About that "affluenza."

Those who think the rich teenager — who, driving drunk, killed 4 persons — should have gotten a harsher punishment than 10 years probation are focusing on the expert testimony he presented in his favor. A psychologist named G. Dick Miller testified that having grown up in affluence, "He never learned that sometimes you don’t get your way... He had the cars and he had the money. He had freedoms that no young man would be able to handle."

Miller used the term "affluenza" — a portmanteau of "affluence" and "influenza" — to refer to the young man's psychological deficit.

Affluenza, Miller acknowledged to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday, is “not a medical term.” The psychologist said that it means “You have too much and you don’t know how to distribute it.” At Cooper’s prompting, Miller acknowledged that the boy was “a spoiled brat.”

The affluenza claim rightfully strikes the most absurd note since Dan White’s infamous 1979 “Twinkie defense.” Psychologists have loosely used the term for years to describe the emotional pitfalls unique to children raised in affluent settings.

Of course, psychologists will have a lot to say about the afflictions of rich people, since rich people are more likely to have money to throw into long, luxurious sessions with psychologists. And rich people have the money to put on a strong defense in a criminal trial, replete with expert testimony framing their deficiencies in the most compellingly sympathetic form.

It's the judge's responsibility to give this testimony the weight it deserves. The problem here is not that rich people have money to dump into a strong defense in a criminal proceeding or that psychologists have coined a catchy/cutesy term for the woes of the rich. It is the judge — Texas State District Judge Jean Boyd — who is accountable for anything that went wrong in the case of Ethan Couch. And we don't know the weight she put on Miller's testimony or the notion of "affluenza."

I don't know how Boyd has treated other teenagers. Perhaps she's deeply informed about the deficiencies of the teenage brain and has shown mercy to a great many poor and working class teenagers and her sentencing of Couch is — within her record — a model of equal treatment of the rich and the poor. Maybe she knows the research that has led, for example, to articles like this — "Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different" — in the New York Times.

That's a 2009 interview with Laurence Steinberg, "a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia... one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology." He says:

I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Asked whether the criminal justice system is "beginning to take these differences into account during sentencing," Steinberg says:

It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

At the link you can see links to the U.S. Supreme Court cases and descriptions of the neuroscience research about the teenage brain.

Speaking of brains: Let's try to think clearly about this case and the larger context. Don't get too distracted by the word "affluenza" — which no one said was an actual disease. Don't impulsively slot this into a class warfare template. Remember that the criminal defendant has a right to present the evidence in his favor. And the responsibility for sentencing lies squarely with the judge, but don't succumb to impulsive emotion as you judge the judge.

"Madison committee to consider paying employees to bike to work."

Ha. That's very funny to me because just this morning, as Meade was driving me to work, we were observing the people on bikes and I said, "It's almost all young white males. All these bike lanes and other amenities, paid for with our tax money? It's almost all for white males. Oh, how it would pain Madison liberals to admit it!"

And now, here are these Madison liberals planning to give cold cash money to the white males.

The Sustainable Madison Committee will begin a discussion Monday on the potential for reimbursing city employees for giving up their parking spots in favor of biking, walking or taking a bus to work.

Oh, it's only for giving up your parking space? Then I guess you collect even if you've got a husband who drives you in, so it's not just about biking.

[T]he idea makes fiscal sense because the city provides employees with parking spaces that could command market prices, providing cash that could provide employees with an incentive to bike — or walk or bus — as well as give the city additional revenue.

At the university, we're expected to pay for parking spaces, so anyone — like me — who forgoes parking gets an economic benefit. If city workers get free parking, then why not let each worker collect the value of the space he gives up? But they're not just saying that.

"You create a system where you as an employer encourage folks to be healthier, and therefore they're more productive at work," [says Tom Klein, Dane County director of the Bike Federation of Wisconsin]. "Research suggests they take fewer sick days than people who don't bike or walk to work."

Some folks are just older or have pre-existing conditions and cannot bike. You're advocating discriminating against them? And what of those who have children that they need to drop off at day care on the way to work and pick up on the way home? What of those with family responsibilities who need to do errands and shop for food? It's easy for young, healthy, single people to think it's great to nudge others to ride bikes to work, but there are good reasons to drive cars, especially in a cold climate. When I first arrived in Madison, I biked to work. But the first day there was ice, the first time I braked, I instantly hit the pavement. There's no way anyone but the strongest, least risk-averse youths can bike year 'round. To pay money to those who do discriminates against women, parents, the un-young, the disabled, and the careful.

It's sexist, ageist, ableist, and ridiculous.

Which state attorneys general "were throwing away important points of law, not just for their state, but for the other 49"?

In his New York Magazine interview, Justice Scalia says that these days, when the states have cases in the Supreme Court, they send in "people who know how to conduct appellate argument." But:

In the old days, it would be the attorney general—usually an elected attorney general. And if he gets a case into the Supreme Court [pumps his fist], he’s going to argue it himself! Get the press and whatnot. Some of them were just disasters. They were throwing away important points of law, not just for their state, but for the other 49.

Who, specifically, do you think he might have been talking about there? I'll tell you who I thought of when I read that: Roger A. Tellinghuisen, the Attorney General for the state of South Dakota, whose argument in South Dakota v. Dole — the key case about Congress's power to attach conditions to spending — threw away an important point of law that could have limited the spending power. For years, when I teach that case, I've urged students to listen to that argument as a lesson in what not to do.



Tellinghuisen was only prepared to talk about the 21st Amendment as a limit on the Spending Power. There's an argument in an amicus brief from the National Conference of State Legislatures that O'Connor pushes Tellinghuisen to use, about how related the condition needs to be to the spending, and Tellinghuisen says he's "not prepared to argue that particular fine point." His case is about a condition that relates to the sale of liquor, so he's all about the amendment that preserves state legislative power in that area, as if all that matters is winning this particular case — which he didn't — and not about the doctrine that will apply to many other cases in the future.

In the 7-to-2 opinion in Dole, written by Chief Justice Rehnquist, we see that the thrown away point in a footnote (boldface added):

Our cases have not required that we define the outer bounds of the "germaneness" or "relatedness" limitation on the imposition of conditions under the spending power. Amici urge that we take this occasion to establish that a condition on federal funds is legitimate only if it relates directly to the purpose of the expenditure to which it is attached. See Brief for National Conference of State Legislatures et al. as Amici Curiae 10. Because petitioner has not sought such a restriction, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 19-21, and because we find any such limitation on conditional federal grants satisfied in this case in any event, we do not address whether conditions less directly related to the particular purpose of the expenditure might be outside the bounds of the spending power.

The Court found spending on highway construction sufficiently related to the age at which a person is allowed to buy alcohol. Dissenting, Justice O'Connor said:

When Congress appropriates money to build a highway, it is entitled to insist that the highway be a safe one. But it is not entitled to insist as a condition of the use of highway funds that the State impose or change regulations in other areas of the State's social and economic life because of an attenuated or tangential relationship to highway use or safety. Indeed, if the rule were otherwise, the Congress could effectively regulate almost any area of a State's social, political, or economic life on the theory that use of the interstate transportation system is somehow enhanced.

What an astounding missed opportunity to limit conditional spending! 

Bill de Blasio — with a 50 point lead in the polls — addresses that motorcycle mob attack.

I'd said that the attack would hurt the campaign of the Democrats' left-wing candidate for NYC mayor, so I'm interested in how the seemingly soft-on-crime de Blasio addresses the incident.

He said:

“We I believe are seeing a phenomenon with some of these motorcycle groups deciding to take over certain streets so they can perform their stunts, and disrupt traffic, slow traffic in the process, and it’s dangerous. It’s really dangerous... This confrontation is a byproduct of that, so we have to crack down on this. It’s not legal to disrupt traffic in a group, it’s not legal, obviously to take the law into their own hands as they appear to have done... This is simply not acceptable behavior."

But what are you going to do about it? It's easy to say "This is simply not acceptable behavior" about all manner of crimes, but then what. "Crack down." How?

"One Video Encapsulates Everything Wrong With NYC Street Culture."

"Two banes of New York City streets — aggressive dirt bikers using the road as a personal racetrack, and SUV drivers using their vehicles as weapons — collide in this horrific video making the rounds today."

Yesterday at about 1:30 p.m., Alexian Lien, 33, was driving a Range Rover north on the West Side Highway near 125th Street with his wife and 5-month old daughter as passengers, according to reports in the Post and Daily News. About 20 seconds into the video, group of motorcycle and dirt bike riders surround the SUV in the center lane, and a motorbike rider appears to hit the brakes and get into a fender-bender with Lien’s vehicle.

You've seen the video. (Or if not, check it out.) We watched it here at Meadhouse this morning — my son Chris along with Meade and me — and we had some different interpretations of what we saw. I'm linking to StreetsBlog, above, but there are obviously more mainstream articles (like this in the NYT). My choice of link is based on my desire to get some perspective on what these bikers are doing. (I thought they had an intent to rob the guy in the expensive car, and they deliberately cut him off, and Meade saw it as bikers out for a big group ride who felt righteous and lost their minds to road rage after what was an accident.)

There are 77 comments at StreetsBlog, which seems to be a bicycle-oriented site where people are concerned about sharing the road. I'll cherry-pick some comments. Each paragraph break is a new commenter:

I don't know what happened before the video, but based only on what I see here, the driver is acting in self defense. He is surrounded, and the initial crash was obviously deliberately caused by the guy on the motorcycle. Additionally, the guys family is in the car. At that point, its either himself and his family or them, and the only weapon he has is that car. Also, as a side note: This has nothing to do with "street culture." Its an absolutely extreme situation that's way past the point where traffic laws or driving behavior are the issue.

This has everything to do with NYC's street culture. It's a culture that's enabled by the NYPD, which focuses on tinted windows and nuisance tickets against cyclists, but sees hundreds of motorcycles on the HH parkway as the equivalent of a storm cloud - something that could be dangerous but that hopefully will pass. EVents like this are extreme, but they are the inevitable outcome of NYC's "anything goes" attitude toward street safety.

It's more like the outcome of the "if you chase them and any body gets hit in the process all fingers will be pointed at you" mentality. Most of these guys are simply going to run from the cops, and any attempt to chase them will involve risk to all the parties involved as well as innocent bystanders. It's a lose/lose situation for the NYPD.

There is plenty wrong with NYC street culture, but this video does not "encapsulate" it. There is nothing typical about this scene. The motorcyclists represent thug culture more than street culture, and this guy just happened to get caught in the middle of it and was probably scared shitless, and rightfully so. I saw an incarnation of this group riding through Brooklyn yesterday, and you wouldn't want to get into a situation with any two of these riders let alone two hundred.

First, there seems to be at least 50 motorcyclists in some of these shots. So, I ask, have they gotten a parade permit that is required of cyclists and pedestrians? Secondly. I saw a comment in another string on a website that reports that the NYPD has a do not engage policy when it comes to these throngs of motorcyclists. Not sure what that is supposed to mean, but if it is true, then why is there such a double standard when it comes to bikes? Finally, while riding I have been surrounded by around a dozen or so of these hot shots from time to time. It can be pretty scary when they are doing wheelies near you and gunning their bikes.

This video encapsulates everything wrong with NYPD's traffic enforcement culture. I've been there more than once as these illegal parades of thugs on unregistered and unlicensed dirt bikes swarm the streets, both on foot and in a car, and it is scary as hell either way. Other commenters are right. Given NYPD's lack of enforcement, best thing to do is to come to a complete stop and let them pass. Even so, many of them intentionally come dangerously close to cars, bicycles, and pedestrians in their path, running red lights and failing to yield all along the way.

I was on the Hudson River Greenway when these guys passed Canal Street. There had to be at least 200 of them. I've never seen so many motorbikes (and Quads too?) in my life. I was on the phone with my fiance and I was like wow . . . that's got to be so intimidating to be on the road with those guys. And then I sit back and laugh and think about the police presence we have at Critical Mass rides.

It certainly looked like they crowded him out of his lane and the the brake-checking started when he beeped. If theres anything before the video, obviously this interpretation would change.

Fool (driver) should have slowed down. Not saying the bikers were right, but come on, how dumb can you be. Situation could have been avoided.

Why was this driver targeted? These bikers don't target random people. The most important part is missing. The vehicle was surrounded in the very beginning of the video. Something must have occurred prior.

HE WAS A WEALTHY ASIAN MAN... 1%er! Hopefully Asians realize that no matter how much money they have and how insulated they believe themselves due to their wealth, they can be pulled from their cars and nearly murdered while the NYPD issues parking tickets. Just a taste of the de Blasio first term!

There's a lot to talk about here, but one thing is damage to the mayoral candidacy of the left-wing Democrat Bill de Blasio.

"An average moose yields about 700 pounds of lean meat when recovered from a crash."

"Even if the crash is bloody and causes clotting, about 300-400 pounds of burger meat can be salvaged. Many churches, food banks and non-profits are on a call list. When a moose fatality is reported, they call folks on the list and are given an hour or so to harvest the meat. Folks consider it a privilege when it’s their turn on the list."

Link.

"Walter Riedl...figured the only way to keep his wife safe was to give the gunman the keys to his truck and volunteer to become his hostage."

"The 69-year-old Riedl told Linda, his sweetheart since high school, not to cry, that everything was going to be OK...."

Driving Riedl’s 2004 GMC 2500HD pickup truck — a cattle trailer still attached with a cow inside of it — [James] Kruger drove erratically and acted irrationally as he sought to elude police, Riedl said. Opportunities to escape eluded him.

As they approached Dodgeville on Highway 18, he knew the city’s two traffic lights would give him a chance to jump out.

“First time in my life we got two green lights,” Riedl said.

Still, he never panicked...

Look out!

This happened in Taiwan:



(Via Metafilter.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Ivy observes that you can see the beginning of this amazing incident at 0:03. She tells you where to look, but I won't put that on the front page. It's more interesting to watch the first time without the spoiler. If you watch this once, you will watch it more than once. I had watched this about 10 times without seeing what she pointed out.

"They're not from here; they're tourists... They don't even speak English. They were very confused. "

"They had no idea how they wound up on the bridge," said the cop.

"I don't know how that would happen," said tourist Mike Norton to ABC. "They give you a little training before. They tell you don't take any bridges. I don't know what would possess you to take the bridge!"

Meanwhile: "Lost Tourist assumes all these people are in the wrong place not the other way around."

Cop at a memorial for a dead cyclist "then told me explicitly that he 'would not leave until I ‘understood’ that ‘it was the bicyclist’s fault."

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition said that SFPD Sgt. Richard Ernst made his "apparent disdain for 'you people,' bicyclists, disturbingly clear."

Shahum said that she tried to be diplomatic with Ernst and asked him to please move his patrol car out of the bike lane and into an available parking space that was right next to it, saying that it presented an unnecessary hazard to bicyclists riding past.

Diplomatically asking a cop to move his patrol car? Is that possible?

And apparently Ernst didn’t stop at denouncing [24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac] for causing her own death, in front of people who are still mourning that death. Shahum said Ernst also blamed the other two bicyclist deaths in SF this year on the cyclists, and on “you people” in the SFBC for not teaching cyclists how to avoid cars.

"Whitefish Police got a strange report Wednesday about a man falling out of a pickup truck that continued to roll down East Sixth Street."

"The man got up and chased the truck, but the reporting party wasn’t sure if he caught up to it or not."

Using the Christopher Lane murder to argue for gun control.

Promoters of gun control seem willing to use any shooting as an argument for gun control, but the murder of the jogging Australian baseball player is especially inapt. Here's Steve Clemons polemicizing in The Atlantic:

I have been greatly affected by sad news from Oklahoma today, another case of a victim of gun violence that deserves as much attention and public concern as the more grisly mass slayings we have heard so much about and which still have not produced progress on gun control....

The young college baseball player... was allegedly shot and killed by three juveniles, one of whom confessed to the police saying,  "We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody."

The accused teenagers were in a car. Lane was jogging by the side of the road. If it's really true that they were simply bored and wanted to amuse themselves by killing that particular man in that situation but they didn't have a gun, they could have run Lane down with the car. Wouldn't that have been easier than taking aim while driving? And if their mental state really was what the reported confession makes it sound like, wouldn't that have been more entertaining?

***

In last night's post about this murder, I said "Why is this murder story the lead story? I've got to assume it's counter-Trayvonistic." That is, unlike The Atlantic, some commentators are presenting this story as an example of black people targeting a white person, as if to rebalance things after media made the Trayvon Martin incident the symbol of a larger racial problem. I recommend noticing who's doing what in America's endless discourse about race, but what I want to add here is that Trayvon Martin — according to evidence presented at trial — beat George Zimmerman's head against the pavement. As Zimmerman's lawyer put it in the closing argument, Martin armed himself with the concrete curb. The pavement was appropriated as a deadly weapon, and Zimmerman used the gun in self-defense.

Promoters of gun control portray handguns as a special sort of object, because they are useful only for wounding or killing other living beings and they are designed and possessed for exactly that reason. Concrete curbs and automobiles are designed, purchased, and used for nonviolent purposes, though they can be repurposed to maim and kill. If you like gun control, this difference is important. If you don't, you'll probably say: Because there are so many ways to inflict violence — including innumerable household objects and the bare fists of whoever happens to be stronger — decent people have a right to bear arms in self-defense.

***

Only yesterday, in New York City, a cab driver, in a rage, turned a car into a deadly weapon.

“It was like a damn movie,’’ said the bike messenger, Kenneth Olivo.

He and rogue hack Mohammed Himon, 24, of The Bronx were heading north on Sixth Avenue when the cyclist cut off the cabby, law-enforcement sources said. Himon, in his yellow cab, chased Olivo to 49th Street, where the cyclist allegedly banged on the taxi. Himon “wanted to turn, but he didn’t want to wait . . . He wants to be Number 1,’’ Olivo said.

“I told him to calm down . . . He gets angry, he honks his horn, and he accelerates, and that’s it — I’m on the hood of the car, and the woman is under his car . . . He accelerated, because I couldn’t escape him.”

The woman, a British tourist named Sian Green had "her left leg... severed below the shin, and part of her right leg was left hanging by just the skin. "

Yeah, Mohammed Himon. Let's see if anyone jams this story into their larger "global jihad" template.

Scenes from the drive from Lincoln, Nebraska to Madison, Wisconsin.

1. On 2 overpasses to I-80, there were groups of protesters with signs calling attention to the Obama scandals: Benghazi, IRS, Fast & Furious. I saw at least one Gadsden flag.

2. "The corn and soybean crops looked really good. I didn't see any poor crops at all." So says Meade when I ask him about the highlights of the drive. Some people driving from Nebraska to Madison might say "Ugh, corn. Too much corn. When will we get past all this corn?" But Meade is not one of those people. His father was in the popcorn seed business.

3. Mostly looking for coffee, we got off the interstate in Williamsburg, Iowa, where there's a big outlet store shopping center. Meade wanted to go into Lids to get some baseball hats, so I went into the Coach store and was checking out with a book bag and at the next cash register, there was a woman who was quickly replaced by a man who said she didn't speak English. The older woman behind the counter plied him with cheerful questions including "Where are you from?" He said "Iraq," but he said it in his Iraqi accent, which is nothing like eye-RACK or even eee-ROCK. It was more eee-RAHqqq. The woman said she wasn't familiar with that country, and the man repeated the name, perhaps wondering whether this woman had not heard of the events of the last 10 years. I didn't want to intrude. I cast a glance at her and then at him, as they kept going back and forth, and it was obvious she was never going to hear the word he was saying as "Iraq." Finally, I said to her, "He's saying  eee-ROCK," and of course, she knew Iraq. To him, I said, sympathetically, "It was the way you said it."

4. Meade's team the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, so Meade listened to the whole game on the satellite radio as he drove, and Meade didn't see that I'd put in the earbuds and was listening to an audiobook (which happened to be "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"). I laughed and he said "I wonder if they cooked up sushi?" because he thought I'd laughed at the baseball announcer who'd just said that the people coming to the Miller Park were tailgating and "cooking up every kind of food imaginable." Apparently, my laugh was perfectly synchronized. Meade's reference to sushi harkened back to lunch, wherein I ate this:

"Can you start a post and thread on the adverse economic and environmental impact of pets?"

Asked Phaedrus in the comments to "If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel."

The same tree huggers that yammer on and on about the environment allow their pets to use everyone else property, public and private as a restroom for their animal. Human waste has to be treated under all kinds of regulatory requirements. Pets are allowed to deposit equivalent waste at will wherever as if they are wild animals which they aren't. And don't get me started on what it takes to feed them, the grain, meat etc. You could feed a lot of starving people using the grain that goes into pet food.

Consider this that post. And let me also call attention to my 2010 post "If you really believed in global warming, you would turn off your air conditioning," which had an addendum with a list of 6 more things people should do to demonstrate actual belief in the coming calamity:

1. Your weight should be at the low end of normal, indicating that you are not overconsuming the products of agriculture.

2. You should not engage in vigorous physical exercise, as this will increase your caloric requirements. You may do simple weight-lifting or calisthenics to keep in shape. Check how many calories per hour are burned and choose a form of exercise that burns as few calories as possible.

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don't run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don't waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don't have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

6. If you have free time, such as a vacation from work, spend it in your home town. Read library books, redo old jigsaw puzzles, meditate, tell stories to your children — the list of activities is endless. Just thinking up more items to put on that list is an activity that could be on the list. Really embrace this new way of life. A deep satisfaction and mental peace can be achieved knowing that you are saving the earth.

Hey, who's driving that car?

Come on! Both paws on the wheel!

"Norway’s handsome PM poses as taxi driver to hear the wishes of the people."

(Via Bloggingheads.)

"It's just nuts. It's crazy." Why are you texting and driving?

Please watch this half-hour documentary. Made by the great film director Werner Herzog:

The anti-car message conveyed by those curbside rows of bike-share kiosks falls flat...

... when the gas-powered vehicles they impede are ambulances and fire trucks.

City workers swooped in Monday night and yanked out part of a bike-share rack blocking the front of a West Village co-op — just hours after The Post called the Department of Transportation over complaints that an ambulance crew had trouble getting to a 92-year-old resident in distress.

So... your tax money is used to install these things and then yank them out again. You might say: Just site them properly in the first place. But every time an old lady is "in distress" the right place for bike-share racks becomes the wrong place, The Post calls the Department of Transportation, and — once again — city workers must swoop in and yank out. 

Young people are driving less and less.

But why? Is it economic pressure?

Online life might have something to do with the change, [suggested Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan]. “A higher proportion of Internet users was associated with a lower licensure rate,” he wrote in a recent study. “This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that access to virtual contact reduces the need for actual contact among young people.”

I get the sense that younger people are generally less interested in traveling. The idea that travel is the best thing to do with your free time and extra money... that's fading, isn't it? Something old people do.

There was also this article a few days ago saying "Americans are moving around the country a lot less frequently than they used to." That didn't specifically focus on the young.

So... is something happening to us? We're not so adventurous or not so restless or we've overcome the delusion that moving around changes who you are? We're lazy and the couch potatoism has extended into everything about the way we live? We long for the friends and family that our grandparents and great-grandparents had in the days when everyone — in this nostalgic true/false memory — stayed in one town and you had deep roots and connections to all sorts of people who loved and cared for you (or disliked you but at least knew you).

"The National Transportation Safety Board recommended that all 50 states lower the threshold from 0.08 blood-alcohol content to 0.05."

"Lowering the rate to 0.05 would save about 500 to 800 lives annually, the safety board report said."