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I Got Married At the Perfect Age

by Chad97D06478 Posted on December 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Christopher Ingraham, we have some new research showing when to get married if you want to minimize your risk of divorce. Here is Nicholas Wolfinger: “My data analysis shows that prior to age 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11 percent. However, after that the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year.”

Hmmm. In the chart it looks more like 29 is the ideal age, but I got married at 32, so I’ll take it. Unfortunately, this is for people getting married now. For people who got married back when I got married, the older the better. Today, for some reason, it’s the older the better until age 32, and then the divorce risk curves back up. Why the change? After a bit of statistical argle bargle, Wolfinger admits he can’t really figure it out. But he’s willing to guess:

My money is on a selection effect: the kinds of people who wait till their thirties to get married may be the kinds of people who aren’t predisposed toward doing well in their marriages. For instance, some people seem to be congenitally cantankerous. Such people naturally have trouble with interpersonal relationships. Consequently they delay marriage, often because they can’t find anyone willing to marry them. When they do tie the knot, their marriages are automatically at high risk for divorce. More generally, perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony.

I totally agree on the congenitally cantankerous observation, but I’m not sure that’s changed much since 1995. There were lots of cantankerous people back then too. So I’ll put my money on some other explanation. I’m just not sure what it is yet.

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I Got Married At the Perfect Age

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Does Donald Trump Have Any Friends?

by John Basset Posted on December 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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One of the things that kind of fascinates me about Donald Trump1 is the fact that he doesn’t even pretend that his attacks are real. His latest 2-minutes hate has been directed at Bill Clinton, and he’s pretty much admitted that he doesn’t really believe the stuff he’s saying. But if Hillary attacks him, he has to attack back. Here’s Rebecca Sinderbrand:

Trump on HRC: “Had to mention her husband’s situation. And now it’s the biggest story on television by a factor of 10. So you have to do it“

He had to do it—delivered with the usual Trumpish shrug of the shoulders. That’s all. And if Hillary stops, he’ll stop. It’s business, not personal.

This is an odd quirk in Trump’s personality. He seems to have an ironclad rule against ever attacking someone first. Even Vladimir Putin. Putin says nice things about Trump, so Trump has to say nice things back. Opposing candidates who don’t attack him are “great guys.” But if you attack first, then he has to fire off a nuclear retaliation. There’s an odd kind of chivalry at work here, and I suppose it also provides people with a motivation to leave him alone.

This may also be responsible for the odd silence about Trump from everyone who knows him. I’ve been wondering for a while whether Trump has any friends. Real friends, that is. Not family members, not people who work for him, and not celebrity buddies who have a casual acquaintance with him. I’m talking about people he’s worked with frequently and who like him. People he hangs out with regularly. People from his childhood or college years that he’s stayed close to. Are there any?

I can’t tell. Nobody from the New York development community seems willing to say anything about him, which would make sense if they all dislike him but don’t want to trigger a temper tantrum. Who needs the grief, right? How about childhood friends? Not that I’ve heard of. Trump seems to view people almost entirely transactionally, as assets to be deployed, so it would hardly be surprising if none of them had stayed close. Given his penchant for demanding sycophancy, and lashing out instantly against even a hint of criticism, I suppose it would be hard to have any real long-term friends or even any long-term business pals. It’s kind of sad, actually.

1Against my will, but there you have it.

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Does Donald Trump Have Any Friends?

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Murder Is Up, But Don’t Blame Ferguson Yet

by FeliciaWalthall Posted on December 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, the news was full of reports about cities in which the murder rate had increased 30, 40, even 50 percent since 2014. Was it the fault of Ferguson, which prompted so much anti-police animus that cops started pulling back, afraid to do their jobs for fear of being the target of angry mobs and the evening news?

That’s a hard question to answer, but the first order of business is to figure out if the murder rate has really gone up in the first place. The FBI won’t have official figures for a long time (they’re still working on 2013), but a couple of months ago the Brennan Center took a crack at this and estimated that the murder rate for all of America’s largest cities was up 11 percent this year. That’s a lot less scary than 50 percent, but it’s still a pretty sizeable increase. Heather Mac Donald is unhappy that liberals are trying to downplay it:

Good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn’t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year’s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.

….Cops making arrests in urban areas are routinely surrounded by bystanders, who swear at them and interfere with the arrests. The media and many politicians decry as racist law-enforcement tools like pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing—the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones.

….To acknowledge the Ferguson effect would be tantamount to acknowledging that police matter, especially when the family and other informal social controls break down. Trillions of dollars of welfare spending over the past 50 years failed to protect inner-city residents from rising predation. Only the policing revolution of the 1990s succeeded in curbing urban violence, saving thousands of lives. As the data show, that achievement is now in jeopardy.

First things first: no one thinks that “good policing” is responsible for the massive drop in violent crime over the past two decades. It may be part of the reason, but it’s certainly not the whole reason, or even the main reason. And pedestrian stops and broken windows are the subject of intense controversy. They’re the farthest thing from “proven” you can imagine. This is true whether or not you believe that gasoline lead played a role in the big crime drop of the 1990s. MacDonald is engaging in absurdities when she suggests otherwise.

Nor have “family and other informal social controls” broken down. Not in any way that affects the crime rate, anyway. The evidence against this hypothesis is overwhelming. It needs to die a decent death.

Finally, it’s worth noting that because the number of murders is relatively small, it’s not unusual to see fairly large annual changes. We won’t know for years whether the murder rate really went up 11 percent in 2015, but even if it did, it wouldn’t be that surprising. Between 1985 and 2012, the FBI recorded five years in which the murder rate in America’s largest cities increased or decreased by more than 10 percent.

That said, an 11 percent spike is still substantial. If it’s real and persistent, it deserves attention. No one should pretend that it’s just a “modest” increase or a “small blip.”

My recommendation: Both sides should cool it. Mac Donald is right to be concerned that this year’s increase could be bad news if it marks the beginning of a trend. We should keep a close eye on violent crime data—not just murder rates—over the next year or two. At the same time, liberals are right to be skeptical that the “Ferguson effect” is a long-term problem. Most likely, everyone will either adjust to it or forget about it by this time next year. And both sides should be concerned about finding the right policing balance in an era of ubiquitous cell phones and body cams.

Waiting too long to acknowledge a problem can sometimes be disastrous, but a few months is a pretty short time and murder is a pretty small sample set to draw any firm conclusions from. Everyone should calm down a bit and wait to see what the next year or two bring.

More here – 

Murder Is Up, But Don’t Blame Ferguson Yet

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Donald Trump Is Just a Garden Variety Right-Winger These Days

by QuinnWayn231 Posted on December 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a blog post about an entirely different subject, Jay Nordlinger says this about Donald Trump:

I am reminded of how the Left and Right can blend — although it’s pretty much impossible to locate Trump politically. Is he Left or Right or in between?

This has long been a common observation, but is it really true anymore? A few months ago, for example, I wrote that Trump didn’t favor a flat tax. But that’s true of most Republicans. And now that Trump has actually released a tax plan, we know his tax notions are entirely orthodox these days. Ditto for Planned Parenthood, which Trump is now on board with defunding completely. Ditto again for his short-lived support for an assault weapons ban.

So what’s left of Trump’s alleged populism? I count one thing:

He doesn’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Is there anything else left? He’s not stridently anti-gay, but he’s opposed to gay marriage nonetheless. Sort of Jeb Bush-ish. He refuses to say that he still supports affirmative action. His foreign policy is…um…a little hard to get a handle on, but it sure can’t be described as liberal these days. He claims to have opposed the Iraq War, but that’s just a lie—and ten years in the past anyway. He sometimes sounds a populist note on trade, but his real position is that he’s smarter than all the dimwits in Washington and could negotiate better terms than they do. He doesn’t seem to harbor any real leftish views on trade.

So really, his support for Social Security and Medicare is pretty much it for non-conservative heresies—and even there his position remains unclear. Does he mean that he doesn’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare at all, or does he mean he doesn’t want to cut them for people currently in the system? After all, the standard Republican position already protects Social Security and Medicare for anyone over age 55. But since Trump has declined to provide any further detail, we don’t really know what his position is.

Trump used to have a few more quasi-liberal positions, but the campaign has sanded them all down. Today, he’s just a really loud right-winger who understands that bashing Social Security and Medicare doesn’t win any votes. That’s it.

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Donald Trump Is Just a Garden Variety Right-Winger These Days

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Enough Is Enough: Cassette Tapes Died For Good Reason

by BeatrizMcGhee Posted on December 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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I am, of course, familiar with the hipster love of music on vinyl. But I didn’t know that cassette tapes were making a comeback too:

Many people over 30 remember cassettes, with nostalgia, if not some disdain….Go to any indie show and inevitably, among the T-shirts and knickknacks, there will be tapes. Some record labels are now cassette-only. The National Audio Co., America’s largest manufacturer of audiocassettes, reported that 2014 was its best year yet.

But before the revisionists completely rewrite my adolescence, let’s be clear about something: As a format for recorded sound, the cassette tape is a terrible piece of technology….Each time you play one it degrades. Bad sound gets worse. Casings crack in winter, melt in summer.

Craziness. The only reason anyone liked cassettes back in the day was because they were better than 8-track tapes. When I was in college, you could hardly turn a corner without hearing an earnest conversation about Maxell vs. TDK,1 Dolby vs. Dolby C, chrome vs. metal, 60 minutes vs. 90 minutes.2 But those conversations only existed because everyone also understood that cassette tapes fundamentally sucked. There was lots of innovation, but it was all just part of a desperate attempt to improve the sound of a format that was inherently lousy because the tape was just too damn narrow. There’s a limit to what you can do when you cram four audio tracks onto eighth-inch analog tape.

But lots of people today have forgotten about all that, I guess. Oh well. I’m pretty convinced that about 90 percent of the population couldn’t tell the difference between music played on a half-inch reference tape and music played on a Teddy Ruxpin doll. So I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Still, cassettes? Seriously folks: a thumb drive is better in every conceivable way. Don’t get sucked in.

1I was a Maxell guy. I have no idea why.

2No one who wanted to be taken seriously ever considered 120-minute cassettes. And for good reason: they were just too fragile.

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Enough Is Enough: Cassette Tapes Died For Good Reason

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Republicans Aren’t Delusional, Just Dishonest

by KarolynAgostini Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today Jon Chait writes what must be about the millionth blog post explaining that nearly all conservative criticisms of Obamacare are wildly cherry-picked and intentionally deceptive. In fact, Obamacare is doing pretty well. Not that it matters. Nothing Chait says will have any effect because conservatives just don’t care. Obamacare is bad because it taxes rich people and provides health care to poor people. All the rest is just chaff.

Take this paragraph, for example. It’s about the Cadillac Tax, which partially removes the tax-exempt status of high-end health plans as a way of trying to rein in costs. It was supposed to take effect in 2018, but it’s now been moved out to 2020 because everyone1 hates it:

As bad as this news is for Obamacare, it’s absolutely catastrophic for Obamacare replacements. Every Republican plan to replace Obamacare relies on the same financing mechanism: limiting or repealing the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. The Cadillac Tax is a smaller, more painless version of this same policy. If both parties can’t abide a partial rollback of the tax break for the most expensive health plans, they’re never, ever going to go along with eliminating the entire tax break for all health plans. The conservatives cackling over the demise of the Cadillac Tax are delusional — it’s as if they’re watching the backlash against the Iraq War in 2008 with fingers tented, anticipating that this will encourage war-weary Americans to support a land invasion of Russia. The bipartisan support for maintaining the tax break for employer insurance will hurt Obamacare, but it can survive. The Republican plans to replace it would all be wiped out.

This would be a devastating point—if all these conservative plans were actually serious. They aren’t. Republicans haven’t the slightest intention of ever enacting any of them. Their opposition to the Cadillac Tax doesn’t show that they’re delusional, it just shows that they’ve never taken their own plans seriously and couldn’t care less if any of them ever see the light of day.

1Except for health wonks. But nobody cares about them.

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Republicans Aren’t Delusional, Just Dishonest

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How Far Do You Live From Your Mother?

by NoellaCote992 Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to Google Maps, I live 13.64 miles from my mother. This is less than the median of 18 miles for American adults:

The biggest determinants of how far people venture from home are education and income. Those with college and professional degrees are much more likely to live far from their parents than those with a high school education, in part because they have more job opportunities elsewhere, including in big cities.

….Families live closest in the Northeast and the South, and farthest apart on the West Coast and in the Mountain States. Part of the reason is probably cultural — Western families have historically been the least rooted — but a large part is geographical. In denser areas, people live closer together than in rural areas.

Married couples live farther from their parents than unmarried people, and women are slightly more likely to leave their hometowns than men. Blacks are more likely to live near their parents than whites, while Latinos are no more likely to live near their parents, but more likely to live with them, according to data from Mr. Pollak and Janice Compton, an economist at the University of Manitoba.

How far do you live from your mother?

Originally posted here – 

How Far Do You Live From Your Mother?

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Soon You Will Be Able To Listen to "Rocky Raccoon" on Spotify

by CarrolHargis Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our long national nightmare is nearly over:

Happy holidays from the Beatles: As of 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 24, the band’s music will finally be available on streaming services worldwide.

…The surviving members of the group, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with Universal Music Group, which controls the band’s recorded music, made no statements other than the fact that the Beatles’ catalog — 13 original albums and four compilations — will now be playable on nine subscription streaming music services.

Maybe I need to try one of these newfangled streaming thingies someday. I’ve heard rumors that music has continued to be produced over the past 30 years, and I suppose I should investigate that.

So: Beatles or Stones? Which are you?

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Soon You Will Be Able To Listen to "Rocky Raccoon" on Spotify

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Donald Trump Is a Germaphobe

by AndreasLwm Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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I assume everyone knows this about Donald Trump, right?

A self-confessed germaphobe, Trump doesn’t even like to push a ground floor elevator button because it’s been tapped by so many people….This does not sit well with the masses, let alone the PTA crowd. Trump especially avoids shaking hands with teachers, since they are likely to be have been “in touch” with too many germy kids.

It’s no wonder that he finds it disgusting to even contemplate someone’s use of the bathroom. I can only imagine what Trump thinks of having to use public facilities himself—assuming he ever does. Maybe he always holds it in until he can make it back to the gold-plated lav on his plane.

This article – 

Donald Trump Is a Germaphobe

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ISIS Had a Good Year in PR, Not So Good on the Ground

by Aaleyah William Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Iraqi forces are fighting to retake control of Ramadi, a city of half a million about an hour west of Baghdad:

“I think the fall of Ramadi is inevitable,” said Col. Steven H. Warren, the United States military spokesman here. “The end is coming.” But he added: “That said, it’s going to be a tough fight.”

….If Iraqi forces manage to reassert control over Ramadi — the capital and largest city in Iraq’s western Anbar Province — it will be the latest in a series of military setbacks for the Islamic State. President Obama said recently that the militant group had lost 40 percent of the Iraqi territory it had seized in the middle of last year, as the United States and its allies have intensified their aerial bombardment against the group. In October, Iraqi forces and Shiite militias retook control of the northern city of Baiji and its oil refinery, and last month, Kurdish and Yazidi forces expelled the Islamic State out of the northern city of Sinjar.

Progress is slow but steady. The map below, from IHS, shows the territory lost by ISIS over the past year. There’s still a long way to go.

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ISIS Had a Good Year in PR, Not So Good on the Ground

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