The Rollbacks Go Rolling Along

Obviously, the deregulation of the financial industry is in the process of being rolled back. But I just saw in the LA Times (the paper R. says is the only place he's seeing good, long, detailed articles anymore) that California is contemplating rolling back some of the Welfare-to-Work rules, with the goal of saving money for the state. By the time you add up the per-child child care costs, job training costs, etc., it's often cheaper for the state to just pay a parent to stay home and raise the kiddies. (Duh. I'm fairly certain this was pointed out at the time it went through during the Clinton years. In fact, I think we pointed that out repeatedly.) A lot cheaper. While the primary caregiver of a child under the age of one had already been exempted from mandated job search/job training (cuz we may be barbaric, cruel and shockingly stupid, but apparently not _that_ barbaric, cruel and shockingly stupid), the current proposal would extend that and factor in the 3 preschooler issue.

I just wish we could maybe invent a government program that, say, recognized that maybe the people receiving the assistance could make pretty good decisions themselves, and let them decide whether it was a better deal for them to stay home, or go through with their education, or whatever. But we don't trust people who are receiving government assistance -- well, we don't trust anyone, but those are the people we feel prepared to coerce.

Safety First

I haven't read the proposed financial regulation, but the it's-not-good-enough commentary I've been reading from Krugman and others I do not necessarily find particularly compelling. In particular, the people who think that the ratings agencies need to be regulated, I think, have entirely missed the point. The proposed regulations seem to go a long way towards reducing the amount of shit paper out there by putting a stop to making loans that are bad for the people who are borrowing -- which, despite what a lot of people convinced themselves and others, are _actually_ even worse for the people who are lending the money. Systemically bad lending environments are like a game of hot potato in which the hot potato has been replaced with a nuclear reactor that is about to go critical. It's still going to burn your fingers, and it's really crucial to pass that sucker along to the next, er, sucker, but it isn't going to cool down as it moves along and eventually, it will destroy everything in the vicinity.

To switch analogies midstream (er), we're looking at the aftermath of an extremely bad car wreck. A large, fast moving vehicle has gone through a barrier and right over a cliff. The passengers in the vehicle who weren't killed as it bounced along the cliff mostly drowned in the deep and cold waters below. Obviously, no one wants to have that happen again, barring some people who watched it all on TV and happened to really, really, hate someone in the vehicle and is overjoyed that They Got Theirs. So to speak.

A variety of factors contributed to those deaths. Deep cold water. Can't do a lot about that, other than Not Go There. Cliff. Ditto. We could reinforce the barrier (do something about the ratings agencies), and that might help, but this particular vehicle was so large and so fast that the kind of barrier required to not fail would probably have the side effect of killing a lot of other people who hit it in smaller vehicles moving less quickly. (Jersey barriers are designed to redirect for a very good reason.) Enforcing a speed limit is probably important. But if an investigation leads us to conclude that the vehicle in question _had no brakes or steering, and the throttle was permanently pressed to the maximum_, then the real problem lies in not letting vehicles like that have people in them, get on the road, etc.

If you make sure you don't have a crazy lending environment, the details of the ratings agencies is a lot less important. And if you don't have a crazy lending environment, there probably won't be so much money sloshing around that someone is tempted to hand a lot of it over to the executives.

I don't _know_ that the proposed regulations are necessary and/or sufficient. But I'm not really that impressed by arguments against them based on ratings agencies and executive compensation. Even if the ratings agencies and executives are currently topping my Hope They Get Theirs list.

ETA: My LJ posts are propagated automagically over to Facebook. Weirdly, this entry resulted in a libertarian edging into Republican Talking Points comment from a man who I vastly admire, a friend, ex-coworker, great dad and super-cool-thrower-of-parties (with the Best Christmas Lights Ever), a response from another man I vastly admire, a friend, great dad, bicycle commuting, garden growing, air travel avoiding, I Wish I Were That Good a Human Being, and then lively back and forth thereafter. Neither, needless to say, had any particular impact on the opinions of the others. While I may complain about Krugman on occasion, my opinion falls far more on the side of G. than of B. -- and watching the back and forth, it's quite clear what was going through Obama's head when he put this package together.

Earth Machine

Because I noticed that I was talking about how I hadn't had time to do this, and feeling guilty about the food waste not being composted, and today R. said he realized what he's allergic to in the garage (the food waste), today I dug up the Mass Gov bingrant.pdf I downloaded before we moved down here to figure out which local municipality might have composting devices for us to purchase. _Now_ I comprehend the geography enough to realize that while Acton abuts both Chelmsford and Concord, nearly anything we're actually going to go to in Concord is functionally half the distance that anything we're actually going to go to in Chelmsford. One phone call and one short trip later, we have another Earth Machine.

And a kitchen scraps bucket, because I paid in cash and they didn't have change and apparently donating $5 to them was going to cause much heartache, so I gave them two more and got a $7 scraps bucket. Which is actually sort of cool.

We also went to Not Your Average Joe's for lunch, where I discovered (a) they will let you order off the kids menu (unsurprising -- it isn't much of a deal, really) and (b) the kids burger does not come with condiments automatically (someone there understands children) but is otherwise _really good_ and (c) while the kids burger is 4 ounces of meat before cooking, it is perceived by our waitress as being smaller than the McDonald's hamburger (which is kinda funny, since that burger is 1.6 ounces).

Portion distortion strikes again.

Also, I got cheated out of my drink and ice cream. It would have been nice to have the drink for A., as she finished all of the diluted OJ I brought in a bottle for her.

Eating Off the Kids Menu, redux

Friday is traditional eating out day, since there's a regular lunch get-together (didn't do that today) and a fairly regular dinner get-together. We haven't done the dinner for months and months, largely because it's tricky to make it through traffic at the 6-7 start time they usually pick and often a long ways from where we are. Since we moved, we should have been able to go, but the folk who arrange it were on hiatus for a while.

Well, today we got the e-mail, and the selected restaurant was in our town! Up in Nagog, but still! We had to go, and so we did. I was going to stay home with T. and ride bikes, but we got him back at 5 so by 6ish he was worn down pretty good and willing to leave for a restaurant with fries. Scupperjack's has an old-school salad bar, which I got, figuring I'd mooch off of T.'s kids meal which was, inevitably, chicken fingers, french fries, chocolate milk and, in this case, included ice cream at the end. Nice! Good staged bribery. Company was excellent. Ambient noise level high enough to cover any noise our kids were making (which was not much, as T. was fairly quiet and A. was asleep). And T. dissed his chicken for the most part, so I got plenty to eat.

If I'd moved here from Seattle, I'd be bitching and moaning about how few places there are to eat. But after southern New Hampshire? A paradise of restaurant selection.