Just to update everyone on the job situation — I have accepted a position at a new employer. I will start sometime in the next few weeks. While I have managed to keep the blog up, and be very busy at work before, I have little idea how this new job will affect my schedule. Needless to say, starting a new job is going to require extra effort. It is my plan to use WordPress’s scheduling feature to get some posts up before work in the morning, add a few over lunch, and then do a few more when I get home, according to roughly the same schedule I did before when I was working.
Needless so say, I’m happy my period of unemployment will soon be at an end, even if I’m nervous and apprehensive about starting a new job. I am hoping for the best, and that it will be a challenging job, and that the work will be interesting. I’m moving back into the engineering space a bit. I am at the same time both excited and nervous about that. I appreciate everyone’s support over my job woes, and hope you’ll be patient if the blogging schedule gets a bit out of whack from having to put in some extra time to come up to speed at a new job.
I grew up in a working class area where a lot of folks didn’t end up going to college. Those that did generally tended to either go to a few years at Delaware County Community, or if they were into a four year university, to Penn State. It was with a bit of surprise that my high school guidance counselor reacted with when I informed him I did not want to apply there.
I applied to only two schools. University of Delaware, and Drexel University. I was accepted at both. I went to Drexel and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. My guidance counselors were telling me it was foolish not at least applying to Penn State. I went to a football crazy high school, and I considered the fact that Drexel did not field a football team to be a plus.
I keep thinking back to the guidance counselor’s advice, and wondering “Who’s the fool now?” I feel bad for the folks carrying Penn State degrees into the job market now. While if I were the hiring manager, I wouldn’t hold it against anyone, this scandal has been more than embarrassing. Hopefully the school will recover, and learn something from it. Jonathan Adler pointed out:
The cowardice of some was no doubt motivated by a sincere desire to protect the reputation of the university and its football program; to preserve the house that JoePa built. And yet, as I noted yesterday, the failure to take immediate action has, in fact, done more to tarnish the PSU football program and Paterno’s legacy than would have a determined effort to protect children from the predator in their midst. It may even hit the university’s credit rating. Placing the welfare of the football program ahead of the Sandusky’s victims protected neither.
Had Nixon been forthcoming about Watergate, and fired those responsible, rather than attempting to cover it up, it’s likely his presidency would have survived. I’ve never seen a case of covering up something wrong ultimately paying off. If the sin is big enough, people will eventually find out. When they do, the backlash is going to be severe.
A friend of mine who has a CNC machine wants to try this. This kind of stuff is making me think I should start a category called “Gun Control Can Never Work”:
I’ve always wondered how well plastic would work for prototyping. There really isn’t a whole lot on the lower that takes huge stress, especially if you strap a .22LR upper to it for testing.
Ladd Everitt seems to be pretty proud of his performance here:
I am not really impressed, to be honest. For those of you who don’t want to listen to Ladd debate for ten minutes, Everitt’s main assertion seems to be that imperfect enforceability and imperfect deterrence don’t mean the laws are not worthwhile. Our folks note, quite correctly, that laws barring people from carrying guns accomplish nothing, because the likelihood a murderer will be deterred by a sign or law against carrying the gun is vanishingly small. Everitt contends that the same thing could be said for the law on murder itself, so by our logic, we shouldn’t have laws against murder.
The problem Ladd has here is that he hasn’t really spend much time thinking about the law. While I think he brings up a good point, his mistake is to assume that the primary purpose for laws punishing murder is deterrence. I contend that it is not. When people form governments, we surrender certain natural rights to it, and retain others. One right we surrender is the right of retribution. In a natural states, if you come over to my house and kill my brother, I have a natural right to seek retribution for your depriving a loved on of his life. It is difficult, in a civilized society, to allow for individual punishment of crime. So we surrender retribution to the state, who formalizes the process, and ensures justice is served. The primary purpose of laws against murder is not so much that it will deter someone intent on committing it, so much as offers the living a sense that justice was served. If the state fails to be effective as this function, you risk a break down of law and order, and a reliance of vigilantism.
But this is not to say that laws against murder don’t also have deterrent effect. One has to examine how this deterrent effect works, however. Generally speaking, unless you’re scrupulously careful, if you murder someone, you are much more likely than not going to be caught and brought to justice. About 70% of murder cases are solved in the US. This qualifies as a fairly powerful deterrent. I would wager this probably does help keep the murder rate down significantly.
Serving justice can’t possibly be a justification for preventing someone from carrying a firearm, because there is no victim of the crime who will be seeking it. It’s fair to judge a law against the practice solely on its deterrent effect, which is not also true for murder. The problem for Ladd is that the likelihood of being caught with a concealed weapon is infinitesimally small unless you do some kind of screening in the place where carry is prohibited. I’ve been carrying for a decade, and I’ve never been stopped by law enforcement who noticed. Sure, a law prohibiting carrying concealed weapons will have a deterrent effect; it will deter people who are generally law abiding and don’t intend to commit crimes. It will not deter someone who is intending to use that firearm to commit more serious crimes that do have victims that will require justice served. It certainly won’t deter someone who is mentally deranged.
So if the law has a relatively zero change of deterring someone, other than someone who is not intent on committing a crime of violence, why is it incorrect to question whether this is a worthwhile law? What Ladd Everitt defends has a deterrent effect on one intending violence, either through criminal inclinations or madness, that is so vanishingly small is to be logically of no use to society. I think he’s wrong to so quickly dismiss this fact, and to make poor analogies to laws against murder.
I’ve heard it claimed recently that the idea of a professional police force was a foreign one to the founding generation. While I wonder whether our founders would approve of the militarization of modern police forces, the concept of modern policing was not unknown to them. From the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:
I began now to turn my thoughts a little to public affairs, beginning, however, with small matters. The city watch was one of the first things that I conceiv’d to want regulation. It was managed by the constables of the respective wards in turn; the constable warned a number of housekeepers to attend him for the night. Those who chose never to attend paid him six shillings a year to be excus’d, which was suppos’d to be for hiring substitutes, but was, in reality, much more than was necessary for that purpose, and made the constableship a place of profit; and the constable, for a little drink, often got such ragamuffins about him as a watch, that respectable housekeepers did not choose to mix with. Walking the rounds, too, was often neglected, and most of the nights spent in tippling. I thereupon wrote a paper to be read in Junto, representing these irregularities, but insisting more particularly on the inequality of this six-shilling tax of the constables, respecting the circumstances of those who paid it, since a poor widow housekeeper, all whose property to be guarded by the watch did not perhaps exceed the value of fifty pounds, paid as much as the wealthiest merchant, who had thousands of pounds’ worth of goods in his stores.
On the whole, I proposed as a more effectual watch, the hiring of proper men to serve constantly in that business; and as a more equitable way of supporting the charge the levying a tax that should be proportion’d to the property. This idea, being approv’d by the Junto, was communicated to the other clubs, but as arising in each of them; and though the plan was not immediately carried into execution, yet, by preparing the minds of people for the change, it paved the way for the law obtained a few years after, when the members of our clubs were grown into more influence.
What’s even more interesting in here is Franklin’s notion that the fact that the rich paid the same as the poor, rather than taking on more of the burden, would seem to be an endorsement of the ideas that are used to justify a progressive tax system. Ben Franklin is only a single founder, but as a lot, they tended to be more pragmatic, and a lot less ideologically strict than many ideologues today give them credit for.
Here’s a very quick introduction to the discussion about how security can mean trading away some liberty, but that TSA takes away the choice completely. To have such broad concepts broken down into 2 minutes, I like it.
But I suspect the answer is that our society is just a lot more outraged over child rape than they are about gun smuggling. To be honest, I’m fine with that being the case, and I think it’s a good indication society as a whole largely has their priorities straight. I am reluctant to compare the two as roughly equivalent criminals acts. What Paterno covered up was far more heinous than what Holder covered up, even if I think they both deserve the same ultimate treatment.
