Well, it’s official. Mitt Romney has chosen rising Congressional star Paul Ryan to be his vice-presidential running mate. Team Red is stoked that the young articulate conservative will absolutely smoke Biden in the VP debate, and Team Blue is stoked that Obama is now guaranteed to win because Ryan is obviously too extreme for most Americans. But does this mean anything for us independent fans of small-government?
Continue reading Should Libertarians Be Excited About Paul Ryan?
Ezra Klein is obsessed with Mitt Romney’s proposed budget policies, or lack thereof. Klein convincingly argues that Romney’s plans are far vaguer than many previous presidential candidates and also very dishonest and mathematically impossible. The only problem with all of this analysis is that it assumes that presidential budget proposals actually matter, an assumption Sonic Charmer ridicules with his trademark snark:
Continue reading Why So Obsessed With Presidential Budget Plans?
Sunday night, NASA’s Curiosity rover completed a ridiculously complicated landing sequence to safely grace the surface of Mars, where it is now beaming back exciting images and other data. I feel like this is a good time to thank our federal government for one of its few entities that I really enjoy – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
In reverse order of importance:
Continue reading Everything You Need To Know About Last Week’s News #4
Mitt Romney still hasn’t released his tax returns, and the Democrats aren’t letting up. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now claims he has “sources” that say Romney paid no taxes for ten years, and that it’s up to Romney to prove them wrong.
Justin Wolfers summarized the liberal logic a few weeks ago when he tweeted, “Bayesian logic: If you won’t reveal something, then I infer you have something to hide. Given this, you should only hide it if it’s terrible.”
But this is terrible reasoning built on arrogant assumptions. I don’t remember liberals being excited when the Tea Party used the same bad logic to insist that Obama reveal his birth certificate. There are multiple reasons you might not want to cooperate in this game.
For awhile now I’ve been planning a post about some awesome technologies that will probably bring great changes to the world by the end of this decade. Azmyth recently did a similar post and inspired me to stop procrastinating on mine. So, without further ado, here is my list:
What is it? Cars that are smart enough to drive you places safely while following all traffic laws. Also known as “autonomous” or “self-driving” car.
Why is it so cool? It will greatly reduce vehicle accidents, which still kill over 30,000 Americans each year and injure many more. (No more worries about drinking and driving. Or texting and driving.) It will also greatly reduce the opportunity cost of driving, as you’ll be able to do a lot of other things during your commute. Some folks have utopian visions of automated taxi services that reduce the need to own a vehicle or build a bigger parking lot. It could disrupt the shipping industry. It could keep all the old Baby Boomers active. I wonder if police will have fewer people to pull over.
How close are we? Google has been driving around a real prototype for a couple of years, although it’s probably not quite ready to handle all the driving conditions and complicated intersections of the American landscape (though as some say, humans are so bad at driving it’s not hard to make a computer that’s better). A few states have pre-emptively signed laws allowing driverless cars, and many manufacturers are supposed to be working on them. We’ve had cruise control for a long time, and we’re starting to see cars that can parallel park themselves and use cameras to warn you when you get too close to things. Completely reliable driverless technology is probably at least a couple years away, and even when it comes it will take awhile to trickle down from the new expensive models (unless we come up with a cheap way to convert older cars, but it seems like you need a lot of sensors – i.e. hardware – around the vehicles). But by 2020, even if we just have thousands of cars with a fancy cruise control that can stay in the lane and avoid collisions on highways, that would still be an incredibly valuable leap.
Continue reading The Awesome Technologies That Will (Probably) Change This Decade
Rejoice, fair citizens of this great land! Rejoice, young and old! Your fearless leader and friend, Barack Obama, President of the United States and Perpetual Beacon of the Free World, the Hope and Change of the Nations, the Mighty One, has accomplished another mighty deed, worthy of our praises. Four years after halting the rise of the oceans, He has achieved even greater heights by completing his repeal of the powerful laws of supply and demand:
Today is a big day for birth control. Under President Obama’s health care reforms private insurance companies have to start providing contraception for free on August 1. That means no more co-pays for birth control.
Just a couple months after banishing 32-ounce sodas from select establishments in New York City, the Nanny Nudger – aka Mayor Michael Bloomberg – is at it again. This time the man wants to nudge mothers into breastfeeding their newborns at the hospital by hiding bottles and scolding women who ask for them.
After all, science agrees that breastfeeding is best! Besides, they’re not really banning the bottles for mothers that need or really want them… they’re just making them harder to get. This will make more women breastfeed and lead to healthier children!
Of course, these results will come at a slight cost to personal freedom and responsibility. Mayor Bloomberg seems intent on proving old libertarian rhetoric about health care: the more the government pays your medical bills, the more the government will try to get you to do things to lower those bills. There are three problems with this.
In reverse order of importance:
Continue reading Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #3
It’s been three months since my first Global Climate Snapshot, and it’s time for an updated look at the many forms of official data concerning our planet. Many skeptics distrust the official data about some things for one reason or another, but let’s assume it’s real and see what it says. When I analyze data about the earth’s climate, I look for two things to help judge whether or not it points to (man-made) global warming: 1) Are we reaching new records? 2) Are we reaching them as fast as scientists have predicted?
The northern ice cap had its best spring in a decade, but all that extra ice has melted, and the sea ice is currently flirting with the record low years of 2007 and 2011. So far, NO, the cap is not retreating to new records. After the record low of 2007, some predicted the ice might be gone entirely by this summer. But not only will the ice not disappear entirely, it may not even be any smaller at all. It doesn’t look strong, though, and it is very possible we will see a new low this year.
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