In Pursuit of Virtue – April Edition, Vol. II

Let’s see, let’s see…

• The media states the obvious, albeit after months: The inflation rate is more like 10% than the numbers the gov’t has been giving of late. The media misses a lot of things, though, as we all know. Some of these may be petty or conspiratorial, but others are huge: what the media isn’t reporting.
• Another obvious lesson that the media is JUST NOW CATCHING ONTO: living together before you are married lessens satisfaction within your marriage. The incompetence of people at the NYT, honestly.
• Banks of issue give a tendency toward militarism, which gives a tendency toward inflation by banks of issue, and so on. Want to end the wars? End the Fed!
• The more I learn about Bush, Jr.’s regime, the more evil I believe the man to be. Torture, murder, and conspiracy, oh my!
• Fixed voting machines: The forensic study of voting machines in Venango County, PA found the central tabulator had been “remotely accessed” by someone on “multiple occasions,” including for 80 minutes on the night before the 2010 general election.
• An illegal $200 drug transaction can cost society $100,000 in legal fees, imprisonment, and police costs. Economically, we are just burning money with the war on drugs.
• Humans are terrible at probabilities (thus, the Lotto exists). As the Monty Hall experiment shows, even pigeons are better at probability than humans.
• When I was a wee 1L in law school, a slogan oft-repeated was “Ignorance of the law is no excuse!” Well, it should be, given the amount of laws on the books.
• In the latest unemployment statistics, around 88 million people were absent from the data. That is 1 and 3 people, which could skew the data significantly.
• CISPA is worse than PIPA or SOPA, and little is being said about it (Obama threatened a veto yesterday if the bill passes, but he said the same for the NDAA and signed it anyway. Who are we to believe?). Of course, this matters little, as the U.S. claims it has legal jurisdiction over anything touching the internets.
• Sent by a cousin, this ZH article is interesting because it explains the cannibalization of chain stores, the effect on the economy, and why we won’t be returning to the real GDP of 2008 for a long time.
• No matter what you have deleted on your Facebook, it is available for the police if your account is subpoenaed. Be careful what you put online, peeps.
• Paul Krugman’s economics is still a crock of shit.
• This video has been making the rounds on the interwebs. Meh: