Don't Smoke If You Got 'Em

Let us stipulate that smokers are the scum of the earth--

(WOS: "What did you just say?" "Nothing, Hon.")

--OK, everybody we have to keep it down.

Where were we? Ah, yes: Smokers.

--loathsome bottom-dwellers unfit for membership in polite society--does that mean they can't get a job?

Some companies--frequently hospitals and other health-related entities, but others as well--have taken the idea of a "smoke-free workplace" to the next level, refusing even to hire smokers. These companies reason that smokers cost too much money, in the form of both higher healthcare costs and reduced productivity. Furthermore, particularly in the case of the healthcare industry, employers feel that employees should practice the healthy lifestyle choices that these industries promote.

On the face of it, these companies have a point. Why should they pay higher costs to subsidize the destructive behavior of their employees? Smokers hardly strike us as a "protected class." Racial and sex discrimination is reprehensible--and rightly outlawed--because employers must not discriminate against people because of innate or, in the case of many disabilities, acquired characteristics. On the other hand, when a behavior is chosen--smoking, drinking, homosexuality--a privately owned company would seem to have the right to weigh it disfavorably in its hiring preferences.

(Digression: Yes, we know: It was a joke. EOD)

Still, much as we personally dislike smoking, and much as we wish everyone would just stop doing it, we have a problem with this policy. Yes, one could argue that smoking is a choice, and one could just as easily choose not to do it if one truly wanted a job at a non-smoking firm. At the same time, though, smoking is a legal activity, and as long as one's smoking does not incovenience other employees (which the near-universality of smoke-free workplaces generally ensures), one should not automatically be banned from a job because of a smoking habit. (Well, OK, maybe from the position of Chairman of Stop Smoking America, but otherwise. . . .)

What about the argument that companies are simply trying to promote health? As Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health (no fan of cigarettes himself) said, "Unemployment is also bad for health." We sympathize with the economic argument: We, too, have a problem with the idea that non-smokers must bear an additional burden for the bad habits of their fellow citizens, but the solution seems quite simple: According to federal estimates, a smoker costs an employer approximately $3,400 a year in additional health-care expenses. Why not just deduct $3,400 from the annual salary of a smoker?

Call it a Start-Your-New-Year's-Resolution Early tax.

Solipsistography
"Hospitals Shift Smoking Bans to Smoker Ban"

And What If You Paid Doctors Like Teachers?

ACOS posted this link on his Facebook page. The title pretty much says it all: "What If We Treated Doctors the Way We Treat Teachers?" It's worth a read. Thearticle is a response to those who blame teachers for the shortcomings of American education. While it is certainly true that teachers play a vital --indeed, central--role in the educational system, people fail to realize that a huge percentage of the factors affecting student performance are beyond the teacher's control: If a student fails to grasp basic algebra, is it because the teacher is inferior? Or is it because the student doesn't speak English well? Or because the student is more worried about where to get his next meal? Or, indeed, simply because the student just doesn't bother to do any homework, and his parents don't pressure him to do it? How many of these things is the teacher responsible for?

We don't punish doctors when their patients don't follow medical advice. We don't fire doctors if they diagnose a patient with high blood pressure, but the patient still has a heart attack after having a Big Mac. And if you think about it, compared to doctors, teachers have an infinitely better long-term success rate. After all, even if only 50% of a teacher's students ultimately graduate from high school, that compares quite favorably to the ultimately 100% mortality rate among even the best doctor's patients.

Frankfurt Stock Exchange Bids to Buy "Big Board": American Financiers, Academics Finally Admit They Don't Understand Any of This Either

A SOLIPSIST EXCLUSIVE--German investors revealed that they are in negotiations to purchase the venerable New York Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, American stock traders, financial management professionals, bankers, and others finally admitted that they have absolutely no idea what any of this means.

"I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to explain the stock market in 'layman's terms,'" Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein said. "I usually just start throwing around words like 'supply' and 'demand' and then I draw some graphs on envelopes. Awhile back, some folks started to suspect that I was just making things up--that's when we came up with the expression 'back-of-the-envelope' calculation to make what I was doing sound better."

When asked to comment on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange's proposed purchase of the NYSE, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said, "What?"

He continued, "Wait, how does someone buy a stock exchange? I mean, it's not, like, a thing. It's a place, right? I mean, it's not a place. . . you could buy a place. . . but. . . ." Mr. Geithner then patted his pants pocket and claimed that he had to "take this call. Seriously, it's on vibrate!It could be the President." He then ran out of the room.

Dr. Percy Duffman, Professor of Finance at MIT, explained that the entire concept of "stocks" was originally "a joke made up by a group of itinerant pipe salesmen who used to gather under a blueberry tree on what would later become Wall Street. They made up all kinds of words: 'stocks,' 'bonds,' 'debentures,' 'throodles,' 'ortivestules'--of course, not all of these words caught on. The fact is, they were really just putting letters together and making up definitions to go with them.

"One day, the local constabulary came to roust them, and they convinced him that if he bought some of their 'stocks,' they could guarantee him a good return on his. . . . Well, that was when one of them coined the word 'investment,' and the rest is history."

Details on the proposed purchase have yet to be revealed, but it is rumored that Frankfurt Stock Exchange executives are offering in excess of 18 billion throodles for the NYSE.

Solipsistography

"German Borse in Talks to Buy the Big Board"

Blockage

Argh! Blogger's block. What to write about. . .what to write about. . . .

With everything going on in the world, you would think something would have caught our fancy, but all the news seems somehow . . . repetitive. Egypt's still in turmoil, the economy still sucks, roofs are collapsing in Connecticut. OK, that last one is not the kind of thing you see everyday. Seems that the flat roofs in Connecticut are no match for the incessant blizzards blanketing the Northeast. And even though we've always thought of snow as a nice, soft, fluffy sort of thing, it turns out that if it piles up, it can cause previously sturdy buildings to implode. Did you know that a shovelful of snow weighs about 50 pounds? So, y'know, three or four shovelfuls of snow will probably cause all manner of roof collapses.

All right, this is boring. Here's what we'll do: We're going to go to Wikipedia and look up a random article. Whatever subject pops up, that's what we'll write about. We can do it! We're just that good! We can turn positively ANYTHING into bloggy gold! Here we go! What have we got here. . . .

Celinki: An administrative village in the [Polish] administrative district of Gmina Wielichowo. . . .

Huh. . . .

See you tomorrow, everybody!

Solipsistography
"Winter's Punch Crumbles Roofs in New England"

Blinded 'gainst the Right

Dateline: Ironyville.

Turns out social psychologists--whose job it is to illuminate all the subtle biases infecting the body politic and blinding us to the difficulties faced by those not like ourselves--are infected by bias and blinded to the difficulties faced by those not like themselves. At least, that's what University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says. He has found that a statistically impossible number of social psychologists (something like 536%) identify themselves as liberals. This, in turn, makes it difficult for self-identified conservatives to break in to the social psychology field. But who cares what they think, anyway?

The problem here is that liberal bias lead researchers to faulty conclusions. Let's say a liberal social psychologist examines the virtually non-existent Latino membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He (and it's always "he" because, let's face it, women aren't capable of the academic rigor demanded by the social sciences) may assume a racist explanation. In fact, once you recall that Klan meetings are always held on Tuesday evenings, a simple non-discriminatory explanation for Latino non-participation presents itself: Latinos probably just prefer to spend their Tuesday evenings drinking tequila and committing welfare fraud. QED.

We see liberal bias in the recent mini-uproar over the huge gender imbalance among Wikipedia contributors. Men make up over 85% of the contributing populace. But where a liberal may see discrimination, a cooler head may see an alternative explanation. Remember, that Wikipedia is "open source": Any yutz with a keyboard and an internet connection can pontificate on any topic. Maybe women are just less inclined than men to dilate for15 single-spaced pages on "Lord of the Rings" (which, by the way, only discusses the novel) or 23 pages on "Star Wars" (just the media franchise). When the entry on shoe designer Christian Louoboutin takes up as many pages (four) as the entry on "tribbles," we suspect the reason is less gender discrimination than admirable restraint on the part of female contributors. Maybe a disturbing proportion of men just have way too much time on their hands.

So we ask all members of Solipsist Nation--a decidedly left-leaning bunch--to analyze your own biases. Maybe there is more than one way to look at the world. Then again, that is a fairly liberal attitude, so we may be wrong about it.

Solipsistography
"Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List"
"Social Scientist Sees Bias Within"

Never a Dull Moment

This e-mail was sent out to the entire campus this afternoon, under the subject line, "Who Owns a Black Prius?"

Hello Everyone,

To the owner of a black Prius, we wanted to inform you that your vehicle is being attacked by a giant male turkey. If your car is parked in the back of the Physical Science Building, you may want to move it. Thank you!

Sincerely,

As if California's budget woes weren't crisis enough!

(By the way, the Solipsist-mobile is, indeed, a black Prius. Although she [yes, she--her name is Zelda] was not parked in the location mentioned, we did rush out to make sure that the turkey was not engaging in serial molestation of black Priuses [Prii?].)



Solipsistography:
Video from CarCheckup.com

Bowled Under

31-25. So much for the defensive struggle.

Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers on their Super Bowl victory. We steadily, if not passionately, rooted for the Pack. We had no emotional stake in the outcome. An article in today's paper captured our feelings well--the feelings of the sports fan obligated to watch the big game but lacking any true rooting interest in the outcome.

In this respect, today's game posed more of a conundrum than most Super Bowls. We have worked out a system for our rooting interest in the game, assuming, of course, that our favorite team is not playing in it--and considering that our favorite team is the Jets, we have had ample opportunity to develop this system. Sometimes, there is just another team that you really want to see win. This is rare, but last year's game was a perfect example: Was ANYONE outside of Indiana not rooting for New Orleans? Then, of course, we have our "adopted" teams: the 49ers and Raiders, the teams of our post-New York life. The fact that we are largely indifferent to one of these teams over the other testifies to our not having grown up in the Bay Area, where professing an equal liking for either team is about as common as Tivo-ing Glenn Beck because you don't want to miss Rachel Maddow. (If you must ask, if the Raiders play the Niners, we root for the Raiders, if for no other reason than we are East Bay residents.) Finally, if nothing else, we will root for the underdog, just to not be seen as jumping on some sort of bandwagon.

Super Bowl XLV, however, was a tough call. Even if we wanted to root for the underdog, it was never quite clear who that was. The initial line favored the Packers, but we think by this morning the odds had shifted to Pittsburgh. In any event, it was hardly a case where one team was highly-favored. Indeed, on paper, this looked like one of the more evenly matched games. And so it turned out to be--despite what looked to be a Green Bay blowout for most of the first half.

For us, our decision of whom to root for boiled down to a decision about whom to root against. And the only clear villain for either team was Ben Roethlisberger, he of the dubious sexual ethics. Sure, no charges were brought, but the man was suspended four games for an alleged rape, which is good (or bad) enough in our book to make us root against him and the Steelers. And lest you think this is just the sour grapes of a disappointed Jets fan, we can only assure you that it's not. Indeed, from that perspective we would have rooted for the Steelers--not out of any sense of sportsmanship (have we met?) but rather out of the comfort we could derive from the idea that if the Jets lost to the Steelers, it was because everybody lost to the Steelers.

So, again, we're more than satisfied by the game's outcome--and even more satisfied by the thought that two of Green Bay's scores were direct results of Roethlisberger's miscues. (Serves you right, Sleazeball!) Now, we can turn our attention to baseball. Of course, with the recent revelations of Madoff-related hijinks around the Mets' ownership, we may need to find a new team to follow there, too. What do you all think about the Mariners?

Solipsistography

"Suit Casts Light on Little-Known Mets Partner"

"The Who Gives a Damn Bowl"