Dana Levine

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

If we're ranking selfishness by impact, the scoreboard isn't close. A widely cited 2017 study in Environmental Research Letters found that having one fewer child saves about 58.6 metric tons of CO2-equivalent per year, dwarfing every other personal climate action combined: no car, no flights, plant-based diet, all of it ([the study](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541)). Every child born into a high-consumption country inherits a massive footprint and a destabilizing climate they didn't vote for. Framing childlessness as selfish gets it exactly backward. The genuinely self-interested move is demanding the planet produce another consumer to staff your old age, keep your pension solvent, and carry your name forward.

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Minor-league baseball players are employees. Under the 2023 collective bargaining agreement their minimum salaries run from about $19,800 at the lowest levels to $35,800 at Triple-A, and they unionized, which they did successfully. Now compare: a Power 4 football program can clear $100 million in revenue in a year, built almost entirely on unpaid labor. The [MiLB](https://www.milb.com/) comparison destroys every defense of the current model. We already decided that young athletes developing toward a pro career deserve wages, benefits, and a union. College athletes generate far more money and face far more physical risk than a Single-A infielder. The only difference is that the NCAA spent 70 years insisting its workers were students first. The market spoke. Listen to it.

Should daylight saving time be abolished permanently?

Every November and March, my household spends a week recovering from a government-mandated jet lag. My kids' bedtimes slide, mornings become battles, and teachers report the same fog in every classroom. The original energy-saving argument collapsed years ago: a 2008 Department of Energy study found the extension of daylight time saved about half a percent of electricity, a rounding error. Meanwhile Arizona and Hawaii skip the whole ritual and function perfectly well, as [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/) coverage of the debate regularly notes. Russia tried permanent daylight time in 2011 and abandoned it after public outcry over dark winter mornings, switching to permanent standard time in 2014. The experiment has been run. The switching helps almost nobody and disrupts everybody. End it.

And small companies are the least likely to have real privacy counsel. An automatic audit forces them to build proper data practices from the start instead of treating compliance as something only giants do.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should location privacy violations trigger automatic independent audits?