Rad Geek People's Daily

Here’s a long post by Kelsey Piper, block-quoted in its entirety from the Ex Birb site (so you don’t have to, etc.); boldface is added by me.

Kelsey Piper

@KelseyTuoc

I dislike having to plead with the public to make the case for the worthiness of the things I want to spend my money on; it’s a free country, and it should be sufficient that it’s my money.

But I keep having conversations in which I say yeah I like cheap low quality goods and they make my life better and people express incredulity at the very idea, or insist that I’m rationalizing what is obviously a deep void of meaninglessness, so let me describe what cheap goods mean to me.

The first thing it means is that I can try things. If a hobby requires gear or supplies or books or whatever else, and there’s no cheap version of those things, I know myself – I simply never dip my toes in the water in the first place.

It’s not worth spending $1000 to figure out whether my kids like camping. But if camping gear is cheap, we’ll try it. We did some camping with cheap gear, we liked it, now maybe we’ll upgrade and get good, long-lasting stuff.

I started playing D&D with a $5 bag of dice. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount on gorgeous metal dice now, but if it’d cost that much to get started I would never have tried at all.

5yo developed an enthusiasm for armored knights and swordfighting, so we tried out some SCA events. Because it’s easy to get cheap Viking tunics, I now own one. I was never going to spend hundreds of dollars on the nice version. (I was also never, realistically, going to find something that niche on the local buy nothing groups which I participate in.)

When consumer goods are expensive, it’s not worth taking risks and trying things you might end up disliking, or might not have the skill to execute on. We had an awful landing on our stairs where the door to the yard opened and the wood was badly damaged by six years of people tracking in water and mud. I wanted to try putting down vinyl tile flooring there, but I’d never laid vinyl flooring before and I’m not exactly a home improvement pro. I wouldn’t have tried it if it was expensive, but it was $20, so I was willing to take the leap. It turns out to be very easy to install and it looks so much better now. With greater confidence in my DIY skills I’ve ordered wallpaper for the kids’ rooms.

The fact that consumer goods are cheap also lets me try out companies I don’t already know and trust. If something costs $200, I’m only going to buy from a company that has a good reputation, where I trust the warranty, which has been around a while. For cheaper products, I’m willing to take a chance on new entrants just off seeing an ad and some credible good reviews.

The second thing it means is that I can do crafts and experiments and activities at the microschool. It has ten kids now; buying ten of anything will start to pinch the pocketbook. But because consumer goods are cheap, I can buy the things we need for papermaking when we’re learning about how papermaking works, or model city kits when we’re talking about urban design, or play money for practice making change and running a business. I can buy a gumball machine so we can take it apart and look at the mechanism. I can buy so, so many books. Do you have any idea how expensive books used to be? Do you have any idea how many our microschool library now has? My children will never run out of good books to read because consumer goods are cheap.

Or they were cheap, last week.

I keep talking to people who have in mind huge swathes of the consumer economy that they’re sure we don’t really need. Big TVs, someone said to me last week. Surely you can admit we don’t really need big TVs.

I do not admit this. Sometimes six or eight kids want to crowd around downstairs in my home and watch a movie or play Smash together and they need a big TV.

4-cent bouncy balls, surely we don’t need those.

I do not admit this; I bought a bunch for a civics lesson last week.

Would it be such a big deal if toasters were $100?

Yes, because I would never buy one to disassemble and learn how it works.

How about Shein clothes, surely no one needs those?

Actually, I kind of like that I can attend costume parties! I have a cheap Victorian ballgown with an absurd hoopskirt my children like to hide under, and it makes my life better!

I would not pay four times more for a better version of any of these things. I would just do without them; they are not important enough to break the bank for. But my life would be worse without them. It would have less spontaneity in it, less curiosity, less whim, less exploration.

If you find that cheap consumer goods cause you depression, my condolences. I think that’s a skill issue. Cheap consumer goods make it easier for me to live the life I want to live, surrounded by the people I want to live it with, while donating to charity and saving for retirement and living within my means. You can raise my taxes, but don’t pretend you’re really truly doing me a favor while you do it.

— Kelsey Piper, … [L]et me describe what cheap goods mean to me.
Twitter/X dot com, April 4, 2025 @ 7:06PM

The study [Sehrin et al. (2024), “The effect on income of providing near vision correction to workers in Bangladesh: The THRIVE (Tradespeople and Hand-workers Rural Initiative for a Vision-enhanced Economy) randomized controlled trial”] — published Wednesday in PLOS ONE — found a dramatic increase in earnings with a very low-cost change: a new pair of reading glasses.^[1]

The researchers went to 56 villages in Bangladesh and found more than 800 adults ages 35 to 65 who are farsighted – that is, they could not see well up close. Half were randomly selected to get glasses; the other half got glasses after eight months. In that time, the researchers found that income grew by 33% for those with glasses – from a median monthly income of $35 to $47 – and that people who were not in the workforce were able to start jobs after getting reading glasses.

This is a really big study, says Dr. David Friedman, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the project. This is the first time we can really say that something that will improve [someone’s] quality of life from a visual standpoint will also help with poverty alleviation, which is an enormous finding.

— Gabrielle Emanuel, Glasses aren’t just good for your eyes. They can be a boon to income, too
NPR Morning Edition, April 3, 2024.

O.K., so if cheap, commodity reading glasses are such a big economic benefit, why don’t lots more people in poor countries get reading glasses? Or why don’t development or aid outfits give lots more glasses out? Is it because they’re cheap for people in affluent societies, with affluent incomes, but just turn out to be an unaffordable expense for poor people, or for people in poor countries? If the problem were some unavoidable cost structures of making or distributing commodity reading glasses, in any case, this would seem like an obvious case for a really, really low-cost charitable intervention by NGOs. But even that seems like a real stretch — you can pick up commodity reading glasses for $10, retail, at Wal-Mart. That’s a lot more to a poor person than it is to a rich person — or to anyone in a rich society. But it’s not the real bottleneck.

The real bottleneck is a story that is as old and familiar as it is frustrating.

In the U.S., the U.K. and many other European countries, reading glasses are readily available over-the-counter at most drugstores. That’s not the case elsewhere.

A pair of glasses can be hard to find

In a lot of low- and middle-income countries, glasses are still tightly regulated, says Dr. Nathan Congdon, a co-author of the study and chair of Global Eye Health at Queen’s University Belfast. People often have to get a prescription from a vision specialist before they can purchase glasses, even reading glasses. This proves to be a huge hurdle for those living in poverty and those in remote areas, he says.

. . . The glasses themselves cost maybe $3-4. And using village health workers, we can make the cost of delivery very inexpensive as well, said Congdon. So the whole thing can really just be a handful of dollars to deliver something that’s potentially quite life changing.

. . . Congdon would like to see regulations loosen to improve access to reading glasses. He says the regulations, the cost and a general lack of awareness have meant many people who need glasses go without. When searching for participants, his team met almost nobody in the Bangladeshi villages with glasses.

The state of global vision care: in need of correction

Congdon, who is an ophthalmologist himself, largely blames his own profession.

**Ophthalmologists and optometrists may be advising the government that they should tightly regulate access to these products [to] strengthen their professions. They may see themselves as gatekeepers of quality, he says. I wouldn’t be recommending that we just hand out distance glasses, but I do think that for near [vision] glasses that’s a reasonable thing to do.

— Gabrielle Emanuel, Glasses aren’t just good for your eyes. They can be a boon to income, too
NPR Morning Edition, April 3, 2024.

Well, hell, if he won’t, I will: I would be recommending that we just hand out distance glasses. Come on, seriously, why in the world not?^[2] But in any case, the big lesson here is — once again — the real barriers, which build the structure of global poverty as we know it and confine people to it, are not a matter of the economics of eyeglasses in a market society or whatever; it’s a specific dysfunction of the political economy of optometry and medical professions. The best solution — and the thing that matters even more for the poorest people in the poorest societies — is to get regulation out of the way.

1. ^[1][Abstract from PLOS One: Presbyopia, the leading cause of vision impairment globally, is common during working years. However, no trials have assessed presbyopia’s impact on income. In April 2017, we conducted a census among 59 Bangladesh villages to identify persons aged 35 to 65 years with presbyopia (presenting distance vision > = 6/12 bilaterally and correctable inability to see 6/13 at 40 cm with both eyes), who never had owned glasses. Participants were randomized (1:1) to receive immediate free reading glasses (intervention) or glasses delivered 8 months later (control). Visual demand of different jobs was stratified into three levels. Outcomes were between-group differences in the 8 month change in: self-reported monthly income (primary) and Near Vision Related Quality of Life (NVRQOL, secondary). Among 10,884 census participants, 3,655 (33.6%) met vision criteria and 863 (23.6%) comprised a sample enriched for near vision-intensive jobs, but 39 (4.52%) could not be reached. All participants allocated to intervention (n = 423, 51.3%) and control (n = 401, 48.7%) received the appropriate intervention, and follow-up was available for 93.4% and 96.8% respectively. Groups were similar at baseline in all characteristics: mean age was 47 years, 50% were male, 35% literate, and about half engaged in “most near vision-intensive” occupations. Glasses wear at 8-month follow-up was 88.3% and 7.81% in intervention and control respectively. At baseline, both the intervention and control groups had a self-reported median monthly income of US$35.3. At endline, the median income for the intervention group was US$47.1 compared with US$35.3 for control, a difference of 33.4%. Predictors of greater income increase in multivariate models included intervention group allocation (OR 1.45, 95% CI 1.12, 1.88, P = 0.005), male sex (OR 2.41, 95% CI 1.84, 3.16, P <0.001), and not engaging in income-producing work at baseline (OR 2.35, 95% CI 1.69, 3.26, P<0.001). —RG]↩
2. ^[2]If people need a professional exam and prescription to get glasses that work well for them, then there are lots of ways they can figure that out and go get the professional exam and prescription. No doubt you need careful measurement by a professional to get a good tailored suit, too. But this is a matter of judgment where the customer can easily judge for themselves how much they need and how well it worked out. There’s no need for a regulatory requirement here, either.↩

Here’s the news:

Alabama cannot prosecute doctors and reproductive health organizations for helping patients travel out of the state to obtain abortions, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

Alabama has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, and in 2022 its attorney general, Steve Marshall, a Republican, raised the possibility of charging doctors with criminal conspiracy for recommending abortion care out of state.

Multiple clinics and doctors challenged Mr. Marshall’s comments in court, accusing him of threatening their First Amendment rights, as well as the constitutional right to travel. The Justice Department under the Biden administration had also weighed in with support for the clinics, arguing that “threatened criminal prosecutions violate a bedrock principle of American constitutional law.”

On Monday, the judge, Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama, in Montgomery, ruled that Mr. Marshall would be violating both the First Amendment and the right to travel if he sought prosecution.

. . .

The clinics that first challenged Mr. Marshall’s comments, in 2023, included the Yellowhammer Fund, an organization founded in Tuscaloosa that helps fund and support abortion access in the Deep South, and the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, now known as WAWC Healthcare. The plaintiffs also included Dr. Yashica Robinson, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Huntsville.

In court filings, they said they either had stopped operating an abortion fund or had begun declining to answer questions about how patients could seek care out of state. Collectively, the plaintiffs still receive several calls a week asking for help; the court ruling on Monday put the figure at as many as 95 a week.

“Every day was agonizing,” said Kelsea McLain, the health care access director for the Yellowhammer Fund. The ruling, she said, brought “just an overwhelming sense of relief.”

“We are free to do exactly what we feel called to do, in ways that we are experts in,” she added. “People won’t be alone.”

Mr. Marshall’s office said it was “reviewing the decision to determine the state’s options.”

Notably, in a 2022 opinion concurring with the decision to overturn Roe, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that he did not believe a state could constitutionally bar a resident from traveling for an abortion. Judge Thompson noted this in his ruling on Monday.

— Emily Cochrane, Alabama Can’t Prosecute Those Who Help With Out-of-State Abortions, Judge Rules
New York Times, 1 April 2025.

From an e-mail I received today from Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion fund in Alabama that suspended funding after the Dobbs decision while they sought a legal opinion:

Yellowhammer Fund

WE WON!

. . .

We just WON our lawsuit against Alabama’s Attorney General which means that we’ll be able to reopen our Abortion Access Hotline and fund abortions for Alabamians again!!

While this decision was the best case scenario, it means that we need a LOT of money to help Alabama abortion seekers. Right now, our goal is to raise $250,000 to get our abortion line back up and running.

We’ll be assisting folks with clinic costs, traveling multiple states away to get to a clinic, childcare costs, lodging, and much more. Within less than an hour after receiving the news, we’ve already pledged $1,000 to a patient who had a funding gap. Help us help 250 more clients by giving now!

Wanna support abortion access for Alabamians (again!!)? Donate now!

I first read this a while ago; I find myself referring back to it at least a couple times just about every month or so.

This is a despicable orgy of arbitrary state violence, and an utterly lawless assault on due process.

Chicago attorneys with the National Immigrant Justice Center and the ACLU of Illinois accused the federal government in court Thursday of violating immigration law and the constitutional rights of at least 22 people who were arrested and detained in the midwest since President Donald Trump’s inauguration as part of his crackdown on immigration.

Two people are still in custody, 19 were released on bond and one has already been deported.

Attorneys are asking for the immediate release of people still detained, bond reimbursements, weekly reports on immigration arrests and additional training and discipline of federal agents involved in the arrests.

The motion filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said federal agents arrested at least one person without probable cause. Attorneys also accused the federal government of making arrests without proper warrants and creating warrants in the field after the arrests.

Attorneys say these actions violate the Nava Settlement — a 2018 class-action lawsuit filed in response to unlawful arrests by ICE agents who used traffic stops and other tactics to make arrests without a warrant. Under the agreement, ICE officials can conduct a warrantless arrest if they believe an individual is likely to escape but they must provide evidence. But in the motion filed Thursday in federal court in Chicago, attorneys said federal agents since January failed to assess whether there was probable cause that an individual was likely to flee before a warrant could be issued.

No one disputes that ICE has authority to do immigration enforcement in the U.S., in Chicago, anywhere in the U.S., said Mark Fleming, of the National Immigrant Justice Center’s federal litigation project.^[1] But they only have authority to do it under the laws that Congress have passed or are part of the legal limitations of the US Constitution.

Fleming says the rhetoric of mass deportation is putting a lot of pressure on federal immigration officials to get their detention and arrest numbers up.

In order to do this mass deportation that the administration has demanded of them, [federal agents] are going way outside the bounds of the legal guardrails around arrest and deprivation of liberty, both within the immigration laws but also under the U.S. Constitution, Fleming said. [ICE agents] believed that they had developed a work around the settlement, albeit an unlawful one.

. . .

The 22 cases include Chicago resident Julio Noriega, 54, a U.S. citizen who, according to court documents, was arrested, handcuffed and spent most of the night at an ICE processing center in suburban Broadview. He was never questioned about his citizenship and was only released after agents looked at his ID.

I was born in Chicago, Illinois and am a United States citizen, Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and social security card. They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.

— Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, Immigration agents arrested a U.S. citizen and created warrants after an arrest, lawyers say in court
WBEZ Chicago, 13 March 2025.

See also:

• GT 2008-01-27: Someone must have slandered Thomas W….. . . . But the point that I do want to make is that if you’re a U.S. citizen, and you’re not convinced of the central importance of immigration law–if you believe that you can reliably secure your own freedom without paying attention to the way that governments treat undocumented immigrants–then you need to think a lot harder about what a system of immigration control necessarily entails. International apartheid requires mechanisms for detecting, and then either interdicting or rounding up, unauthorized immigrants. But to discover and then interfere with their presence in the country, it necessarily entails a system of paramilitary border control, and it also necessarily entails immigration dossiers, passbooks, and government surveillance. But these systems have to be inflicted both on citizens and on immigrants for them to make any sense at all; by definition, the government can’t discover immigrants who bypass the official documentation system by getting documentation of their undocumented status, so instead the border control State has to force everyone else to carry papers, to submit to La Migra’s surveillance, and to take on the burden of giving affirmative proof of our status whenever some prick with a clipboard demands it. There’s no way to block off opportunities for undocumented immigrants to move or to get jobs except by limiting everyone’s freedom of motion or employment to government-controlled chokepoints where papers can be demanded and inspected. And there’s no way to make undocumented immigrants disappear into legal limbo without also, at the same time, creating an ominous threat to any citizen who might come under La Migra’s suspicion or might have trouble producing her own papers on demand. There is no way for international apartheid to be enforced on immigrants without massive invasions on the privacy and liberties of non-immigrants, because the basic concept — the concept of a government with the power and prerogative to systematically screen who is and who is not allowed to exist within its territory — requires everybody, whether their presence is authorized or unauthorized by the government, to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. . . .

1. ^[1][Editor’s Note: No one? Nah. I dispute this, even if no-one else does. Existing law may grant them this power, but it cannot grant them authority to do things everywhere that nobody has the authority to do anywhere. —RG]↩