Monday, March 25, 2013

Monday's Child is Full of Links

1.  Some people jabber about food deserts.  Turns out they live in brain desert.  Grocery store access does not cause people to eat more healthily.  (Healthily?)

2.  You won a Dem primary and you don't drive a hybrid?

3.  Angus (rightly) made fun of people who say, "If raising the minimum wage is good, why not raise it more?"  A problem is that there are some people who advocate the minimum who actually do make EXACTLY this argument.  Elizabeth Warren, for example, who presumably knows better.

4.  And just when we were worried that there might not be enough self-absorbed idiots on the Republican side of the US House....Mark Sanford comes to the rescue!

5.  Icarus flew too close to the sun, and got burned.   The nations of the world are trying to fly too close to the solar panels, and taxpayers are getting burned.  Let me guess:  the answer is more regulation, and possibly even government production.

6.  Solar power is a net loss of resources.  It takes more energy to make the panels, in the form of various subsidies, than the panels can return from the sun.  That's okay, it's not the panels' fault.  The problem is the government subsidies.  We are investing in solar not because it helps the environment, but because we can get paid subsidies.  When the subsidies stop, solar turns out to be a big waste of money. 

7.  My kind of environmentalist, from Top Gear.  The whole packaging thing does bother me.  I'd rather buy less packaging.  And drive old cars much too fast.

8.  The sell-off in muni bonds, from the always interesting Sober Look.

9.  Peak oil was peak idiocy.  And always will be.

10.  So many of our young entrepreneurs are in jail.  There are many things with our society, but that's a big one.

11.  Secret, and actually illegal, internet census.  Very cool.  

12.  Not the Onion.  Who could possibly have thought this was a good idea?

3 comments:

Tom said...

If raising the minimum wage is good, why not raise it 1% more? You're planning to impose fines (or jail) for that jerk paying only $8.99, so why should that asshat paying $9.08 get away with exploiting his workers?

...except for the obedience thing. Yeah, obedience is really important.

As for E. Warren, sure she knows why $22 isn't reasonable. But she has a point to make (and headlines), so that part of her brain is walled off, unused. There is a lot of that going around.

Anonymous said...

There is no such thing as "exploiting workers" in a free country. People choose to show up to work every day for a mutually agreed upon wage. There are plenty of teenagers that would love to get "exploited" this summer if the government would get out of the way.

sfw said...

"Elizabeth Warren knows better"

I doubt it. Like the rest of her class of people she has no idea how the world works. They think the way it works is to go to university then get a job with government and push the agenda they learned in uni.

The average self employed tradesman has a better idea of economics than most of the university educated.