will be future generations’ 1984 Ghostbusters is both unrelated and delusional. Ghostbusters (1984) can both be every bit the superior film, and jerks can therefore denounce the reboot as abusively they have, and it could every bit as much still turn out to be the case when all the years pass. But also, it won’t, because there is no example like that. The 1932 Scarface? Seriously? That’s her example? Ghostbusters was a legitimate sensation (rightly), and has remained so, however much Zacharek does or doesn’t think it merited. As she suggests, I was unaware that there was a previous Scarface film. No one’e ever going to be unaware that this Ghostbusters was a remake of a generational megahit. They might like his one better – it’s more up-to-date technically and probably reflects our times better socially, but it’s not going to be anyone’s childhood the way Zacharek seems to concede the original was.

    I was similarly incredulous about similar predictions made about The Force Awakens. No Star Wars are going to be for this or later generations what the original Star Wars films, or even Ghostbusters, was for kids in those generations. That’s not how kids operate. They have their own things. Latter-day installations of dated series are not the things that generations of kids define their childhoods culturally by. Sorry, just no. And their own things aren’t even necessarily movie-theater movies (obviously – Pokemon Go, anyone? Halo Seventeen?). That is the sense in which film might be (relatively) dying, and Zacharek, though to her credit she brings it up, then just doesn’t really consider that change in the media obsessions of young people as relevant to her argument at all.

    (The closest thing I know of to the kind of pattern Zacharek imagines from recent years might be Mad Max: Fury Road, which definitely inspired a devoted following to rival that of the originals. But that’s bar-lowering: the Mad Max films, while classics, simply weren’t the phenomena that either Star Wars or Ghostbusters were. They were hits, but they weren’t generation-defining. Subculture-defining (for one generation), maybe.)

    • Michael Drew says:

      …Perusing Zacharek’s archive at TIME, there is a perfect headline which, of course, she may not have written, but it’s a pretty fair summation of her reflections anyway:

      “Review: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates May Not Be Progressive—Is It Still OK to Laugh?”

  6. Michael Drew says:

    …Raising wages is indeed an ingenuous way to attract employees, and it may even have a bit of genius in it as well.

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