Haiti, today

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Haiti today.
Pictures 5 and 8 give a small sense of the damage done.
Pictures 13, 14, and 29 show desperation, loud and quiet.
Picture 33 is a great contrasts shot.
Picture 36 is heartbreaking.

Study: Stupid Laws Produce Stupid Results

Another in the long line of the unintended consequences of government intervention. I forget what number we're up to now.
Anyway, there are federal subsidies in Porkulus that will help you invest in the lucrative market for...golf carts.

The IRS also has ruled there’s no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, the Journal reports, inspiring some enterprising investors to stock up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later on.

Seriously. What does it take to get lawmakers to just shut up and stop making stupid laws?

18.5%

That's the July unemployment rate for 16-21 year-olds. Why? Three words: minimum wage increases. Basic economics, people. Increase a business' costs with no corresponding increase in output or revenue, and you have a problem. In that kind of environment, the easiest short-run solution for business owners is to lower employment costs (ie. fire existing employees or, alternatively, not hire additional employees), which means more teens (and other lower-wage workers) get left on the sidelines. Those jobs were neither created nor saved.
It's not rocket science.

The Quest for Truth That Matters

This article is as good a summary of why it's important to look at both sides of an argument and not just pay attention to what your side is saying.

Today, conservatives and liberals can join vacation tours attended by only their side of the debate or join dating services to court only the like minded. At night, one side watches only MSNBC and the other side only Fox News. And when people are around likeminded individuals, one study found, their viewpoints only become that much more extreme.

And this:

We are ever more polarized today and so may be the conspiracies. The less each base understands the other side perhaps the more outlandish the theories become, in order explain the hold of the other side.

There was a good post up at Behavior Gap the other day about the folly of single-factor decision making. It applies here thusly: people are complex. This is easy to say, out of context, but oddly it's very hard to say when talking about people with whom you disagree strongly. Humans have a tendency to reduce the behavior we find distasteful in others down to one single characteristic: "oh, he's just a drunk", "oh, she's just a bitch", "oh, democrats just are stupid, they just want to take over the world with their socialist agenda". What's wrong with this?
Well, it takes away everything that makes a person a person, for one thing, their history, their family experiences, their religious beliefs, their lifetime of love, hate, hurt, anger, remorse, elation, and sanguinity.
He is not just a drunk. He's manic-depressive because he's gone through more crap in his life than you will ever dream about, and he can't handle it very well anymore. She's not a bitch. She's a single mother, insecure about her position at the company, and she wants to be liked, but she's afraid to be seen to fail lest she lose her job and have no money to feed her children.
As I have said before, the closer you get to someone, the harder it is to demonize them. Throwing stones only works when you stay at a distance. No one of us wants to be seen as one-dimensional. So why, just because you disagree with something someone else believes, would you reduce them to labels like "stupid", "power-hungry", or "elitist"? Because you don't want to take the time to get to know them more fully. Because if you did, you might find that they aren't easy to label at all. You might find that you will change your mind, or at least your attitude.

That's a pretty daunting concept, isn't it?

The Law of Unintended Consequences, a continuing series

I have no idea what number we're up to now. I think the basic rule of this Law is, if you do something in haste, in an emotional state, you are 100% more likely to do something that has (multiple) negative unintended consequences.
That said, here's this week's installment.

If the "TARP bonus" bill the House passed today becomes law, any of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, and nine other major US corporations will have to fork over 90 cents of every bonus dollar that puts their household income over $250,000.

That's household income, not individual income.* If you're married and filing singly, you'll have to surrender anything over $125,000. Indefinitely.

(h/t MR)