Marginial Devolution...

Eric Raymond has an excellent rant he titles “Marginal Devolution”.  The main point he makes is that as our liberal government makes it more and more expensive to hire someone.  This is a key libertarian (and to a lesser extent, conservative) plank element, and well worth understanding in detail.

The classic example is the minimum wage laws.  It's demonstrable that every time the minimum wage is increased, the number of people employed at minimum wage goes down.  Why?  Because through the minimum wage law, the government just made it more expensive to hire someone.  No matter what the level they set the minimum wage, the following will be true: there will be jobs that aren't worth the minimum wage to the business, and there will be people willing (but unable, thanks to the law) to take those jobs for less money.

This is one of the many reasons why liberalism always fails in the long run.  And very typically for liberal programs, the well-intentioned minimum wage regulation (“How can we expect people to work for so little money?”) backfires and hurts the very people it was intended to help...

ClimateGate: Roundup...

The big prize for ClimateGate: the IPCC announces that it going to make “significant changes” in how it does business.  We owe that still-anonymous hacker who posted the ClimateGate emails a huge debt of gratitude...

Dr. Judith Curry on rebuilding trust and credibility in climate research.

Dr. Harrison Schmitt (former astronaut, moon walker, and Senator) on what we should be doing about natural climate change.

Golden State, Tarnished...

Here's a good summary of California's current economic woes.  It's a bit depressing if you, like me, happen to live in California...

Promoting Travel, Liberal-Style...

Let's say you're a Washington bureaucrat in a liberal administration, and you're charged with creating jobs by promoting travel (which does require lots of workers in the service industry).  Would you (a) look hard at what roadblocks were preventing growth in tourism, and try to remove them, or (b) tax the travel industry, because obviously you know how to spend promotional dollars better than the entrepreneurs in the industry?

Well of course your answer would be (b)!

Idiots.  Criminally insane idiots.

History of the Disk Drive...

Interesting and brief history of data storage on disk drives.  I purchased my first disk drive for $10,000 in the late '70s – a broken Memorex 630 (5mb fixed, 5mb removable) that I repaired and interfaced to a 2.5MHz Z80.  By today's standards this sounds almost insane, but back then, trust me, it was a bargain.

In my years in the U.S. Navy in the early '70s, I worked with several other kinds of data storage: magnetic tape, magnetic drums, paper tape (seriously!), magnetic cores, and the most amazing of all – recirculating mercury delay lines.  Data storage was hard back then!

Just Plain Stupid...

Unfair?  Forget unfair, this is just plain stupid.  These sorts of failures in our educational system (and they come in many species) are an existential threat to this country...