Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 28, 2021
Maryland police officers dealing with an unruly child last January were caught shouting at, berating, and handcuffing the 5-year-old boy. It happened on video. He might have been a downright terrible brat, but a kindergartener is not a hardened criminal, and his treatment truly was outrageous. ■ Naturally, any discipline for the cops' behavior needs to follow due course. But there are some things one doesn't expect to see or hear along the way. A blanket statement from the police union? Maybe. But the police union's statement on the incident includes this flabbergasting line: "Montgomery County police officers do not receive training on how to effectively communicate with a young child in distress." ■ The word "shocking" gets over-used. But that's a truly shocking claim: We tell children to go to police officers and firefighters without hesitation when they are in danger. That's part of why impersonating a police officer is treated as a serious crime; the sight of a police officer must be, without exception, a moment of relief for young people (and, really, for anyone). But it cannot be a relief unless there is adequate trust that the officer is truly there to protect and serve. ■ At the barest of minimums, if the statement really is correct, it is imperative that the police department involved immediately implement a training system for "communicat[ing] with a child in distress". And so should every agency invested with the public's faith and entrusted with guns.
China menaces Taiwan with airspace incursion by 20 military aircraft
A rule of thumb: Things are usually not as bad as they seem, but they can get much worse much faster than we can imagine. That rule seems unnervingly appropriate here.
Berkshire Hathaway proposes an $8 billion fix for Texas energy problems
The company -- a massive utility operator already -- has proposed an $8.3 billion generation network to ensure the reliability of the grid so that February's weather-induced blackouts don't happen again. While the prediction was made before the blackouts, at one commentator called a utility expansion "a thoroughly satisfactory way of staying the course without holding still" for Berkshire in 2021.
Ship blocking the Suez Canal has been freed
But that doesn't necessarily mean the route will be immediately re-opened to traffic. Apparently we're about to hear a lot about the meaning of "necessary but not sufficient".
Fancy garage doors and their shortcomings
Conor Fridersdorf has an amusing obsession with expensive garage doors. One thing many of them have in common is their use of windows -- which seems like an oddly contra-indicated choice from a home-security standpoint.
The real story behind children's books
The book is "Bread and Jam for Frances", but the real plot is "Holy Cow, Frances's Mom Does a Ton of Unpaid Work". Her kid eats like she's got an executive chef. The book concludes with Frances chowing down on tomato soup, a lobster-salad sandwich, celery, carrot sticks, black olives, plums, cherries, and vanilla pudding. ■ This is no knock on the book itself, per se -- the intended underlying message is that kids ought to be open to trying new things, and that's a pretty defensible position among parents. But even though the book is only from 1964 (making it the same age as Vice President Kamala Harris and only a year older than the first members of Generation X), aspects of it seem both wildly antiquated and unfortunately current. ■ Keeping up a household (cleaning, cooking, performing maintenance, groundskeeping, paying bills, and in many cases, caring for children) is a major consumer of resources. The allure of devices like dishwashers and clothes washers and dryers is self-evident to any functioning adult who has had to perform those tasks manually. And the amount we are willing to pay to get devices that make other tasks even easier -- like Roombas and robotic lawn mowers -- reveals that at least some people in the modern world know how to place a value on their non-working hours. ■ Just as we place a price tag on the work we do outside the home, we really ought to place a value on the work done inside the home, as well. This non-market housework is valuable. Even if most parents aren't making their children Frances-quality meals for lunch, it all adds up: While it isn't counted in our GDP, the estimated value is in the trillions of dollars each year. It does appear that some of the time spent on this labor has decreased overall in the last two decades, but a yawning gender gap between women and men has remained. The average employed woman does more than the average non-employed man, and the average employed woman spends about 50% more weekly hours on that household work than the average employed man. ■ Measurement is hard, but that shouldn't stop us from acknowledging that household work is an important component of how people spend their time. And even more than that, it is valuable -- to the tune of something around one-fifth of measured GDP. That's a whole lot of tomato soup and lobster-salad sandwiches.
Noted academic Albert Einstein doesn't have a verified email address on his Google Scholar page. He should get on that -- relatively quickly.
