Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
In America, vast pools of money in politics give the business community enormous power to influence elections. That's bad. But the alternative, apparently, is to get the money out and instead give media moguls enormous power to influence elections. Pick your poison.
via Theories of the British Press - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.
Seriously: best PHP blog around today. Queries inside queries | CSI: PHP.
In which Ms. McArdle makes points similar to the ones I made here. She concludes with this very good ending paragraph:
The failure to think specifically applies to taxation, incidentally. Â I know a very large number of east coast progressives who are outraged when they suddenly discover that middle-class ol' them, who doesn't even have enough money to repair the cracks in the ceiling after property taxes and school bills and one not-very-nice vacation to Nova Scotia, are technically "the rich" for the purpose of assessing taxes. Â They, too, are not thinking specifically about where the money is. Â They're just thinking it would be nice for Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates to have less stuff, while people living in housing projects have more. Â But there, as with cuts to the nebulous cloud of "spending", the math doesn't work. Â If you want to raise more tax revenues, stop thinking about corporate jets and the carried interest, and start thinking about eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction for all earners, and allowing the AMT to kick in on the upper end of "middle class" incomes. Â In other words, start thinking about taxing New York Times reporters, not a very small class of rich people.
Emphasis mine. If you want to increase revenues, then *everyone* is going to have to pay more in taxes, especially the middle class and the poor, until we get rid of a trillions in spending. Another alternative is to start moving toward the Fair Tax which *everyone* has to pay.
Via Getting Specific on Spending - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.
[T]he bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart -- because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.
Why have driverâs licenses at all? ... Does the licensing process really do much to weed out bad or irresponsible drivers? Enough to justify the expense and irritation of the DMV? After all, if you drive badly or drunk, the DMV doesnât have to pay out any damages for licensing you.
The drug war inevitably leads to corruption in the forces recruited to fight it. It erodes civil liberties. It diverts law enforcement resources from other tasks. In a society which believes that lap dancers in strip bars are exercising their constitutionally protected right of free expression and that virtually any government interference in the termination of unborn life is an obscene and inexcusable violation of the right to privacy, it is hard to find good reasons why government should have the right to tell us what chemicals to put in our bloodstreams.
The only thing about an ounce of pot that puts your kids in danger is what the government will do to you if it finds out you have it.
Jeremy Kendall is blogging on PHP now. It's great stuff. If you find yourself doing the things he has mentioned so far, stop immediately and re-evaluate your approach.
There is a great coffee mug that reads: âMulti-tasking, the best way to screw up both jobs.â Yet, many of us walk around with our chests out looking for a Foursquare badge for our multitasking promiscuity.
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According to Josh Waitzkin, âA study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points. That is the equivalent of not sleeping for 36 hours â more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana.â
Hat tip to Travis Swicegood; via Social Media Multi-tasking Worse than Marijuana | Socialnomics.