Cats, charts, and politics
Here are last night's fireworks. This year I decided to trek around to the far side of the lake and shoot with our (patriotically lighted) bridge in the foreground. Much hilarity ensued because my flashlight didn't work and I kept fumbling with the camera buttons. Eventually I got everything set right and captured a few good images. This is one of them.
The other recent Supreme Court case that I'm on the fence about is 303 Creative. In that one, Lorie Smith didn't want to create a website celebrating a same-sex marriage and the Court upheld her refusal.
In my initial post about it, I said the Court relied on a "thin distinction indeed": namely that while Smith was required to serve LGBT couples in her (virtual) shop she wasn't required to sell them whatever they wanted. But it is of such thin distinctions that case law is made.
Consider an ordinary shop that sells merchandise, not customized websites. It is full of Christian t-shirts and mugs and whatnot that celebrate marriage but none of the goods celebrate same-sex marriage. If a gay couple comes into the store, the owner is required to sell them anything they want whether he approves or not. That's public accommodation. But if the gay couple isn't happy with his selection of stock for sale? That's too bad. Nobody thinks the owner is obligated to carry any merchandise he doesn't want to.
Or try on for size another, more incendiary analogy. After the Civil Rights Act passed, the Supreme Court ruled in Heart of Atlanta that motels (and similar establishments) were required to serve customers of all races. This presumably extended to prohibiting certain kinds of speech too: a motel, for example, couldn't display a sign saying "No Negroes Allowed" as a way of discouraging Black customers even if, in the end, they'd cough up a room if they had to. At the same time, the owner of the motel also couldn't be compelled to say affirmatively nice things about Black customers if he didn't want to. Nor could he be forced to display a sign saying "Negroes Gladly Welcomed Here."
The parallel with 303 Creative is obvious, and it's one that Sonia Sotomayor persistently avoids addressing in her dissent. There's no question that Smith is required to serve on an equal basis any LGBT couple who shows up at the door. That's uncontested, and Sotomayor is eloquent and outspoken in insisting on this. But can Smith also be forced to affirmatively say things she doesn't want to just because a customer wants her to?
This is a far more subtle question. It goes without saying that I, personally, find it abhorrent that Smith is so narrowminded and cruel in her views. But my personal opinion has nothing to do with the law in this case. In the end, I think the Court probably got it right: This really is a fairly cut-and-dried First Amendment case, and Smith has the right to say—or not say—what she wishes. I don't like it, but the First Amendment is meaningless if I support it only for speech I like.
Earlier this morning I said there were two recent Supreme Court cases that left me conflicted. One of them was the decision that killed off the student loan forgiveness program, so let's take a closer look at that. The easiest legal argument in favor of allowing the program to continue is a simple syllogism:
This is black letter law. What possible reason can there be for ignoring it? This leads us to the meaning of "waive or modify" and the question of just how expansive it is. Here, I think the majority opinion has a point when it says:
What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by “waiving” provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text.
What is the limiting principle here? Could the Secretary literally abolish all payment of all student loans? Could he abolish all future payments too and essentially turn student loans into unrestricted grants? Could he refund all previous loan payments? For that matter, what stops him from abolishing the loans and then giving everyone $50,000 free and clear to make up for the hardship they've been caused in the past?
I know: this is ridiculous. And yet, the law contains no explicit limit on the Secretary's power, which means there must be an implicit one. But what?
There is now no further to go. The law is silent. As happens so often, Congress wrote some hazy statutory language without giving much thought to what it really meant or how much power they were giving up. So interpreting it becomes, literally, nothing more than a matter of opinion. The Court is forced to take a flyer at some kind of reasonable guess about how far Congress intended to go and what common sense implies.
It's possible the majority is mistaken. Their view might be too cramped. But before the loan forgiveness program was put in place, an awful lot of people—liberals and conservatives alike—thought it couldn't be implemented via executive order because that would have gone beyond the likely intent of Congress when it passed the HEROES Act. It's a close call, but it's hardly unreasonable to think the Court ended up on the right side of it.
The Washington Post has a devastating but deadpan story today about the efforts of a private equity firm to buy up anesthesiology practices all over the country and then jack up prices for everyone. It starts in Denver:
The multibillion-dollar private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe took less than a year to create, from scratch, Colorado’s biggest and most prominent anesthesiology practice.
The financiers created a company, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, which in 2015 bought the largest anesthesiology group in the Denver region. Then it bought the next largest. Then it bought a few more....The Federal Trade Commission, which is supposed to prevent unfair business practices, questioned the company’s growth but did not stop it.
The company raised prices for its services — one by nearly 30 percent in its first year in Colorado — and
continued raising them for several years, according to interviews and confidential company documents obtained by The Washington Post.
And it's not just Colorado. It's also Texas. And Florida. Indiana. Maryland. Nevada. Tennessee. Washington. But the Post story is based on leaked documents about the Denver practice, so that's what the story is about. In short, practices were acquired. Rates increased. Doctors were tied up with noncompete clauses. Then their pay was cut and hours skyrocketed. The FTC looked into things but shrugged and did nothing. And once the acquisition spree was complete, it was time for phase two:
With its acquisitions, USAP had become the region’s preeminent anesthesiology practice, and it quickly sought to raise rates, according to documents. One page of an internal USAP company presentation labeled “Guiding Strategies” at the time listed 11 points.
“Accelerate rate increases,” said one. “Pricing +/-5% range, for market’s lead insurers,” said another....For patients insured under the Cofinity network, effective payment to USAP jumped 29 percent, according to the internal company documents. For patients covered by another insurer, Anthem, USAP rates would rise 17.5 percent in the first year the contract was up for renewal, according to the documents.
.....Another doctor group in Denver, Guardian Anesthesia, was charging United, a major insurer, about $75 per unit in 2020; when USAP won the contract at the hospital where Guardian had been operating, it charged about $125 per unit, or 66 percent more for services provided by the same anesthesiologists, according to the documents.
How much does it matter if Microsoft purchases Activision? Maybe some games will become exclusive to Xbox. Maybe not. It's hardly the world's most pressing concern, but it's getting overwhelming attention from the government and in the media.
At the same time, the real action is under the radar, where de facto monopolies are constructed by private equity firms all the time. They're a tenth the size of the Microsoft deal, but their impact is actually far greater: not just a few gamers here and there, but, in this case, every single person who has a hospital procedure in one of ASAP's territories. Maybe it's in situations like these that the FTC ought to do more than just ask a few questions and then leave.
I suppose it's just a coincidence that these three headlines all appeared on the same day from major new outlets:
Republicans are "divided" about impeaching President Biden. Sure. Is it possible that this is because he's obviously done nothing wrong aside from pursuing policies that many Republicans don't like? Is it possible that modern Republicans are stone cold lunatics? Surely it's time to hide the matches from them?
The Supreme Court ended its term with a flurry of important decisions that covered a lot of important ground. How did it do? There are some clunkers on the list, but overall I think their performance was better than most liberals give credit for.
Out of nine major decisions, I'd say the ending score is five correct; two close calls; one wrong but modestly so; and one plainly wrong. That's . . . not bad, all things considered.
I've been thinking all evening about just how crazy this latest court order from Louisiana is. You really have to read it to believe it. The whole 155-page opinion is an insane, rambling stew of right-wing paranoia about "mass censorship" and "unrelenting pressure" from an Orwellian White House that you'd sooner expect to see at Gateway Pundit than in an opinion from a US judge.
As recently as a few years ago this case would have been dismissed with extreme prejudice and the lawyers told they'd be held in contempt if they ever wasted the court's time again with stuff like this. Today it produces a bizarre injunction against half a dozen agencies—the entire Census Bureau! all of the CDC! the Surgeon General!—along with several dozen named Biden officials prohibiting them from entirely voluntary interactions with a specific set of 21 social media platforms plus "like companies." Has there ever been a court order like this before? Maybe. I've never heard of one, though.
It's nuts. The whole thing is just lunacy. I barely even know what to think of this stuff anymore.
A federal judge ruled that the Biden administration likely trampled on the First Amendment in trying to eliminate what it saw as disinformation on social media, issuing a broad preliminary injunction limiting the federal government from policing online content.
In a 155-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana barred White House officials and multiple federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from government censorship.
Oh Christ. Yet another district judge has issued a sweeping national injunction on some topic that has him¹ exercised. I don't suppose I even need to tell you anything about the guy, but I will anyway:
Judge Doughty, who was appointed to the federal court by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, has made the court a sympathetic venue for conservative cases, having previously blocked the Biden
administration’s national vaccination mandate for health care workers and overturned its ban on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling.
But let's not jump to conclusions too quickly. Let's first take a look at the forceful and reasoned arguments in Doughty's 155-page tome. Mostly it's a long, familiar conspiracy-esque recitation of right-wing hobbyhorses about efforts from public health officers to highlight COVID misinformation, with a bit of Hunter Biden and election integrity thrown in. The key question, apparently, is whether the federal government "significantly encouraged" social media companies to toe the government's lefty line or else, and Doughty has no doubts on this score:
What is really telling is that virtually all of the free speech suppressed was “conservative” free speech. Using the 2016 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government apparently engaged in a massive effort to suppress disfavored conservative speech.
....The White House Defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified. Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.
....The VP, EIP, and Stanford Internet Observatory are not defendants in this proceeding. However, their actions are relevant because government agencies have chosen to associate, collaborate, and partner with these organizations....Flagged content was almost entirely from political figures, political organizations, alleged partisan media outlets, and social-media all-stars associated with right-wing or conservative political views.
....The Plaintiffs have outlined a federal regime of mass censorship, presented specific examples of how such censorship has harmed the States’ quasi-sovereign interests in protecting their residents’ freedom of expression.
....The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.
This is Deep State derp all the way down. I wonder if Doughty also wants to prevent the White House from talking to newspapers, TV reporters, talk show hosts, radio chatterers, podcasters, newsletter writers, labor leaders, CEOs, climate activists, and bloggers? It's going to be mighty lonely in the White House press office before long.
¹It's always a him.
The Wall Street Journal concedes that remote work is down since 2020, as are job listings that advertise remote options. But remote work is "sticking" anyway:
Many lower-wage office and call-center jobs went remote at the onset of the pandemic. Business executives viewed the shift as a temporary emergency measure, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at jobs site ZipRecruiter....“Many employers were surprised to discover that remote customer support agents and freight dispatchers, for example, were often just as effective and productive working from home, if not more so,” Pollak said.
Thanks to those productivity gains, as well as improved recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism and lower real-estate costs, companies decided to keep offering remote options for some lower-wage staff long after offices reopened, she said.
Oh please. This article is based heavily on data from the American Time Use Survey, so let's see what ATUS says about remote work. I've put this up before more generally, but here it is for different professions:
On average, across every profession, people who work at home put in way fewer hours than people who work in an office. The average difference is nearly three hours, and this is true for every other type of measurement too. Full-time vs. part-time. Men vs. women. High school grads vs. PhDs.
These figures are not averages for everybody. They are solely for employed people who "worked at their workplace on an average day" or "worked at home on an average day." And if these numbers are even in the ballpark of being correct, they mean that workers at home spend a ton of time goofing off just because they can. There's no other conclusion to draw. Is it any wonder they love working at home?
Flags waving in the breeze at the United States of Ikea.
