Fashion, Innovation

What’s the Deal with Pants and Shoes?

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The worlds oldest discovered pair of trousers are 3,300 years old. How different are they from what we wear? Time joked that they would fit in at Anthropologie.

Pants Image
The Pants

Made from wool, with a reinforced crotch, pattern design and straight leg, these pants feature most of the elements of a modern pant. Sure there was no zipper or clasp, no pockets, and the waistband wasn’t elastic–but people still wear rompers, and I would argue those are a step down in functionality.

Why haven’t pants changed much? My dress pants are wool and I like them more than most “modern” fabrics. Did we find the secret sauce over 3,000 years ago and haven’t found an improvement yet?

Shoes too. I was recently looking for a new pair of shoes for work and I wanted the following attributes:

  • Leather upper (stretchable)
  • Use of a wide last
  • Replaceable heal
  • Cork in footbed

I’m a little picky on dress shoes, but I’ve worn through too many and they are one of the three things to spend money on (Shoes, Mattress, chair). I’ve had shoes with synthetic tops, cushioned midsoles and rubber bottoms. They have either looked clunky, wore quickly, or lost comfort with wear. This does not happen with shoes that have the characteristics above.

Roman sandals from as early as 34 BC would fit in with the worlds oldest trousers in Anthropologie. They were leather with cork or hardened leather bottoms and tight laces.

Roman Caligae

Again, did we find the secret sauce in 50 BC? Toss in metal eyelets, rubber welt, and traction supporting bottoms, and we have modern shoes. Much like rompers, are pleather stilettoes a great leap forward or a ‘Great Leap Forward’?

Why is it that authors from the Victorian era through the Golden Age of Science fiction anticipate so much change to our clothing? For thousands of years fashion changed tremendously, but the technology in clothing (pants and shoes at least) did not. Why by year 2000 did those authors anticipate we would be wearing Mylar jumpsuits with rocket packs and motorized heelys? Hell, we just passed self-lacing shoes as a possibility.

I think it could be that we did find the best design for most clothes in the BC era. Wearable tech won’t catch on precisely because fashion changes so often and it’s hard to find something that works well. I wouldn’t want to buy a shirt with great computing power if I anticipate that it will be out-of-style in a few months. I’d rather put that power in my pocket. Instead, I would want the technology benefits in clothes to center around making maintenance easier and item cost lower.

I think there will be a point where clothing fundamentally changes, but it will come only after other factors cause us to need clothing that protects against threats or facilitates actions that humans have not encountered in the past. I don’t think fashion will lead the revolution; which is interesting, because the fashion industry is one that prides itself on change.

Observations

Strict Scrutiny Needed

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Strict Scrutiny is, in the hosts’ words,  “A podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.”  I am a frequent listener; the hosts are quick-witted legal minds that provide a partial-but-supported analysis of the current cases and happenings in the Supreme Court.

In a recent episode, host Melissa Murray interviews Adam Cohen about his new book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. This episode was uncharacteristically one-sided and left me wishing that Murray engaged with more of the ideas that Adam promotes in his book. As a disclaimer, I have not yet read the book, so the content of this post is specific to the episode (listen here).

As a response to the podcast, I penned a letter to Murray emphasizing the areas of the conversation that I wished received more airtime:

Melissa,

I am probably more conservative, and further removed from the legal profession than most of your listeners. Caveats out of the way, I listened to your recent conversation with Adam Cohen, and although I enjoyed it, I was hoping to hear more pushback and thoughtful consideration of his assertions during the conversation.

I have not yet read Cohen’s book, but I’ll summarize what I heard to be his argument during your conversation:

  • The Warren Court from 1962-1962 protected the rights of the people and better served the duties of the Supreme Court than any Court since
  • Nixon gutted the Warren Court, making way for a business-first, people-second judicial record since 1969
  • Since 1969 the Court gave rise to two primary forms of inequality that continue to increasingly damage the nation
    • Educational inequality
    • Wealth inequality

Adam’s framing brings a number of questions worth asking in conversation, yet most of his arguements were accepted as fact for the purpose of your conversation. One question I was glad to hear early in the conversation, is why did he start with the Warren Court?

The answer was that Adam views the Warren Court as a high water mark in Court history; and even though you asserted that the Courts on either side of the Warren Court in history would have been considered too conservative and pro-busienss to Adam, I would have liked more attention paid to Adam’s underlying belief about the Court.

The Warren Court during that time appears to me as a bit of an anomoly in the judical record. To use a subset of Warren’s reign as cheif justice as a starting point for a 50-year trend, is to obfuscate a considerablily longer trend and structural consequence of how the Court functions.

Adam seems to judge the Court based on a civil and human rights scale, I wish you specifically asked about his weighing mechanism and how he rated a justice based on her tenure. By which mandate are certain Courts “better” than others?

While I agree the government should do more to protect the rights of underprivileged classes and reduce inequality, I’m not sure that Adam is evaluating the right entity. A Court that has lifetime appointments, is not accountable to the Public, and that has no mandate to govern the people, may not be the right entity to judge on how well it benefits the public good for all.

In the words of Warren Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, writing in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette:

But, as judges, we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution, and are equally bound by our judicial obligations whether we derive our citizenship from the earliest or the latest immigrants to these shores. As a member of this Court, I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard. The duty of a judge who must decide which of two claims before the Court shall prevail, that of a State to enact and enforce laws within its general competence or that of an individual to refuse obedience because of the demands of his conscience, is not that of the ordinary person. It can never be emphasized too much that one’s own opinion about the wisdom or evil of a law should be excluded altogether when one is doing one’s duty on the bench. The only opinion of our own even looking in that direction that is material is our opinion whether legislators could, in reason, have enacted such a law. In the light of all the circumstances, including the history of this question in this Court, it would require more daring than I possess to deny that reasonable legislators could have taken the action which is before us for review.

Structurally, the Court will most likely be the most conservative entity of government due to its makeup and its mandate. I believe that Adam is judging the Court on a rubric made for Congress, and I hoped the conversation would explore the reasoning behind his assertions.

I will not be able to have this conversation with Adam, and the best I can do is write my thoughts in this letter. Thank you for each engaging episode; they built enough of an emotional connection to cause me to write this letter.

 

Observations

Is impeachment the right move?

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Almost always, yes. For the last three and a half years, the Democratic party has tried to impeach president Donald Trump. I say the Democratic party, rather than a subset of Americans, because Trump’s approval rating with conservatives has remained north of 80% for most of his presidency and his overall approval rating has rested between 40-45%. The conservative approval rating matters in impeachment process, because impeachment is considerably more of a political concern than a judicial one. Only one senator has ever voted to remove a president of his party from office (Mitt Romney).  It’s clear that impeachment, and the threat of removal from office, does not serve as a deterrent from presidential abuses of power.

What if impeachments and removals were significantly more common? Would it remain true that senators would continue to vote along party lines? Are there past presidents who would have been similarly strong candidates for impeachment?

To start exploring these questions, it is worth an overview of the impeachment process. The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to draft articles of impeachment against the president. The articles of impeachment include a charge of misconduct of the President. The Senate evaluates the articles of impeachment under the direction of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. If two-thirds, or greater, of the Senate convict the President, the President will be removed from office. 

The House of Representatives are limited to “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as reasons to impeach a sitting president (or other official). Unfortunately, the phase “high crimes and misdemeanors” has never been clearly defined.

The Articles of Impeachment for Donald Trump included two principle charges:

  1. Abuse of Power for alleged quid pro quo dealings with the president of Ukraine.
  2. Obstruction of Congress for hindering the subsequent investigation.

Both charges referenced high crimes and misdemeanors as the basis of impeachment. Imagine a banking official charged with abuse of power and obstruction of justice, would Americans prefer that the banking official is let free with no investigation? No, evidence from the Great Recession makes it clear that Americans desired stricter treatment of Wall Street Officials. If impeachment did not carry the weight that it does politically, Americans would be much less split on whether Congress should try the President through impeachment proceedings.

Are there other presidents who could have been impeached with similar charges?

Yes. this post will not review all Presidents who would have been likely candidates; I have identified three that could have faced similar charges and are worth summary:

  1. Andrew Jackson– Endorsed a state law that did not allow white Americans to live on American Indian land, when the Supreme Court ruled that the law was unconstitutional, Jackson refused to force the state to comply with the ruling. His treatment of American Indians invalidated numerous treaties with various American Indian tribes.
  2. Abraham Lincoln– During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of  habeas corpus, enacted war-time executive powers, and gave the Emancipation Proclamation without the approval of Congress or the Supreme Court. When Chief Justice, Roger Brooke Taney, dissented to the suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln ignored the dissent.
  3. Ulysses S. Grant– During the Grant administration, distillers in the Midwest did not pay the required taxes on alcohol. To escape taxation, the distillers had a wide-spread and complex bribery scheme, that kept officials from collecting taxes. Grant used the weight of his presidency to appoint and then defend his allies who were embroiled in the scheme.

Each of the three could have been subject to impeachment on the same terms: Abuse of Power, and obstruction of another branch or investigation. I am not advocating that all should have been removed; it is hard to imagine a United States after the Civil War had Lincoln been removed. Impeachment is a process to review and try Presidents who perform acts of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanor;” if the general public and Congress is not open to having these trials, then the general public is doomed to have Presidents who continue to toe each line. If removal is not a threat, then sitting Presidents will not be threatened by it.

Trump should have been impeached, so should many past presidents. The removal process does not work, and I do not have a solution for it. It is unclear to me which presidents should have been removed; it is clear to me that with more impeachments and more chances for removal, there will be more opportunities for the Senate to get the process corrected in the future.

 

 

 

 

Observations, Prediction

Korematsu 3? 4?

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It wouldn’t be shocking to many on the left to learn, after the election of 2016, that the Supreme Court would need to decide a  “Korematsu 3” during Trump’s presidency; what they wouldn’t be able to guess is that it occured based on the actions of the left in the worst U.S pandemic in the last 100 years.

Korematsu v. United States was the case that, in effect, permitted Japanese internment during Eorld War II in the U.S. The Supreme Court, at the time, understood that their decision to uphold the program’s constitutionality had the potential to pervert future readings of the Constitution, but deemed the risk of a Japanese attack too great to ignore.

Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority wrote:

Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions. But when, under conditions of modern warfare, our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.

To the court’s credit, the original ruling was clear that it should not be used in future cases. To the court’s discredit, the Korematsu decision was used as justification in one of Justice Jackson’s opinions only 5 years later.

What does Korematsu have to do with the situation the U.S finds itself in now? Many state and local governments have issued “shelter in place” orders as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic. For some localities, the need appears obvious and can be tied to a specific number of cases and forcastable public risk. Seattle, for instance, saw an early and imminent risk of outbreak when first calling for quarantine measures.

When other cities and states followed suit, it wasn’t always as obvious that the order protected against an imminent threat. Many municipalities now under state-wide shelter-in-place laws, have no confirmed incidences of COVID-19 in their communities. Should it be legal for state governments to shutter their businesses, close their community centers, and halt daily life because of an abstract, so-far-unrealized threat?

Many doctors think so. Lessons from other countries seem to reinforce the effectiveness of a quarantine; however, I expect a legal challenge to state quarantine before the pandemic is over. The shelter-in-place mandates are too broad, too economically damaging, and are attached to no exit criteria.

When these laws are challenged, what will the Supreme Court rely on? Korematsu?

**To provide some hope to our hypothetical character at the beginning of the post, Korematsu did come up during the Trump presidency in the exact way she anticipated. In a time where many fear the degradation of minority libraries, the U.S Supreme Court condemned Korematsu in 2018 to demonstrate societal progress.

Observations

Viva the Minivan

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I do not own a minivan. I crippled from the pressure of others. “What are you a mom?” they said. “No one wants a minivan,” they said. “You don’t have kids, and I’m not riding in it,” they said.

Okay, they, I don’t care if you want to ride in my vehicle. A minivan probably made the most sense for me at the time. It probably does for you as well. In fact, it is probably the best all-around vehicle body style in the US right now.

Let’s start by looking at the best selling new cars of 2019. The best selling vehicle was the Ford F-series (yes, they cheat every year by combining the sales of different trucks). The best selling small SUV was the Toyota RAV4. The best selling sedan was the Toyota Camry, and the best selling full-size SUV was the Toyota Highlander. The best selling minivan of 2019 was the Dodge Grand Caravan.

To judge how the minivan compares, let’s review what most drivers actually need in a vehicle. Most drivers:

  • Occasionally drive 3-4 other adults
  • Occasionally haul “weekend warrior” project materials
  • Frequently drive children and their things (if applicable)
  • Want to reduce fuel costs
  • Spend most of their driving at city speeds or on highways
  • Desire a quiet, comfortable ride
  • Choose vehicles largely based on cost
  • Are not very good at driving in uncomfortable situations

The Grand Caravan or Highlander are the best suited for carrying kids or other adults based on second row space. Both offer captain’s chairs as an option for the second row seating (although it is much cheaper in the Grand Caravan). The Highlander, F-series (F150 from here), and Grand Caravan are the best suited to carry weekend build projects and the clutter that comes with kids. It’s clear that the bed of the F-150 is best suited for home improvement because it does not have a ceiling, but the Grand Caravan is the second-choice. It has more room than the Highlander (it will fit a sheet of drywall or plywood) and the low load height will be the easiest on the back.

Neither the RAV4, nor the Camry are suited to fit four adults or haul home improvement materials. That leaves the Highlander, Grand Caravan, and F-150 as vehicles that can conceivably meet all needs listed above. All three are able to drive comfortably at city and highway speeds. None are great on fuel economy, but the Highlander is the best. Of the three, the Caravan has the lowest starting and lowest fully-optioned price.

For new cars on my arbitrary list. Its clear that the Dodge Grand Caravan best suits the requirements. But what about 4-wheel drive? You probably don’t need it. In fact, it will probably help you get into scenarios that you aren’t comfortable driving. All cars have four wheel braking, that’s what matters most. What about cool factor? How does one measure it objectively? What about top speed or acceleration? When was the last time you floored it from 0-60, or hit your car’s top speed? What about the ability to tow or haul that a truck brings? How often do you actually do either?

Most people don’t buy new cars, and minivans are a better value proposition the older they get. Trucks and SUVs do not depreciate nearly as fast. If this article didn’t convince you, listen to Jalopnik. Or do what I did, buy a wagon and love it. But love it knowing that it is a poor imitation of a minivan.