Gripes about the housing process so far...

The most talked-about part of the offer my graduate school sent me was the graduate housing guarantee. Having read it, and gone on to read the most recent internal committee report on the housing guarantee, and then read the rates quoted on the website, I thought that this meant that I would have some variety of affordable housing. Barely affordable, but affordable.

What I didn't read was the noise-filled, flash-intensive website of a private subcontractor, who runs the other graduate housing units, the ones that the university doesn't actually own. The rent is much higher in these privately-run "luxury apartments."

Seriously? You're going to use the word "luxury" in describing graduate student housing? Someone's priorities are messed up. If I had gone on to read those rates, and realized that my school was going to put me in one of the expensive apartments, and that they would be asking for two rent payements prior to even moving in... well, the  offer would have looked a lot less attractive.

The margin for housing to be considered "affordable" is 30-35% of income. By that standard, in order for the cheapest rent in the housing run by the private subcontractor to be considered even marginally affordable by Federal terms (35% of income spent on rent), you need an income of $26,000. Which is more than they pay graduate students. And to afford a single? Over $40K. This is enormously different from the units the university actually runs themselves.

And may I go back to the front-loading, and the silly fees? Application fee of $20. Security deposit of $150. $12.95 extra for them to process a credit card payment through a fourth party (how many middlemen are taking a cut?) and the first two months' rent due August 1st and September 1st when the move-in date is September 19th. Graduate student orientation? Guess. It's the 17th, and if you want to move in early, you get charged extra.

If I had known all of this earlier, I might have decided that thal school's financial support was simply unworkable. As is, now, I will find a way to manage to make ends meet, but you can bet I'm not happy about it. The fees are the most ridiculous part. I'm paying an 8.6% fee to reduce your paperwork? Even Paypal does not charge so much - and taking it out on the payee?

Perhaps in California, students are accustomed to going neck-deep in debt to afford housing, and it's considered essential to have a "resort-style" swimming pool at your apartment complex, etc. But where I come from, graduate students aren't interested in paying an extra $300-$500 per month to live in more luxurious digs. They're interested in having enough left over for groceries and just maybe putting something aside to work on those student loans they accumulated as an undergrad.

I know, I know, this is how the subcontractors make a mint and get their boat payments. But you'd think if the university was aware that problems affording housing both drive away prospective graduate students and prevent existing graduate students from making it through the program in a timely fashion (or at all, in some cases), they'd try to make sure the housing they were offering was affordable. And they are aware. I read the survey results cited in that report.

Legal, regulated, taxed?

Today, for a change of pace, I've decided I'm going to try to think of a list of things that I think can be questioned on moral grounds, or on the grounds of their social cost, but should be legal - since making them illegal causes more problems - but carefully regulated, and that are worth taxing to recover the full social cost of the enterprise.

• Tobacco
• Meat
  
• Alcohol
• Driving
  
• Firearms
• Cosmetic surgery
  
• Hunting
• Sharp pointy things
• Marijuana
  
• Prostitution

This list is sorted by approximate increase in mortality caused by allowing them in the US, so far as I could tell. Prostitution is at the bottom, because as best as I could tell from the comparative statistics and studies, legalizing prostitution seems to actually reduce prostitution-related mortality. Curiously, it's the least lethal two at the bottom that are most often illegal in this country.

Fat and sexuality and society

Consider this an idle rumination, if you would.

Not terribly long ago, a study came to my attention. It noted that among women, lesbians tended to be heavier than bisexuals who in turn tended to be heavier than straight women. This was curious to me, as also, I have seen many studies over the years that seemed to indicate that straight women seem to care more about a partner's body fat percentage than straight men did, and anecdotally, it seems to me that gay men appear to care the very most about it.

Lo and behold, Google provides a study suggesting that yes, gay men worry more about weight than straight men. And I am tempted to say there are two factors - being male, and being interested in males - that both somehow become a driving force, and if straight women care more about body fat than straight men, then being interested in men would be the stronger fashion.

Nevertheless, it strikes me as very odd, and it would bother me very much more if I thought this phenomenon was more biological than social.

The Ecolitan Lesson

Some books teach you things. At times, I wonder if I am drawing the right lessons from the novels I peruse; in L.E. Modesitt's Ecolitan books, the lesson seems a fairly pointed one, so I feel nearly sure that the point is what I think it is:

Know what your priorities are. In the Ecolitan books, the protagonist always has some goal in mind - preserving a way of life, breaking an Empire, something monumental. The protagonist stops at nearly nothing to achieve this - and because they know exactly what their priorities are, it is the thought of a single moment to determine which priorities an action works for or against.

Most of the protagonists are highly pragmatic, and the results are bloody - but in the end, the trade-offs they have made, they are satisfied with. I think there's at least a grain of truth to that, and a grain of danger. People who put a single goal above all else risk becoming monsters in pursuit of that goal - whether the goal is destroying a nation, overturning a law, or accumulating wealth. The truth, though, is that most of the regrets I've had, and the mistakes I've made - or watched others make - are related to not knowing exactly what priorities fall where.

It's a simple lesson, but a difficult creed, and I'm still not sure if the danger in taking an ordering of priorities to heart is more or less than its utility.

The curious problem of insoluble union

My mixed feelings on secession

When I look back on the civil war we had here in the US, I am of two minds. The first thing that comes to my mind is thank goodness they ended slavery. Sure, without the Civil War, perhaps slavery would have died out on its own eventually. Apartheid in South Africa ended eventually, without a bloody civil war... but it seemed to take forever.

A million people dying in a bloody civil war? Worth it to see the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed and enforced right then and there. But declaring the Union insoluble? A little fuzzier. It's been something of a help in protecting civil rights, as the US Supreme Court was what led the way to ending segregation and legalized racial discrimination.

But in theory? I don't think our union should be insoluble, and I think it was a grave oversight not to establish appropriate terms and procedures for states to leave the US. You don't want it to be something too quick and easy, something that can be decided upon rashly by a thin plurality of the population in a single referendum when emotions are running high, and it would probably take a year or more just to sort out state and federal properties and debts and carry out the actual separation once you were absolutely sure you wanted to do it.

In this day and age, I don't see it being a good idea, for Texas or any other state, but the idea that the United States can only add, and never even theoretically remove, states strikes me as non-viable. Eternal union may sound nice, but eternity is a very long time - and that's what bothers me about the Civil War. For all the good it did in removing slavery, it's made it very difficult to talk critically about perpetual union.

We've seen time and time again in other countries that there comes a time when it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that tie them to another, and why can't it be peaceful more often? The dissolution of Czechoslovakia, for example, was carried out quite peacefully.

Metrics by which we might define the closeness of an election

There's always a great deal of talk about how close an election is. To myself, this can mean several different things, as I touched upon in my earlier discussion of the 2000 US presidential election.

An election can be considered close in several senses. First, that the final tallies are close. Second, that a small number of voters could have changed the result. Third, that alternative methods of tallying the election would have altered the election result.

The 2000 example is a good one because the final tally was close (271 to 266), the number of voters needed to change the election result was small (a few hundred out of a hundred million), and a change in election procedure would have likely resulted in a change in the result, e.g., going by popular margin instead of electoral votes, counting one or more states via a non-plurality method, et cetera.

Even very small alterations in the electoral vote mechanics, such as proportional allocation in some states that do not currently split electors, or the number of electors allocated, i.e., the size of the US House, could have altered the 2000 election.

The 2004 election was also a close election - but only in the sense that had a little over 50,000 votes been changed from Bush to Kerry in that state. Given that Bush enjoyed majority support, his position in 2004 was much more secure against alterations in the electoral mechanics, such as shifting to a national popular vote.

While some have charged the 2004 election was stolen, the amount of alteration that such charges must allege in order to secure Kerry's victory against, say, a national plurality vote - is truly staggering. It would take a total of around 1.5 million ballots altered or 3 million added (or subtracted) ballots to account for such a change.

And it is in discussing such metrics that the weakness of the electoral college comes out. The electoral college has most of the pros and cons of the plurality system it is based on - except that it is much more strongly vulnerable to local shifts, whether how easy it is for a third party candidate to make it onto the ballot, voter suppression or fraud, or - in the case of the 2000 election - simple counting error to shift the overall result. Electoral votes are necessarily going to be closer than national popular votes by the metric of how many voters need to change their mind to change the election.

For example, the 2008 election was not considered a particularly close one. Barack Obama's total plurality vote margin was 7.2%, and the electoral vote margin 365-173. Yet to change the result of the total election, it suffices to barely flip North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Iowa - which he won by a total of 987,000 votes, 0.75%. The 2004 election could have been changed with 0.097% of the votes, in spite of a 1.5% popular margin.

I'm of the opinion a comprehensive listing (e.g., Bush/Dukakis would have required 1.23% of votes to be added/subtracted, or 0.62% changed) would give a good idea as to the typical quantitative relationship between how sensitive a national plurality vote is, as opposed to an electoral college ballot.

The curious case of male sexuality and religion

Before I talk about any empirical evidence, indulge me in an anecdote, would you?

For about four years of my college career, I belonged to an all-male pop a capella group by the name of Higher Ground. Beyond any doubt, what held the group together was music, but I was always a bit of an odd duck. When I first joined the group, the core of it was from nearby Hickory, and most of the guys were fans of country music. Mainly country boys, but by the time I left, the founding old guard had all gone, and it had shifted from that to the more generic brand, the kind of fella who thinks about joining a fraternity.

Pigeonhole and stereotype away if you like. There were some interesting characters, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't, but the end result is that Higher Ground was the most "conservative" group I belonged to on campus, and also one of the more religious, at least nominally, and I learned a few interesting things.

One was that Campus Crusade for Christ meetings were apparently one of the best places to score. That was a surprise to me; less surprising was the constant locker-room talk. A very few were genuinely intensely religious, more interested in theology, and those few were willing to put sex aside until marriage. The rest? Conservative or not, religious or not, college was all about getting laid. Expressly and explicitly.

And it's from that experience, and the experience of liberal students who were very cautious about sex, that I started to wonder what exactly is going on here. There's no question in my mind that being told not to have sex until marriage over and over again should reduce sexual activity, but why is it that only some men (far fewer than women, it seems, and now I've gone and introduced empirical evidence) respond to this message, while others come out of the Southern Baptist church thinking that sex before marriage is sinful yet pursuing promiscuity as if it were the path into heaven?

Some of it surely is the traditional myth of hyperactive male sexuality, propagated in some abstinence-only programs and passed on unthinkingly by those who do not critically examine sexuality; but I cannot help but think that something else is involved. And what stands out is that in this day and age, more than ever, conservative young males fear being labeled as homosexual - and nothing is as effective at silencing locker-room backstabbers' quiet implications of homosexuality than having sex with a woman.

So now, whenever people jabber about men being unable to control their desires, I think about homophobia, and how it helps keep alive the idea that sex is some commodity that men demand and women supply.