So, Obama wants to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hr to $9/hr. Like many generally conservative persons, I oppose the minimum wage on principle, expressed by countless others but most recently by The Crimson Reach:
if I want to hire someone to do a thing at $X/hour and that someone is willing to do the thing for $X/hour, or vice versa, this arrangement between we two is none of anyone else’s… business
In reverse order of importance:
Continue reading Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News #32
Earlier this week, the Senate voted on re-authorizing the “Violence Against Women Act,” and some Republicans caught flak for voting against it. The Internet lit up with predictable jokes about how the GOP is so anti-woman. Journalists even wrote articles like “Why Would Anyone Oppose the Violence Against Women Act?” as if the virtues of the bill were so patently obvious that it required a special investigation to uncover the mysterious motives one must have for opposing it.
This is a classic case of judging a bill by its title, which has become increasingly dangerous in recent years (Why would anyone not want to be a PATRIOT? Who wants to Leave Children Behind? Don’t you want Care to be Affordable? Etc. Etc.) Oddly enough, this bill has precisely the wrong title for such judging, yet everyone still manages to commit the same fallacy anyway!
The bill should be titled “Preventing Violence Against Women Act,” so anyone who opposes it could be accused of not wanting to prevent violence. As it stands, headlines like these don’t sound so bad: “Marco Rubio opposes Violence Against Women…” Yet everyone still implicitly understands that the joke is on the Republicans. Somehow it’s obvious that the bill’s goal is actually the opposite of its title, but it’s not at all obvious that the bill’s provisions may not be related to either one!
But enough about the title. I thought violence against women was already illegal, anyway. So what does this bill actually do?
Continue reading So Republicans Oppose Violence Against Women?
After fans voted, Monopoly has replaced the iron token with a cat token. Apparently Monopoly updates its tokens from time to time in an attempt to stay relevant, although I’m pretty sure cats have been around longer than irons. But shuffling the tokens on the Monopoly board is like shuffling the deck chairs on a two-dimensional Titanic. When it comes to turn-based board games, Monopoly is still woefully outdated.
Blasphemy, you say? You still have nostalgic memories of glorious Monopoly nights? I know, I scoffed too, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that innovation in the turn-based board game industry has left old fogies like Monopoly (1934) and Risk (1957) far behind.
Let’s look at a few of the elements that render the gameplay of Monopoly and Risk inferior to a newer game like Settlers of Catan (1995).
Remember when the federal government “cut” a measly $37 billion in spending in 2011 and Obama hailed it as the “largest annual spending cut in our history”? Apparently even those cuts were full of accounting gimmicks, like counting money for projects that were already finished or cancelled. My personal favorite:
At the Census Bureau, officials got credit for a whopping $6 billion cut, simply for obeying the calendar. They promised not to hold the expensive 2010 census again in 2011.
Continue reading Is The Sledgehammer The Only Way To Cut Spending?
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Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #31
65. Newegg scored a major victory against a patent troll. This has a positive externality that makes it less likely that other e-commerce stores will come under attack by similar trolls.
Wow. Drone policy has been in the news for like three days now. As in, the News news. On NPR. In the top of my Google News feed. In this conservative emailing list I accidentally got on. The “mainstream media” has spent more effort on drone policy this week than they did in all of the months leading up to last year’s elections.
It seems that eleven senators (both Democrat and Republican) threatened to delay the confirmations of Hagel and/or Brennan if the Obama administration didn’t release the memo(s) about their justification(s) for killing American citizens with targeted drone strikes. Then a 16-page memo “leaked” to NBC.
Page one of the memo (here from NBC, or here from Reason with selective highlighting) says that lethal operations against a U.S. citizen require, among other things, a “high-level official of the U.S. government” to determine that “the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”
Later, on page seven, the memo says that “an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack” does not require the United States to have “clear evidence that a specific attack… will take place in the immediate future.” Yes, the government literally says that imminent does not mean immediate. This is pretty blatant doublespeak that basically gives the executive branch permission to target anyone they decide needs targeting.
Is it too late to comment on Obama’s second inauguration? Well, here goes. Much digital ink has been spilled about the way Obama’s speech revealed the modern progressive vision, etc, etc. I was most touched by the word cloud of the speech that I saw floating around various news websites:
Look at that giant “must.” Is there any more brilliant display of the coercive power of the state?
In reverse order of importance:
Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #30
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