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There are a handful of new pictures of a smiley baby over at Josephine’s site. Enjoy!

This. Is. Brilliant.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting.

This is why I don’t get anything done! It’s not just laziness!

Andrew is sighing over it, but I think Rod Dreher poses a valid question:

If we accept that people who claim that they need to have sex reassignment surgery to make their bodies conform to who they believe they truly are, then on what basis do we deny people who claim that they need to have one or more limbs amputated to feel whole their moral and/or legal right to the desired surgery?

I certainly have no desire to keep anyone from transgenderating, but I also don’t see exactly why we should prevent someone from chopping off their own arm if it bothers them. I see it as a legitimate question.

Hey, Ross Perot is still around! Missed that guy, and his special brand of crazy.

Richard over at Honest Hypocrite is pissed, and with pretty good reason:

About the time when we seem to be getting Linus calmed, a manager (the unfriendly one) comes over and tells us in the most officious manner possible that some of the other patrons have been threatening to leave because of our crying baby, and some parents take their children outside to calm them, and isn’t teething tough.

Wow. I can honestly say, I’ve taken Charles and/or Josephine to any number of restaurants, and I’ve never had anything like that happen. Richard has asked for responses and advice, but before I do that, I have qualifications and caveats:

1. When I think my own kids are disturbing someone else’s meal, it drives me insane. Ruins dinner for me, even if the other patrons don’t say anything.


2. Conversely, I’ve never been bothered by someone’s baby, other than my own, crying at dinner. I’m routinely pissed about other people’s kids’ behavior, but that happens all the time, not just at restaurants. Babies cry; that’s how they roll. Maybe Linus is particularly loud, but I doubt it.


3. I have two kids, and I know their moods and behavior pretty well; if I think, based on factors like previous behavior, time of day, nap status, food status, etc., that the one or other of the kids is going to be a pill, we won’t go. This isn’t to say I haven’t guessed wrong, and I’m certainly not making any assumptions about Richard and his wife’s ability to gauge Linus’s behavior, I’m just saying that by and large I’ll do just about anything to avoid the above situation, so perhaps that’s why it hasn’t happened to me.


4. I’m pretty selective about where I’ll take my kids. Red Robin? Sure. Walter’s Steakhouse? No. Friendly’s? Of course. The Corner Bistro? Maybe for brunch, but never for dinner. I see kids taken to these places and it feels awkward to me, even if they are well-behaved. Now, I know nothing about Bensi’s. I’ve never heard of it. It might be the kind of place where I’d look at it and think “Of course, kids, no problem.” Since Richard mentioned there were other families with kids there, I’m inclined to think it’s a bit more of a family restaurant, and perhaps the complaining diners were just douche-knuckles.

Okay, enough caveats and explanation. Here’s my take: given that Linus was merely crying, and not running rampant through the restaurant, and there were enough other children there to qualify Bensi’s as supposedly-kid-friendly, I’d say the customers who complained were out-of-line. I’d also say the manager who complained was waaaaaay out-of-line. If something like this had happened to Sarah and me and the kids, here’s what the responses would have been:

Me: “Really? Are you kidding me?”

Sarah: “F%&# you, @?#hole.” ::rips off manager’s face and makes it into a drippy chapeau::

And then we’d pack up and leave without paying. We’d also probably jury rig some silverware so we could hang a stinky diaper above the table candle.

Ooh, I like the sound of this: companies and municipal governments have been exploring the idea of the 4 day, 40-hour workweek.

Local governments in particular have had their eyes on Utah over the last year; the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there’s no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday’s midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

Perhaps as important, workers seem all too ready to replace “TGIF” with “TGIT”. “People just love it,” says Lori Wadsworth, a professor of public management at Brigham Young University in Provo. She helped survey those on the new Working 4 Utah schedule this May and found 82 percent would prefer to stick with it.

I would absolutely be in favor of something like this where I work. I’ve long been half-jealous of the 24-hour operations teams, who work 12-hour days, but only work 3 or 4 days a week. I would consider taking a job that did that, except you end up working either Saturdays or Sundays all the time, plus holidays if they fall on your shift. If I could show up at 7 and leave at 6, taking an hour for lunch, from Monday to Thursday, I’d be pretty excited for all the extra sleeping in I could do if I didn’t have children.

AAAAAAAAAAA! Are you kidding me?

“Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner,” McCaughey said to Thompson.

“The bill expressly says if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period, you have to go through that session again — all to do what is in society’s best interest or your family’s best interest and cut your life short.”

Is there no shame in the modern conservative movement?

More on yesterday’s police topic here: Disorderly conduct: conversation about Gates arrest precedes arrest.

I’m sure everybody’s already heard everything they need to know about Henry Louis Gates and his run in with “the law” last week. I think most folks agree that Gates was in the wrong for basically being a dick to a guy trying to do his job, and that Officer Crowley should not have arrested him. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised about the arrest, either.

In my limited experience with police officers, I find that they’re humans. They’re good most of the time, and occasionally they are bad. But here’s the thing: they have extraordinary power over citizens, both legally and extralegally. (I don’t mean “illegal;” what I mean is that the aura of power gives them the ability to make people do things, whether they have a legal basis for asking or not. If a cop on the street tells me “Sir, please move out of the way,” I move out of the way without asking her what right she has to ask that. Most people do, I think.) When that power is abused, it needs to be punished.

I also think, and have nothing but anecdotal evidence to back this up, that whatever police say about serving the community and making the world a better place, a big part of the job that they like is the authority. They like bossing people around. When those people resist, even if they have a legal right to do so, cops feel insulted and scared. They also have no problem escalating a situation unnecessarily, which is why some states have had to enact rules preventing police officers from getting involved in lengthy car chases. It also helps explain situations like this.

I don’t think Officer Crowley is racist. In fact, I suspect Professor Gates was the reason race played any role in his arrest. If you have to break into your own home, you have to expect somebody might call the cops. In fact, you want them to call the cops. (I’ve had to break into my house a number of times after forgetting or losing my keys, and not once have the police showed up to see what’s going on. It’s not a very safe feeling.) When the cops show up, you break out the ID, answer a few questions, and wish the officers a nice day. You don’t accuse the police of being racist, and you certainly don’t get into a screaming match with them. Don’t ever give a police officer an excuse to arrest you, because that’s exactly what will happen.

I was once on my way to church, came to a red light, and was turning right. The road I was turning onto had 2 lanes of traffic. No one was in the right lane, so I pulled out into it, but I hadn’t notice that cars were parked in it a little ways down the block. So I put my turn signal on to change lanes to the left. A fellow in a dark car wasn’t in the mood to let me in, but I’m stubborn (and a little aggressive behind the wheel), so I muscled my way in. Then he flipped on his lights.

Being a good citizen, I pulled over. The officer parked and got out, and I realized he was in civilian clothes, probably on the way home from work. He walked up next to the window, which I rolled down, and said, in effect, “Sir, you can’t just pull out into traffic like that.”

I stuttered something about how I was turning into the empty right lane, didn’t notice the parked cars, was trying to make a legal lane change. He cut me off and said, “You can turn right on red, but you still have to wait for traffic to clear.”

I started to say “The traffic was clear in the lane I was turning into,” but realized I was disobeying one of my Prime Rules of Life: never, ever argue with a police officer. So I said, “Yes, officer.”

“You don’t get there any faster if you get into an accident, sir.”

“Yes, officer.”

“Be safe, and have a nice day.”

“Thank you, officer.”

That was the end of that. The officer got to throw his weight around a little bit, I got to make it to choir rehearsal without him calling for uniformed backup to detain and ticket me (or worse). It was win-win. You know what didn’t matter worth a lick? The fact that I’m white and he was black. Our races had absolutely no bearing on the dynamic whatsoever.

I’m not saying to acquiesce to everything cops ask. If they want to search your person, car, or home, say no. Just do it nicely.

Another late start today, sorry about that. Let’s go to Andrew for an interesting statement:

Large numbers believe healthcare reform will hurt them personally, but support it for the good of the nation. Obama has tried to argue that it will help most people personally. It’s the worst sales job he’s ever done – because, I suspect, we all know it isn’t true.

The entire point of healthcare reform is that it would help most people personally. Otherwise, why bother? And more to the point, why do 72% of Americans want it done?

My view is that healthcare reform, ideally single-payer, but even in the form of a public plan to compete with existing private ones, would be beneficial to every American. A public option is going to be cheaper because it doesn’t need to spend money on marketing; this in turn can help drive down the rates offered by the private firms. Anyone who can’t get coverage through a private firm can get it through the public option. People too poor to pay for insurance get a subsidy. Everyone will see their premiums drop because of fair competition, and over the long term costs will drop even more because folks will stop going to the emergency room (the most expensive healthcare option) for head colds and arthritis.

The private firms can’t compete, you say? Cry me a river. They’ve been profiting for decades while refusing coverage to sick folks. Screw ’em.

Then we just have to do something about malpractice insurance, which has become expensive enough to drive doctors out of practice altogether.