Rotundus.com

New travel demand projections are due from U.S. DOT. Will they be accurate this time?

"as VMT (vehicle-miles traveled) growth slowed, stalled out, and then went into decline, the DOT has consistently just forecast that it’s on the verge of taking off again."

Nobutaka Aozaki

Modern 'art': "The artist takes one canned good to multiple supermarkets and re-buys it. This single can of corn has been re-bought from 105 supermarkets for a total of $113.07. "

Hope for healthcare?

On one US hospital finally getting some others to emulate it after posting comparatively low, fixed prices on its website. "The established hospitals, working with the established insurers were not competing with each other. It took an upstart with a new business model to provoke competition. It is ever thus, but this is not the model our regulators use when they think of competition. Another interesting observation. The existing insurers were not at all anxious to save money through him. He had to go around them to cash customers, Canadians, and directly to companies."

The Science Is Clear: Don't Text and Walk

"Being distracted by texting makes people walk more slowly and crookedly, and they are more likely to be hit by car."

In general as far as men and women in the workforce goes it seems to me that the question to be asked is not can you eliminate inequality but what type of inequality you prefer. Let me offer you this bit of Longer Maternity Leave Not So Great for Women After All:

In fact, generous maternity-leave policies have a tendency to harden a country’s glass ceiling, and women in the Nordic countries are actually less likely to reach career heights than women in the U.S. (The one exception is in the political realm, where quotas have filled Nordic legislatures and ministries with close to equal numbers of women as men.) The U.S. has a higher proportion of female managers at all levels, as well as professionals and university professors, than northern (and the less egalitarian southern) European countries. Though the overall gender wage gap is somewhat higher in the U.S. than in the Nordic countries, that’s not the case among top earners. Female executives and professionals in America earn closer to their male peers than Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish women

In other words, women as a whole gain certain things with a Nordic model but women as individuals seem also to lose certain things in such a society.

Opinions About Abortion Haven't Changed Since Roe v. Wade

"In the 41 years since the decision, American views are remarkably stable—and just 1 percent of voters say it's their most important issue."

Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed.

"The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed." Apparently that 3D movies are to be avoided is an opinion that Roger Ebert and I shared. (There have been certain times when I've cancelled plans to see a movie as it was only playing in 3D).

Snowden-haters are on the wrong side of history

An analogy between a letter the FBI sent to Martin Luther King Jr. suggesting he commit suicide - and bringing out some of the less-laudable details of MLK's life - and the contemporary Snowden case.

Teen Employment and the Minimum Wage, 60 years of experience

"Is there any other issue where the data conforms so strongly to basic economic intuition, and yet is widely written off as a coincidence?" Is the cure to some extent to vary the minimum wage by age like Australia?

Per definition in the Canadian Online Legal Dictionary a peremptory challenge is:

The right of the accused or the Crown to object to a member of the jury array being chosen to serve on the jury, without being required to offer any explanation for the objection. The Crown and the accused each have a limited number of peremptory challenges, which varies with the offence charged: see section 634 of the Criminal Code.

A few days back I stumbled across the article Federal Appeals Court Says Jurors Can’t Be Excluded Because They Are Gay which asserts a recent US court ruling saying that jurors can't be excluded for being homosexual. In the article it was also mentioned that jurors can't be excluded based on race and elsewhere you find that the same applies to gender. It seems to me that this basically means that, at least in the US, the peremptory challenge is effectively dead. i.e. a peremptory challenge is one where it's explicit that no reason is provided, yet they're reverse engineering the reason in such cases.

The BuzzFeed article linked actually contains an embedded copy of the appeal court's ruling. There on pages 3 and 4 you find both that the potential juror in question (a) had taken or was taking medicine from the companies under trial here over pricing of their HIV drugs and (b) had friends with HIV. Both would seem to provide an fairly plausible alternate explanation for why this specific juror might be one they'd want to bump.

(It is indeed the case that, to quote the head of the CDC back in November 2013 that "Unprotected anal intercourse is in a league of its own as far as risk is concerned" - and the CDC's got the data to show that HIV is vastly more likely to affect men who have sex with men. i.e. the man's answer to the questions above seem closely correlated with the question of whether or not he has sex with men. At what point though can you separate answers to questions like the two I mentioned above from someone's identity without making challenges in jury selection effectively meaningless?)