The Links:
States that raised the minimum wage had faster employment growth this year. More evidence that everything you learned in Econ 101 is wrong or incomplete.
Yes, we can pay for an increase in Social Security benefits. Glad to see this getting some more attention.
Tax breaks for fossil fuels, none for renewables. Was there even any doubt that there's bipartisan consensus to drill baby drill?
Andrew Sullivan pens a quick defense of Bill Harris and Bill Maher over this past weekend's discussion of Islam. I guess my take is a little different than either side. What difference does it make whether all, most, some, or few muslims believe in killing apostates? How would that change the way the US conducts foreign policy? We're already engaged in a generation long war against radical Islam so what would we change? I feel like the whole argument is more of an effort to ease a guilty conscience. "Oh, hey, we're killing a ton of people and making the world a worse place but at least they are really, really, bad and illiberal radicals."
The ominous math of the Ebola epidemic worries experts. I think the most ominous thing is that the experts acknowledge that they don't have a good understanding of infection rates and disease growth. And then we get this:
There are several scenarios for how this plays out. One is that the conventional methods of containing Ebola — isolating patients and doing contact tracing of people who might be exposed — lower the rate of new infections until finally the epidemic burns itself out.
A second scenario is more dire: The conventional methods come too late, the epidemic keeps spreading, and the virus is beaten back only when vaccines can be developed and scaled up to the point where they can be widely distributed.
As the number of infections increases, so does the possibility that a person with Ebola will carry it to another country. This is known as an export.
“So we had two exports in the first 2,000 patients,” Frieden said in a recent interview. “Now we’re going to have 20,000 cases, how many exports are we going to have?”Some John Oliver love from TPM.
Oliver has journalists who worked at the New York Times Magazine and ProPublica on his writing staff.Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, calls Oliver's work "investigative comedy." Thompson has played the net neutrality segment for his students.Research indicates that young people are much more likely than their elders to take a deeper dive into news stories that interest them, searching for more information online, said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. What Oliver is doing responds to that desire, he said.
Were you born after 2005? Good news, the White House is going to start calling you the "Homeland Generation." Well, to be fair, it's a really good show.
Apparently the way to get kids into reading is to simplify and sanitize books for adults. You wouldn't want to make the snowflakes upset! That is actually what the article said:
Of all the horrors Louis Zamperini endured during World War II — a plane crash into the Pacific, 47 days stranded at sea, two years in a prisoner-of-war camp — the one experience that truly haunted him was when a Japanese guard tortured and killed an injured duck.
The episode, recounted in Laura Hillenbrand’s best seller “Unbroken,” also traumatized many readers, Ms. Hillenbrand said. So when she was writing a new edition aimed at young adults, she left that scene out.
“I know that if I were 12 and reading it, that would upset me,” Ms. Hillenbrand said.You know, some of the books I loved most as a kid were books that upset me. A major character or animal would die and it would make me emotionally invested in the story. That includes nonfiction I read about the Civil War and various other parts of history.
Clever cyclists show exactly how bicycles reduce traffic.
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