Making Minimum Wage is Better than Earning 60k a year?

Usually I tend to dismiss this sort of study as making bizarre assumptions or just ignoring some major facts, but I'm not seeing them this time. Any ideas?

World Series Game 5

I watched World Series Game 5 again tonight and I remember when I was watching it, it only hit me what they had done when Joe Buck started naming all the Giants who didn't win a World Series in San Francisco over years: Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, John Montefusco, Steve Garrelts, Robby Thompson, Will Clark, Matt Williams, JT Snow, Barry Bonds, Jeff Kent, Robb Nen, Rod Beck.

I never expected them to win this year. I thought they were at least a year away. The hitting wasn't good enough. The bullpen was too shaky. But they did it. I can't believe they did it. For all the teams that deserved to win and didn't, this one did it. Wow. Lincecum, Cain, Sanchez, Bumgarner, Zito, Ross, Uribe, Huff, Sanchez, Renteria, Wilson, Sandoval, Torres, Rowand, Burrell, Lopez, Casilla...

The 2010 World Series Champions San Francisco Giants.

Could you pass the 8th grade?

I'm not sure what counts as passing on this exam but I'm not sure I could have passed the 8th grade in 1895. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement for the US educational system now is it?
http://people.moreheadstate.edu/fs/w.willis/eighthgrade.html

Live from Chapel Hill

I suppose the name for this blog was destined to have an expiration date. Still, in some sense I'll always be blogging from Tucson...

Uncomfortable truths

Here are some truths that you will not like. The US retains pride in its free market can-do spirit while practicing welfarism as soon as anything goes awry. Europe preaches taking care of everybody but makes sure its market institutions stay solvent when the weight of public spending begins to threaten competitiveness. Citizens take pride in their difference, even when indicators of public spending/GDP, poverty rates, growth rates, are all pretty similar. I guess it comes down to whether you would rather pretend to be self reliant as you get bailed out or pretend that you're taking care of everyone when you're not.

Yeah...

see more Funny Graphs

Bone to pick

John Lewis Gaddis remarks that communism did comparatively well in the 1930s by preserving full employment when the rest of the world was suffering in the depression.

I suppose it's easy to maintain full employment with forced labor and killing between 15 to 20 million of your own citizens. As far as I can tell, that's about 12% of its then 165 million population. If the US had killed 12% of its 125 million population, the unemployment rate would sure have looked a lot better (somewhere between -4 and 12%)

It's frightening to hear anyone say that the Soviet Union did comparatively well at anything during the 1930s. Except democide. That they were good at.

Moreover, the unemployment rate is just not a good statistic to compare countries with free and forced labor: it tells you nothing about the productivity of labor or its remuneration.