STARBUCKS: Where Only The Coffee Is Black! It’s not shocking at all that this lame “conversation about race” stuff is coming from an organization that’s as white as a Netroots Nation conference, an Obama campaign HQ, a New Republic alumni get-together or a Vox editorial board meeting.
The primary purpose of race-talk in America today is to allow elite whites to silence and shame non-elite whites. Thus, it’s not surprising that the people pushing it are . . . a bunch of elite whites.
IS CABLE UNBUNDLING OVERRATED?
Here’s the truth: You don’t want your cable to be unbundled. You just want to pay less for it.
Seriously, guys, you like bundling. You know how I know this? You seek it out in your consumer products. You want your hotel to give you free Wi-Fi and you don’t want it to charge you by the towel. Many of you go on all-inclusive vacations and cruises. You buy mobile-phone contracts to get a “free” phone rather than pay by the minute. You are constantly — and I mean constantly — complaining that your health insurance is not more comprehensive, even though this would just mean you’d pay more for the insurance. And I won’t even get started on your agonized wails when airlines started charging you to check a bag and stopped providing a “free” plate of congealed mystery meat. You buy books and subscribe to magazines rather than pay by the article or the chapter. You love bundles. What you hate is the size of your cable bill.
Why do you like bundling? Because you don’t want to have to think about it. Oh, sure, there are people who would like to spend their days obsessively managing their minutes, reading and towels in order to save 5 percent, but the rest of us would rather not spend our time worrying about blowing the Wi-Fi budget. So we go for the all-inclusive package.
And, in fact, unbundling doesn’t necessarily save money. Imagine you’re running a hotel. You could charge guests for every little thing, from washcloths to television rental to electricity usage. After all, I often don’t use all the towels, so why do I have to pay for them? Why don’t you offer them a la carte?
Because your guests would dislike it, of course — they’d be wasting a lot of their vacation time arranging for add-ons, and they’d feel penny-pinched. More important, all those transactions would be costly. You’d have to install electricity meters, and pay a staffer to go around reading them before checkout. You’d have a staffer in charge of towel rentals and a customer service person to mediate disputes with guests over whether they got all the towels they paid for. Someone would have to go hook up a television in any room that requested one. That labor cost would have to be added into the price of the service, so everyone except the cheapskates who packed their own towels would be paying more for the same stuff. Customer satisfaction would fall, especially since you’d be creating lots more opportunities for disputes.
So instead you bundle all the stuff that everyone uses, from electricity to towels, and only charge for stuff where expenditures are highly variable, such as room service. The guests are happier, costs are lower and everyone has a lot less hassle.
But are hotels and cable comparable?
AN ED DRISCOLL TOUR DE FORCE: Springtime For Hillary! “Has Hillary nailed down the name for her camps yet? Why not go with a proven winner, such as ‘Strength Through Joy’?”
21ST CENTURY HORRORS: Wet Wipes Are Forming Sewer-Destroying ‘Superknots.’
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PRIORITIES: Democrats Take Aim at Liquid Detergent Packaging. “Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin has introduced legislation that would give the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission the authority and direction to issue rules requiring safer, child-resistant packaging for liquid detergent products within 18 months of enactment. Six Senate Democrats, including Nelson, are co-sponsoring the bill.”
THE HILL: ATF chief handled bullet ban ‘sloppily,’ Dem says. “Rep. Steve Israel isn’t shedding any tears for the outgoing director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) after he pulled the kill switch on a controversial bullet ban.”
Neither am I.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Judith Shulevitz: In College And Hiding From Scary Ideas.
A few weeks ago, Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago, protected by the security guards she has traveled with since supporters of the Islamic State issued death threats against her. During the question-and-answer period, a Muslim student stood up to object to the newspaper’s apparent disrespect for Muslims and to express her dislike of the phrase “I am Charlie.”
Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, “Being Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing,” and not everyone has the guts to do that (although she didn’t use the word guts). She lives under constant threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened, too.
A few days later, a guest editorialist in the student newspaper took Ms. El Rhazoui to task. She had failed to ensure “that others felt safe enough to express dissenting opinions.” Ms. El Rhazoui’s “relative position of power,” the writer continued, had granted her a “free pass to make condescending attacks on a member of the university.” In a letter to the editor, the president and the vice president of the University of Chicago French Club, which had sponsored the talk, shot back, saying, “El Rhazoui is an immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights activist who has known exile, and a journalist living in very real fear of death. She was invited to speak precisely because her right to do so is, quite literally, under threat.”
You’d be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that the student and her defender had burrowed so deep inside their cocoons, were so overcome by their own fragility, that they couldn’t see that it was Ms. El Rhazoui who was in need of a safer space.
Such insights are literally impossible for campus feminists, whose philosophy is dominated by narcissism.
EUGENE VOLOKH: Government funding and the Free Speech Clause.
DEPT. OF ACCEPTABLE POP-CULTURE RACISM: “Like, I hate fat white Americans. All the people who are crunched into the middle of America, the real fat and meat of America, are these racist conservative white people who live on their farms. Those little teenage girls who work at Kmart and have a racist grandma, that’s really America.”
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TAKING ON the racists at Starbucks.
JEFFREY SINGER: Removing state-based obstacles to affordable healthcare.
States can begin by repealing “Certificate of Need” (CON) laws. These are outdated and counterproductive laws which encourage cronyism, increase costs, and detract from the quality of health care. . . .
When a new provider petitions for a certificate, established providers are usually invited to testify against their would-be competitors. This means that some health care practices can openly challenge the right to exist of any practice that might hurt their bottom line. Indeed, hospital administrators openly admit that protection against competition thanks to CON laws has become an integral part of their business model.
Large hospitals and other medical incumbents have another advantage: They can afford the lengthy and expensive process while smaller, newer health care providers cannot. Getting state approval for a certificate of need can take years or even over a decade, including appeals and re-appeals. In a place like Washington state, the application fee alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars. All of this discourages new entrants who lack the legal and financial resources to run the certificate-of-need obstacle course.
“Permissionless innovation” made the Internet boom. Let’s try it elsewhere.
I’M SURE THAT FEMINISTS REGARD NANCY DREW AS the wrong sort of empowerment.
FASTER, PLEASE: Alzheimer’s Drug Shows Startling Promise.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Income, Education and Inequality in the “Recovery”: Prepare to be Surprised. “Note to the higher education industry: issuing diplomas doesn’t magically create new jobs in the real world.”
SCIENTISTS EXPLORE THE “INDOOR BIOME.”
The planet’s biomes emerged over hundreds of millions of years. Coastal wetlands sprang up along the edges of continents about 400 million years ago. About 20 million years ago, grasslands became widespread. But the biome that we’re most familiar with — one that has a huge impact on our everyday life — is the youngest of all: the indoor biome.
When humans began building shelters about 20,000 years ago, we unrolled a welcome mat for other species. Over the past few thousand years, the indoor biome has grown to colossal proportions as cities and suburbs spread across the continents. More recently elevators and other technology have lifted the indoor biome into the sky.
If you add up the area of the indoor biome in Manhattan — including its walk-ups and high-rise apartments — it’s three times bigger than the area of the island of Manhattan itself.
Next stop: Trantor!