Letter to the Editor in the Wall Street Journal

This was part of a letter to the editor of the WSJ in response to an editorial that advocated not increasing the minimum wage:

As an employer, I never found the increases in minimum wage harmful to my small business. Rather, when wages at the bottom are increased, my experience has been that it has a positive long-term effect. Critics of minimum wage laws completely ignore the factor of labor turnover in small businesses. The lower the wage structure, the greater will be labor turnover. As a small businessman, my costs were very adversely affected when I lost an employee and had to train a new employee. Any person hired at $5.15 an hour is not apt to stay very long. The employee that earns more than the minimum wage will stay longer and be more productive.

Robert A. Steinberg

Baltimore, Md.

Mr. Steinberg, when you had an employee quit because you were paying him or her minimum wage, did you go sit in your office with your head in your hands in despair, whispering, "If only the U.S. Federal Government had increased the minimum wage in time..."  You are exactly right in saying that any employee you pay $5.15 an hour will not stay long.  Pay them more.  You don't need a "Right to Know" poster in the backroom telling you to pay your employees more for you to make the smart business decision.

Bush vs. Bush debate on the Daily Show

This is probably the funniest bit the Daily Show has ever done, and definately one of the most important. The President Bush vs. Governor Bush Debate:

Gotta support my man B.J. Novak, Office Space (US) genius. From Sullivan:

No Rivera, you live in a small little place you ass clown

On Kos:

"Rivera also asserted that Comedy Central hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert "make a living putting on video of old ladies slipping on ice and people laughing" and that they "exist in a small little place where they count for nothing."

Check out the video.  Screw you MediaMatters for always have extremely huge uncompressed video files and a slow server.  Someone put this on Youtube, please.

The idea that a station that paid its bills for months by having "an important update on the Natalie Holloway case" every fucking night and the guy who every night brings on the craziest motherfuckers he can find so he can make fun of them and say that everyone who isn't a Republican thinks just like that loon can seriously say that The Daily Show makes its living by "putting on video of old ladies slipping on ice and people laughing" in truly an exercise in irony.  When Stewart interviews politicians, it is the best interview on TV. 

Geraldo, go do everyone a favor and find an apartment building in southern Lebanon to go stand on.

Economical Numbers

From Marginal Revolution

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

Thank you George W. Bush, classic tax and spend Christianist mouthpiece conservative.

Nashville Knucklehead on Harold Ford Jr.

Nashville Knucklehead has a post about Harold Ford Jr.   He talks about going to see him and Bill Clinton speak at LP field, but then says something I had to check wikipedia on:

Senior had a long and distinguished career in congress, but that wasn't enough power for the cagey politician. So, through a series of backroom dealings, he became the only man to ever gain the presidency who was never elected to the office in any way.

Harold Ford Jr.'s dad was Harold Ford Sr. The man who was never elected president (other the more recent unelected president) was Gerald Ford. I think he's joking.

Business in Nashville

As this blog has yet to have a unified theme, I will put forward another completely unrelated topic to perhaps define this space.  On an unrelated note, please be kind to X...she doesn't quite know how to make links...she's learning. 

X and I both have jobs.  That is we both work a lot of hours all year to make money for someone else who in turn will pay us a paycheck every so often to keep us happy.  This works out well in certain aspects: it is fairly certain and safe.  We get paid the same out every couple of weeks.  It doesn't really depend on how well we worked all week, so we don't have any business risk.  If the business fails, our personal wealth is not directly affected.

On the other hand, there are some definate downsides, which we have recently experienced.  When you are an employee, you never receive enough of what you put into your job, assuming you actually work hard.  Your superiors will never recognize the amount of your hard work, and you will never receive as much of the benefit of your hard work as the owners of the business will.

This should lead any rational person to one of two conclusions: you should either take the "Office Space" approach and only work hard enough to not get fired or you should do something where you are the boss.

The first approach definately has benefits, but I think for my personality and hers, this won't work because neither of us can really live our lives in mediocrity.  I can't just go half throttle all the time.  I would be too depressed.

X and I have been talking about starting a business recently as we have both had something of bad experiences at work.  If it was just a problem with our respective employers, I think either of us would just change employers, but I believe our problems are just the realization of the drudgery of being in the rat race.  This is not a problem with the company, but of the corporate "career" bullshit culture.  We are thinking of picking the lock on the cage and getting out.

X and I have decided to spend this next year to brainstorm and try to find a business that could work.  There is no pressure as we would both still have our jobs, but we will be thinking about it all year.  I will brainstorm some ideas on here and will be open to any feedback readers have.  Hopefully, it will be something that Nashville will like.

This is one of the many reasons that I love love love dogs!

Elvis' Teddy Bear Leaves The Building The Hard Way
Guard dog rips head off Presley’s $75,000 toy in stuffed-animal rampage

Security guard Greg West and his Doberman, Barney. A $75,000 teddy bear formerly owned by Elvis Presley was one of the bears destroyed when the guard dog went on the rampage on Tuesday.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14154738/

Email posting sucks

see

Justin Mundie on War

Justin Mundie is still struggling with war and faith.  As usual, the good stuff is in the comments.  Ben says

There are worse things than death. Killing someone else to prevent your own death may be one of them.

Justin responds with

What about killing someone to prevent the death of an innocent, Ben? Should we kill to stop genocide in Sudan? Should we kill to stop a madman from harming people in a crowded subway?

I don't necessarily agree with reader Ben here, but I do disagree somewhat with Justin.  Whenever the topic of pacifism or non-violence comes up, the one against pacifism tends to use as the basis of their arguments one of two scenarios to disprove the presumably universality of pacifism.

1.  A war for which most in the US (or whatever country from which you hail) feels it had the moral high ground (ie The Revolutionary War, WWII).
2.  A far fetched situation that few if any will ever experience, but that evokes strong emotions.

The problem with the first is that while you can say, "what about Hitler" all day long, I can say what about War of 1812, US Civil War, Spanish American War, WWI, Korean Conflict, Vietnam Conflict, and the Iraq War II.  The problem with this argument is that it assumes that pacifism or non-violence is an all or nothing thing.  Why can't I be pacifist, yet reserve the right to support violence in certain circumstances?  Those who would call upon bloodly, but probably necessary conflicts to justify needless violence should find a special place in hell prepared for them.

The problem with the second argument is that you are invoking a situation that will probably never happen to support something that is likely to happen.  Also, this brings up a deeper, more important issue, and that the problem of speaking for the plight of others who are in circumstances we can't understand.  As Dan Gilbert talks about in Stumbling on Happiness, the problem with looking at situations others are in and speculating on how it would feel to be in that situation is that human beings are pretty terrible at taking a set of circumstances and predicting how those circumstances would make us feel if they happened to us.

A good example is the prospect of losing your job.  For those of you with jobs, the prospect of losing your job tomorrow is probably pretty scary because your personal experience right now is fixed around the idea that you can count on actually having your job tomorrow.  But for someone who does lose his job tomorrow, the reality of losing your job might be shocking at first, but soon after, the prospect of a new job or starting your own business or just being a bum for a while doesn't look so bad.

My point in saying all of this is that as humans, it seems we need to stop by whatever means necessary something that looks really awful to us (the conflicts in the middle east or Darfur), but perhaps Jesus was serious when he said love your enemies.  Since we don't know the horror or experience of those in Darfur, but presumably God does, perhaps he has perspective we can't attain.