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Restaurant in a Cave →
What do you get a rich celeb who has everything? How about dinner in this place.
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The White House renewing calls for passing the federal media shield law is a twisted and amazingly devious strategy. Such a law would protect the AP and other outlets from what the White House just did to them, but the only reason the law didn’t pass in 2007 is because the GOP filibustered it in the Senate.
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McCain is prepping legislation to overhaul pay-TV business →
Specifically, McCain wants to require pay-TV distributors to give consumers the option to buy channels on an individual or a la carte basis instead of the current system in which they must buy large bundles of channels.
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A few good links
Conor Friedersdorf explains the mental mechanics behind why Michael Bloomberg can simultaneously be awesome and a big bag of dicks. (The Atlantic)
Jonathan Cohn on a landmark new Medicaid study that conservatives think proves everything bad they’ve said about the program to be true, missing the bigger picture. (The New Republic)
New ideas about why people believe in conspiracy theories. (Scientific American)
Read all three. You won’t regret it.
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I know it’s a tough time for this, but it’s easier to hide in our intellectual shells when we feel safe and normal. So since we don’t…
Here are some questions you should ask yourself. If you posted a bunch on Facebook/Twitter/whatever recently about guns, all those image memes, pro-2nd amendment stuff, would you vocally advocate allowing the remaining living Boston bombing suspect to keep guns before conviction?
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Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. | Next New Deal →
It looks like the 2010 study behind global pushes for austerity (including here in the United States) is horribly flawed. If that’s true, there is now not a single economic justification for expansionary austerity anywhere in the world.
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The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions →
Glenn Greenwald: As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emergeI’ll have something to say about Boston once I’ve gathered my thoughts. But I’ll bet before even reading it that this covers quite a bit.
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Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster →
Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware […] The site estimates the profits from the day of mining at about $681,000, based on the current value of Bitcoins.
Given the volatility of BTC, the daily mining output would have been as high as $2 million @ $260 and as low as $400K at $50 earlier today. That suggests that Bitcoin won’t be worth mining below $18.34, adding a data point to figuring out what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is.
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I ragged on Erick Erickson a few days ago, so it’s only fair to give him credit when he deserves it as well:
Sorry folks, I’m not interesting in beating up the President today.God bless him.He’s got his work cut out for him.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 15, 2013 -
Man shoots himself in the head during NRA 500 at Texas →
Can’t make this stuff up.
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New York Times op-ed columnist and economic Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman on #Bitcoin:
At the same time, it’s very peculiar, since bitcoins are in a sense the ultimate fiat currency, with a value conjured out of thin air.
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Adam Smith Hates Bitcoin →
Paul Krugman:
Smith actually wrote eloquently about the fundamental foolishness of relying on gold and silver currency, which — as he pointed out — serve only a symbolic function, yet absorbed real resources in their production, and why it would be smart to replace them with paper currency [..]
And now here we are in a world of high information technology — and people think it’s smart, nay cutting-edge, to create a sort of virtual currency whose creation requires wasting real resources in a way Adam Smith considered foolish and outmoded in 1776. -
Anonymous asked: wouldn't "people who want to marry their siblings" be an entire class of people?
Possibly. But unlike with same-sex marriage, the government might be able to successfully argue that it has a “compelling interest” in prohibiting that. That is one of the three tests a law must pass under the strict scrutiny standard.
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This Tweet caught my eye:
Easy way to dodge androcentric events like TechCrunch Disrupt? Pledge not to speak at events which exclude women: http://2.dashes.com/154GF4S
The link redirects you to “A Simple Suggestion to Help Phase Out All-Male Panels at Tech Conferences” by Rebecca J. Rosen at The Atlantic.
My first thought was this question: Are we talking about events that “exclude women” or events where there are fewer women than we’d like to see? Because there’s a big difference between the two and if you don’t fully grasp the details of what you’re dealing with, you’re never, ever going to be able to do something positive about it.
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Erick Erickson is asking “Why not incest?” as an apparent argument against same-sex marriage. Again, even if you think that’s a valid or even an interesting question, any possible answer or analysis is irrelevant in the debate.
The main question before the courts is whether or not allowing one class of people (straights) to marry while specifically denying it to another class (gays) violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Without taking time to point out how stupid and disgusting and intentionally insulting many such “questions” are, none of them have any relevance to equal protection.
