California law says that drivers have to retake the DMV test when they turn 70. Fine. But the test questions have become crazy. They're completely divorced from knowledge of meaningful traffic laws and instead focus on weird trivia. As a result, we've had an endless stream of 70-year-olds wailing about how they've failed the test two, three, four, a dozen times and are beside themselves with frustration. But our DMV director has finally taken action:
As for test questions, more than 20 have been removed from the rotation. One asked what a driver should do when seeing a road sign that says “NEV USE ONLY” or “NEV ROUTE.” Readers had complained to me that they didn’t know what NEV means (Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, or golf cart), or couldn’t imagine the issue comes into play often enough to waste space on a license renewal test.
Another question, now removed, had asked: “What is another name for the hand-to-hand steering method?” I’m still not sure why anyone would know or care. Also shredded was a question asking the minimum manslaughter sentence for killing someone while evading police pursuit, and another that asked what the punishment is if you “evade a law enforcement officer performing their duties, but no bodily injury occurs.”
I've heard examples even worse than these. Whose idea was this?
And the really crazy thing is that there's a little-known option for avoiding the whole mess: an eLearning test that you can take at home. If you get a question wrong you just try again. It's essentially impossible to fail.
Deep down a lot of hard-core Trump supporters, and many not so hard-core, think it’s all over. They love America truly and deeply but think the glue that held us together is gone. Religion and Main Street are shrinking into the past, and in the Rite Aid everything’s locked up. School shootings, mass shootings, nobody’s safe, men in the girls’ locker room, race obsessions, a national debt we’ll never control. China, Russia, nukes and cooked-up plagues. If they decide to do a mass cyberattack and take out our electricity for six months we’ll never get through it. Once we would.
I don't doubt that Noonan is right—about some Fox News neurotics, anyway. But she's old enough to know better than to write this and pretend it's something new, especially since she herself has written it numerous times. Here's a version from around 1970:
Respect for elders and the five-and-dime are shrinking into the past, and in the Rexall we sell condoms out in the open. Saturday night specials, gangs, nobody's safe, women demanding equal pay, Black Power, inflation over 6%. Vietnam, Russia, MAD, long hair and LSD. If the Arabs decide to embargo oil and take out our automobiles we'll never get through it. Once we would.
Come on, folks. There's always something. But here in the real world, GDP is up, employment is strong, wages are up, inflation is over, the abortion rate is down, teen pregnancy is down, crime is down, cigarette smoking is down, racism is down, teen bullying is down, the divorce rate is down, education is in good shape, homeownership is higher than in the 1980s, US universities are the best in the world, America owns the global software market, the US military is by far the world's strongest, and American workers are among the best paid in the world.
Even the bad stuff isn't generally as bad as people think it is. Illegal immigration is up, but that's probably temporary. Social media is scary, but evidence suggests it doesn't really have a negative effect. School shootings are also scary, but they cause fewer deaths than you probably think. Climate change is bad, but the surging rate of technological solutions is promising. Fentanyl is a scourge, but we've had drug scourges before and they eventually burn out. The national debt could be solved via some genuinely modest tax hikes. The Black-white education gap is the only big problem I can think of that literally has no silver lining at the moment.
We all live in the richest country in the richest era of history. We're mostly well paid, well fed, and get good medical care. We have so many entertainment options we barely know how to handle them. If we'd all just buck up and stop being scared of the monsters under our beds, maybe we'd finally figure out just how much of life there is to enjoy.
A father writes to "Ask Amy" today about his daughter, who deliberately smashed her cell phone in hopes of getting a new one. What should he do? Here is Amy's answer:
Unless you have purchased insurance, replacing this broken phone could be a very expensive proposition (insurance is also expensive, and there is a deductible to replace a broken or lost phone). I do believe that it is something of a safety issue for a teenager to have a phone these days, and because of that, she should have one.
....I think it's important that your daughter should ultimately pay for the replacement — or negotiate a partial payment with you and her mom. Experiencing the consequences of this incident should inspire her to be much more careful.
I am bursting with follow-up questions:
The incident happened at a friend's house. According to the letter writer, "I called the friend’s mom and she told me that both girls had deliberately broken their phones in order to get new ones." wtf? Was the friend's mom watching while the phones were smashed? Why didn't she proactively call up the parents to let them know what happened?
Insurance doesn't cover the deliberate destruction of a phone, does it?
Why is having a phone a safety issue "these days"?
This isn't a case of getting the daughter to be "much more careful." She wasn't careless. She deliberately destroyed the phone! She was trying to scam her parents and lied about it to their faces!
The letter writer says his wife just wants to get the daughter a new phone and be done with it. Seriously?
Why am I reading "Ask Amy"? I don't remember. For some reason I clicked on this last night.
As near as I can make out, everyone in this story is completely crackers. The daughter deliberately wrecked a phone. Friend's mom didn't bother letting Dad know what happened. Mom just wants to get the daughter a new phone. And Amy is totally out to lunch. Not one single person seems to think that the daughter ought to be punished in any way aside from (maybe) getting a crummy flip phone and (maybe) paying for part of it.
I am not a parent. I admit I might wuss out if this happened to me in real life. But my initial thought is that I'd ground the daughter for a good long time so she wouldn't need a phone for "safety reasons." Help me out here. Am I the asshole?
Good news! When it comes to surgeons leaving random crap in your body after they've sewn you up, the United States has the lowest rate among all rich nations.¹ We're #1!
¹All the rich nations that happen to be part of the Peterson-KFF health system tracker, anyway.
The spittle flecked anger from conservatives over increased IRS funding to catch rich tax cheats never ceases to astonish me. I can understand this kind of anger over big hot-button subjects like abortion or the border, but IRS funding? Here is Dominic Pino in National Review, who is apoplectic over Biden's recent announcement that the IRS collected an extra $500 million in the first year after the new funding was passed:
This [infographic] just shows how nonsensical the emphasis on extra IRS funding always was.
First, the Biden administration wanted to raise $400 billion over the next ten years with greater tax enforcement.... Now it’s supposed to be some great victory that, over a year after the IRS expansion was passed into law, they’ve raised $500 million.
Second, the purpose of extra revenue from the IRS was supposed to be to balance out the extra spending from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But the administration’s post is all about how it wants to spend the extra $500 million. Democrats want to use the money to expand government even further, not reduce the deficit.
As I have noted before, it’s important to remember that IRS employees are some of the only federal workers who are unionized. When in power, perhaps the primary purpose of the Democratic Party as an organization is to direct taxpayer money to unionized government employees. The influx of cash for the IRS will expand membership in the National Treasury Employees Union, which donates almost entirely to Democrats. It was never primarily about the extra revenue.
Let's take a breath. First, President Biden estimated the increased funding would bring in $320 billion over ten years. That's the number.
Second, only 0.8% of the new funding has been spent, and increased enforcement only got seriously underway three months ago. It's hardly surprising that only 0.15% of the expected tax haul has been collected so far.
Third, the infographic is just an aid to understanding, like saying you could stack four million football fields from here to the moon. Dumb, maybe, but otherwise meaningless.
Fourth, NTEU (a labor union that represents 31 federal agencies including the IRS) contributes a grand total of about $800,000 to Democrats each campaign cycle. Realistically, the increase in IRS employees will probably produce an approximately 16% boost in NTEU members,¹ which suggests a similar increase in contributions. That comes to about $100,000 by 2033. This is highly unlikely to have been front of mind when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
The IRS plans to use part of its newfound funding to hire several thousand high-end compliance officers, the kind who have the background to go after complicated high-dollar tax returns. There are a variety of estimates of how much this will bring in, but it's notable that literally everyone agrees it will be a net positive. The rest of the funding will be used to man helplines, produce a free online tax filing app, and update the agency's ancient computer systems. Even for Republicans, it's remarkable that they aren't just opposed to this, they are rabidly, madly opposed to it.
¹The net increase in IRS employees from the IRA funding comes to about 37,000. The IRS unionization rate is around 66%, which means NTEU will probably add 24,000 members to its current 150,000. That's a 16% increase.
During its current war against Hamas, Israel has deliberately forced two million Palestinians into refugee camps. Israel has deliberately leveled half of Gaza. Israel has deliberately denied food and medical aid to civilians. Israel has plainly carried out indiscriminate bombing with little care for who they kill.
You can make a pretty good case that these are war crimes. I would. Nonetheless, it's not genocide. It's not an attempt to exterminate the Palestinian population. It's war. As horrific as it is, the death toll in the Gaza war has been sadly ordinary.
Over the past year, remote workers were promoted 31% less frequently than people who worked in an office, either full-time or on a hybrid basis, according to an analysis of two million white-collar workers by employment-data provider Live Data Technologies. Remote workers also get less mentorship, a gap that’s especially pronounced for women, research shows.
In one sense, of course I think this is true. You'd have to be something of a moron not to understand it as a likely price of working from home.
On the other hand, the business press constantly creates clickbait out of press releases from companies I've never heard of. Here's what Live Data Technologies says about themselves:
Our patented technology continuously monitors the open web for job change signals, tracking the employment status for 95M+ decision makers in North America and the EU.
"Since 2018," they say, "we have turned the open web into a continuously updated truth source for workforce data." A truth source. Uh huh. Should I hold this kind of tech mumbo jumbo against them? Or just shrug it off as standard marketing patter updated for the 2020s?
I don't know. But I also don't know how seriously to take anything they say. This might be genuinely state-of-the-art stuff powered by very powerful analytic software—or it might be bullshit. How can you tell?
