Via MJT and the Washington Post:
"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama said at the time. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."That is hands down the most reassuring thing I have heard Obama say. When you are in charge of defending something, you don't worry about collateral damage unless there are strategic ramifications.
I stumbled across an incredibly tortured press release regarding raising the Oregon minimum wage.
Normally minimum wage proponents like to talk about nebulous "fairness", with the implication that only a cold-hearted bastard would oppose raising the minimum wage. So I thought it would be fun to examine what passes for a logical argument for minimum wages.
“It’s an economic stimulus for working families and Oregon,” said Leachman. “It puts money into the hands of the people who are most likely to spend it, spend it quickly and spend it here in Oregon.”I have never seen a minimum wage supporter come closer to admitting that they are wrong than this. An economic stimulus? Ha ha ha! That's as bad as the recent bailout justifications!
The adjustment reflects the rise in the cost of living as defined by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and is mandated by ballot Measure 25. Oregon voters approved that measure in 2002, when the state was also reeling from the effects of a recession.It's a shame that minimum wage is a driver of inflation - this won't result in degenerate inflationary spiral or anything.
With the New Year’s cost-of-living adjustment, an Oregon full-time minimum wage worker will earn $17,472 next year. That’s below the federal poverty line for a family of three.What reasonable person would put minimum wage at a level that supports a family of three??? Holy crap! Well, I look forward to seeing the first fully automated McDonalds.
“We’re still a long way from having an Oregon economy that works for all working families, but a minimum wage tied to the cost of living is a step in that direction,” said Leachman.
Completely ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining. Yes, Fools Gold is stupid, but it embraces that stupid and runs with it.
Way better than most romantic comedies.
I experienced for the first time one of the new TV converter boxes that reads digital rather than analog signals.
It's a pretty unpleasant tradeoff, in general.
Basically, rather than a consistently fuzzy picture you get a beautiful perfect image - except when the signal is lost entirely and you get massive visual artifacts and no sound.
It's the sound thing that shocks me the most. Software video players have long given priority to sound to make a video watchable even if frame skipping is required. I can't imagine why the digital broadcasts wouldn't provide some sound redundancy to achieve the same thing.
I finally finished Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.
The first half - relatively simple economic principles - is really good, the second half not so much. As the book delves into more esoteric ideas it starts to ramble, and the editors seem to have taken the day off. There were numerous occasions where a phrase would seem extremely familiar and, sure enough, it was duplicated almost verbatim two paragraphs earlier.
One section stuck out as being poorly argued: Illegal immigration and the mailing home of accumulated wealth, it was stated, is clearly an economic win because people are doing it (there are willing buyers and sellers). But it isn't so obvious to me that this isn't an example of an External Cost, discussed elsewhere in the book. I imagine Sowell is correct, but he's not particularly convincing.
It would have been more effective shorter, but all in all I learned a lot from this book and am hopefully less likely to make stupid mistakes when talking economics.
The only particularly good argument against photo radar that I have ever heard is that it is extremely easy to exploit at the expense of others. So easy, in fact, that it has moved from the domain of criminals that need clean plates to high school harassment.
Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.Via Slashdot and Bruce Schneier.
Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.
A group of researchers is claiming that higher bonuses actually impede performance, presumably because you get distracted by dreams of rolling around in $100 bills.
We did this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low so that we could pay people amounts that were substantial to them but still within our research budget. The lowest bonus was 50 cents — equivalent to what participants could receive for a day’s work in rural India. The middle-level bonus was $5, or about two weeks’ pay, and the highest bonus was $50, five months’ pay.Also, isn't it great that we have poor people in other countries to do these experiments on without a big budget?
What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.
We replicated these results in a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where undergraduate students were offered the chance to earn a high bonus ($600) or a lower one ($60) by performing one task that called for some cognitive skill (adding numbers) and another one that required only a mechanical skill (tapping a key as fast as possible). We found that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But when we included a task that required even rudimentary cognitive skill, the outcome was the same as in the India study: the offer of a higher bonus led to poorer performance.
After managing to convince myself that the mercury in compact fluorescent lights was a manageable risk, I have done an about face in response to a study from Maine.
The primary concern is when you have a combination of carpet and small children. it turns out that vacuuming or other agitation (like a child rolling around) can bring out levels of mercury one to two orders of magnitude higher than is considered safe. And this is two weeks after the breakage, even if you cleaned it up according to lab standards!
The pre-study cleanup guidance was generally found to be sound. However, as a result of this study, the cleanup guidance was modified to include:Might as well just burn your house down and start fresh...
- Leaving the area/room and waiting 15 minutes after breakage before returning to begin cleaning up (mercury levels in the air will have fallen from their highest levels by then);
- Using a glass container, metal screw top lid with a seal, such as a canning jar, to contain the lamp pieces, powder, and cleanup materials;
- Immediately removing the lamp breakage from the home once containerized, especially if the homeowner did not have a glass container with a good seal;
- Continue ventilating the room for several hours;
- Suggesting that homeowners consider removal of the area of carpet where the breakage occurred as a precaution, particularly in homes with infants, small children or pregnant women;
- If carpet is not removed, the homeowner should consider ventilating the room during vacuuming for the next several vacuuming events;
- Suggesting that homeowners consider not utilizing fluorescent lamps in situations where they could easily be broken, in bedrooms used by infants, small children, or pregnant women, or over carpets in rooms frequented by infants, small children and pregnant women; and
- Avoiding the storage of too many used/spent lamps before recycling as that could increase the chances of breakage.
The $0.035 at-the-pump discount is no more.
I hope whoever came up with that idea got fired. It must have been good business though, for the non-participating stations. Either their prices looked good in comparison, or they made an extra $0.035/liter.
Toys'R'Us is bad that way too. It seems like half their crap is cheaper at the till than the price tag claims. Why would you give a discount to someone clearly willing to pay a higher price??? I refuse to believe that a significant portion of the population chooses their shopping locations based on "surprise" "deals".
Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck and starring his little brother, is superb. Although a little convoluted, it's a pretty moving (sad and depressing) story about trying to make the right choices.
And it's about kids, which gives it that much more emotional kick.
Sacha and Tony are having an interesting discussion about the Axis of EvilSocialism and Pandering that appears about to overthrow the ruling Conservatives. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Prime Minister Harper has shown remarkable cunning in his ability to manipulate the political environment, so I definitely don't discount this being part of some master plan, but there are definitely going to be interesting times ahead.
Sacha is 100% correct that this (incredibly fragile) alliance is going to shake Canada to its core.
Politically, this is going to have the effect of fracturing the country geographically of west vs. east. There may be more geopolitical implications than one might originally think.The most significant difference between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party is the amount of money they are willing to shovel into Quebec. That is the reason the Conservatives are in power today. This coalition will enrage Western Canada.
The Canadian political and media elite don’t want it of course, but it seems to me that the country would be better without Québec, and vice versa.When two adjacent groups can't get along under the same government it means that either the government needs to be scaled back to only cover things that both sides agree on (hooray!) or that they need to split up. Empire building is over, dudes! Let it go.
It’s similar to how countries almost universally condemn secession (or the recognition of such, as in Russia’s of South Ossetia and Abkhazia). Political elites condemn it because they don’t want it happening to their own countries, which would of course diminish their own (that is, the political elites’) power.
