debitage

24.11.07

Anti-Vegetarian Subsidies

Neil the Ethical Werewolf points out the huge skew in how US farm subsidies are distributed -- over 70% go to meat and dairy production, and much of the rest goes to empty starches and sugars. This makes those foods disproportionately cheaper, and thus contributes to the skew in American diets toward eating too much meat and low-quality carbs. Neil sees the problem here as one of nutrition, particularly for the poor who can't afford to fight the subsidy current. I don't want to dismiss that concern, but I do want to point out another effect: the harm to animal welfare and the environment.

In discussing the animal welfare/rights or the environmental argument against consuming meat (or at least factory-farmed meat), the options for action typically wind up focusing on personal choice, i.e., becoming a veg(etari)an. The obvious public policy instrument would be some kind of ban on the production and/or consumption of (some kinds of) meat -- though you'll almost never hear anyone advocating that. But here we have a case in which some progress could be made simply by rearranging our subsidy system.

Stentor Danielson, 13:29, |

21.11.07

Youse Talk Like That In Pennsylvania, Say?

Since I hail from Palmerton, PA, I was interested to note Benjamin Zimmer's post pointing out this comedy sketch poking fun at "heynabonics," the dialect of northeastern Pennsylvania. Most of "heynabonics" is widespread informal and/or lazily-enunciated American English (e.g. the classic pre-dinner conversation "Jeet jet?" "No, jew?"). The two distinctive-to-Northeast-Pennsylvania items covered in the video are "youse" and "heyna." I've always thought "youse" was a much more logical alternative to "y'all," but I'm afraid the latter is becoming the QWERTY keyboard of English pronoun innovation. "Youse" was common but not universal in Palmerton, and was sometimes explicitly noted as being a "Monroe County" thing (Monroe County lying just northeast of Palmerton's Carbon County). "Heyna" (a "tag question" like the Canadian "eh?"), on the other hand, was new to me despite living at the border between northeast and southeast Pennsylvania. But in Palmerton (and possibly surrounding areas -- I'm not sure) we had our own tag question, "say?" The Heynabonics video in some ways reminds me of how Palmerton was also marginal to southeastern Pennsylvania's regional sub-culture as well. I have some college friends from the Philly suburbs, and they would occasionally forward me "you might be from Philadelphia if" lists and other such things, on the assumption that I was from the same region -- yet I rarely got most of the jokes. Then again, you also have to factor in the fact that I was fairly shy and my family moved to Palmerton from northwestern PA when I was 9, so I never fully imbibed the full Palmerton culture (for example, I didn't start drinking iced tea or eating pierogies until after I moved away from home).

Zimmer also points out the "glottalized" pronunciation of the region's major city, Scranton (pronounced more like "scran'-un"). Many years ago I was traveling through this area with a friend and her dad, who hail from Long Island. The dad mentioned that we were getting close to "Scran-Ton" -- not just pronouncing the T as a T (rather than a glottal stop), but emphasizing the O (pronounced like "off" rather than reduced to a schwa) as well. I found it amusingly unnatural-sounding.

Stentor Danielson, 23:09, |

A Note In Passing On The Race And Intelligence Debate

I haven't had time to read any of the conservative columnists who have recently claimed that science proves black people are stupider than white people. But I have encountered a number of my usual reads denouncing these columnists and their conclusions. I noticed an interesting aspect to their denunciations: the cause of the columnists' error, insofar as one is asserted or hinted at, is portrayed as motivational bias. That is, while these columnists are not necessarily racist per se, it's also not exactly a negative influence on their lifestyle to decide that their race is smarter, so they like and want the conclusions they're coming to. Reaching for a motivational bias explanation is unsurprising given the framing of the columnists' argument, in which they seem to protest too much that they really wanted to come to the opposite conclusion and they explicitly make the motivational bias accusation against liberals who hold that there are no racial intelligence differences. Motivational bias is also an easy explanation because that's just what racism is from a mainstream perspective. What's not raised as a possible explanation is interpretational bias. What I mean is the tendency to take one's own culture as an obvious universal norm, and therefore to see people from other cultures as coming up short (a tendency that is stronger for people in dominant groups, since that dominance means they are less likely to encounter a situation where they're forced to question those assumptions). I find the comparative inattention to interpretational bias curious since the most common anti-racist attack on intelligence testing is that the tests assume certain norms and background knowledge that make sense for middle-class whites, but which can't be assumed -- and therefore lead to poorer test performance -- on the part of people from other backgrounds.

Stentor Danielson, 22:46, |

18.11.07

Tipping Is Stupid

A while ago Hafidha Sofia asked why we tip waitstaff a certain percentage of the price of the meal, since the amount of work they do is not proportional to the cost of the meal (a plate of spaghetti is just as heavy as a plate of prime steak). I've come to favor the second of the two theories I proposed in the comments -- percentage-based tipping was created by the restaurant owners as a way to create an incentive for waitstaff to encourage diners to spend more on dinner.

I always try to tip generously. But I would just as soon see tipping abolished (in every profession -- I'm sometimes a quite stingy tipper because I don't realize certain people are supposed to get a tip), a la the Australian system. The basic problem with tipping is that there's no deal worked out in advance. With anything else you pay for, you and the seller agree up front how much you'll pay and what you'll get in return. If you don't get what you pay for, your options (depending on the severity of the disappointment) include demanding a replacement, taking your business elsewhere in the future, and suing. When the service is paid for by tipping, however, the tip-ee has no guarantee going into the transaction what their compensation will be. They have some control in that good service will tend to be tipped better (though that has the side effect of encouraging insincere, ingratiating, subservient behavior). But the size of the tip depends just as much on the generosity of the tipper, which the tip-ee has no control over.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to eliminate tipping in the US, if there was the political will for it. It would simply require eliminating the special lower minimum wage for tipped professions. After an admittedly awkward adjustment phase, diners would decide that since the food is more expensive and the waitstaff make decent money without tips, there's no need to tip. The burden would shift to the restaurant to take care of its employees, rather than the waitstaff to suck up to the customers and accept whatever they deign to bestow.

Stentor Danielson, 21:15, |

What The AP Didn't Tell You About "Doctor Immigration"

Yesterday this story came over the Associated Press wire, with the slug "Doctor Immigration." It concerns Pedro and Salvacion Servano, a Filipino couple that came to the US in the 1980s and is now facing deportation. The story is quite clearly set up to evoke sympathy for the Servanos -- they're successful, hardworking people who get glowing recommendations from everyone who knows them.

Frustratingly, the only information about exactly why they're being deported that reporter Genaro Armas gives us is this:

The couple married in the Philippines in 1980, and two years later, Salvacion Servano's visa was granted and she left the country. Pedro Servano followed in 1984 after getting his visa, and the couple moved to Philadelphia.

The Servanos applied for U.S. citizenship while living in San Diego in 1990, but an immigration official noticed during an interview that their visa application listed them as single. They were accused of lying and misrepresenting their marital status, and the deportation process began, [attorney Gregg] Cotler said.

Such a brief and unenlightening description works to keep the Servanos looking sympathetic, and keeps the focus on the sadness of their predicament. But it's also a bit insulting -- as if we the readers are too dumb to understand how immigration law works.

Luckily I live with an immigration lawyer. I asked her about this story, and what she surmised (with the obvious caveats that she hasn't looked at any of the documents from the Servanos' case and isn't giving formal legal advice here) is the following: there are two separate queues for single versus married adult children of US residents who are trying to immigrate. Both are (like practically all family and employment-based immigration, due to the quotas on the number of visas we give) hugely backlogged. But single people get a higher priority than married ones, presumably because single people are thought to be more a part of their parents' family as opposed to the new family that a married couple forms. At the moment, the difference in the backlogs between the single and married adult children queues for Filipinos is 6 years. By failing to report their marriage, the Servanos were able to get into the country much earlier than they would have otherwise. Though I'm quite willing to believe that it was an honest mistake (it's easy to make such mistakes because US immigration law is so byzantine), there is at least a rational explanation of why they're having their difficulties.

Had the story explained all of this (and assuming my wife's surmise about the details is correct), it might have made the Servanos less sympathetic -- some people would say "well, they're queue-jumpers (even if inadvertant ones), and therefore they have to accept the consequences." (To be clear, I don't take this view myself, and I hope the Servanos find some legal workaround that allows them to stay in the US.) But it would have been much more informative.

The additional detail would also have transformed the impact of the story. Instead of being a heartstring-tugger that cultivates vague pro-immigration sentiment, it would have pointed to a specific problem in immigration law -- the complex and often arbitrary maze of laws faced by prospective legal immigrants, and the enormous backlog in issuing visas due to the huge mismatch between our quotas and the demand. This is an important issue to highlight, as it shows how glib the demand that immigrants "just wait in line" is. But instead Armas figured we just wanted to hear about how gosh-darn nice the Servanos are and how sad it will be when they're gone.

Stentor Danielson, 20:41, |