This topic has certainly been more front and center recently. This video rather dramatically shows the inequality in the US.
Category: Politics
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Everyone Works Part Time Now
Or not. The Big Picture is an interesting finance blog. I don’t agree with it all the time, but the advice on avoiding selection bias and other common investing fallacies is very good.
From today’s blog on investment strategy regarding Obamacare:
Since I have repeated myself so many times, perhaps I should try phrasing this somewhat differently: You better really, really enjoy your partisan politics & Fox News, because it is an incredibly expensive hobby if you are an investor.
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Follow the Money
I’ve often suspected this, but these days it seems any political issue is driven by that phrase. Wouldn’t it be good to have fewer Americans in prison? Apparently not…
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So, What’s It Going To Be?
Excellent political analysis from The Onion, as usual…
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Two Minds
Whatever your opinion on intervention in Syria, The New Yorker’s piece, Two Minds on Syria is worth a read.
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Imagine
You are a gay man (I’ve just alienated 95% of my audience). You live in NYC. You meet another man and fall in love. He’s from Columbia. You go through the usual dating motions and decide this is real. This being NYC, you get married because that is now legal.
Oh crap, he’s not a citizen.
New York says you are married, but the feds do not. His visa has expired. Columbia is not one of our favored nations so immigration is tricky.
If he were a she, this would be easy. But he is a he, so it’s not.
He’s about to be deported.
Today happens. DOMA is dead.
This morning our intern, Gabe, ran the 77-page ruling and delivered it the Immigration Court five blocks from our office. It was still warm from the printer.
Can you imagine this? Your husband is about to be deported and a Supreme Court ruling saves the day. We think of these rulings in grand policy terms but sometimes they are very personal.
As Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local”.
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Death by Bicycle
The Wall Street Journal has a somewhat hilarious video editorial bashing the new NYC Citibike bike share program. Bloomberg is apparently “totalitarian” (funny, he keeps winning elections by huge margins and unlike Iran voting against him is not likely to involve imprisonment).
Click here for the video (I’m having issues embedding WSJ video). Honestly, it’s worth a click.
The reaction around NYC has been what you would expect. People who get driven around in car service pissed off that there are more bikes on the road.
The New Yorker has a great article about this. The author apparently rode in NYC 25 years ago. His experience:
In those days, there were few cyclists on the roads, and part of the thrill was avoiding cabs and other vehicles that would suddenly swing into your lane, apparently oblivious to your presence. When I got back to my apartment on East 12th Street, I was sometimes shaking.
This is actually his argument against bike lane. Apparently shaking is a feature, not a bug. I frankly did this in the early 90’s. The description is accurate. You put your life in your hands. So I’m a tad fond of the bike lanes.
The whole thing has hit normally dull economics blogs.
A media blog gets amusingly snarky…
When Krugman is blogging about it, you know it’s big.
Honestly, I rode home today on one of them today. I’m pretty sure I caused no massive repercussions. It strangely didn’t turn me into a Stalinist.
Isn’t riding a bike supposed to be fun?…
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Counting is Too Scientific
Something like this would usually come from a partisan political blog. But when the source is Scientific American, I take it a bit more seriously:
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Random Lizz Comments
A blog post from our upstairs neighbor Lizz Winstead.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 