So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 6) Why you should have been a school child in Virginia

Hello! I keep reading all these blog posts wittering on about how it's the last week of summer, and it makes me feel bad for the first three weeks of September before the autumnal equinox. Also, here in the SF Bay Area, we're only now heading into our warm season following June gloom, a week of July, then Fogust. Are you ready to listen to "The Boys of Summer" all nostalgic-like? Or does the Hold Steady's anthem "Let this be our annual reminder/that we can all be something bigger" still feel relevant?

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Virginia children are not back in school, and you can thank the powerful roller coaster lobby for that. Virginia prohibits city and county school districts from starting class before Labor Day, mostly because if they do, then King's Dominion, Busch Gardens and Water Country U.S.A. don't have a vast army of teenagers willing to work for minimum wage. The comments are filled with people who somehow skipped over the words "schools that miss an average of at least eight days a year can start before Labor Day," didn't realize that Virginia requires 990 hours of instruction annually, and then forgot that some districts were already out of snow days by the end of January 2014. And so they cry, "This isn't true!" -- completely missing the point of the story.

So what? The point to the story is that the Virginia lawmakers are very fond of taking money from amusement park operators to maintain a calendar schedule that may not sync up with the rest of the country. The calendar-synching is less of a big deal than the visible money-for-policy angle.

Who cares? Anyone wondering what the average asking price is for a Virginia lawmaker's vote. (Hint: It's fairly cheap: the owners of Busch Gardens only spent $1 million over a decade.)

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California phones can no longer communicate with SkyNet and conspire to overthrow us all. Okay, that's not quite right. Today, the state became the first in the nation to pass a "kill switch" law, meaning that all smartphones sold in the state must come with an option to wipe the phone remotely and render it unusable.

So what? A lot of phones already came with remote-wipe technology in the event of phone theft (which is skyrocketing, possibly because people are remarkably careless with the devices). The phone manufacturers argue that slapping legal requirements on the phone will ultimately deter more effective anti-theft innovation, dooming the phones to clunky "old" anti-theft requirements.

Who cares? Phone manufacturers, who are in the unenviable position of trying to insist that they care about customer safety so much, they think laws specifically designed to maintain consumer safety are ultimately unsage. Consumer advocates also care, because they're keeping an eye on how phone vendors will monkey with their anti-theft insurance policies in the wake of this news.

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Coca-Cola's plans for world dominance thwarted by lack of water. The company was hoping to make a big push in India -- the subcontinent was the last great untapped market, with the average Indian only drinking 12 bottles of soda per year (puny when stacked against the 230-bottles-a-year Brazilian). However, since a bottling plant in Mehdiganj opened in 1999, groundwater levels have dropped 26 feet. Protestors and activists captured the attention of the local government, and Coca-Cola's just over dealing with all the hassle.

So what? Water shortages are going to be a huge factor in a region's economic growth, especially as more regions fall into drought thanks to man-made climate change. Either the lack of water will limit an area or it will induce the development of new industries (like water recycling technologies).

Who cares? So many industries: Insurance (which covers all manner of risks, some weather related); real estate; construction; agriculture; beverages; data analysis; hardware and software engineering. Water management is about to become a huge ($$$) deal as water stops being a cheap, plentiful commodity in formerly-moist parts of the world.

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When it comes to marriage, ignorance is bliss. Although a recent study alleges that having a big wedding is the key to a long-lived marriage, the real news is buried in the researchers' contention that people with considerable romantic histories are fated to be less happy in holy matrimony. The University of Denver's Galena Rhoades and Scott Stanley wrote, "More experience may increase one’s awareness of alternative partners and a strong sense of alternatives is believed to make it harder to maintain commitment to, and satisfaction with, what one already has."

So what? This study is basically saying that the more people someone has been involved with before marriage, the less likely it is that their marriage will be happy, because they're aware that other options exist. This is basically the paradox of choice as applied to human interactions.

Who cares? Your mom, who was not too keen on you shacking up with your college girlfriend. Also, social scientists are going to immediately see how this observation applies in different socioeconomic niches, no doubt.

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One final culture note: I saw The Normal Heart just in time for Emmy season, and watching it prompted a re-read of Randy Shilts' superb And The Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic. The book is a masterclass in long-form journalism. It is also the literary precursor to The Wire, as all 700+ pages detail the triumph of institutional self interest over the institution's actual mission. And you don't even have to like The Wire to appreciate the depth of this exhaustively researched, snappily written book.

Yes, there was a movie. No, I don't care to talk about it. Just read the book and wonder why it hasn't been revisited as a 13-part miniseries.