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I donated to your podcast 200 dollars, the amount you said you needed for that audio sync thing

http://m.thefiscaltimes.com/fiscaltimes/#!/entry/1400-real-world-minimum-wage-increases-show-no-impact-on,530731c0025312186cd48fbd/4/media/2,minimum-wage-increase-effect

So I found a graph on 1,492 minimum wage studies and it has some interesting points. 1 is that the vast majority of studies say minimum wage has a negative impact on employment. 2 is that the vast majority of the studies have a very low "power" associated with them. If we looked ONLY at studies with a 1/Se of 50 or greater, the trend is reversed. Virtually no study says minimum wage causes unemployment at that level.

How do we interpret this?

I remember you gave Laci Green a Silver Cluon for her analogy to Abstinence only education, I was reminded of it during the yearly wrap up, but I wanted to speak about it but kept forgetting.

Laci Green did not come up with that meme. It can be found here.

tinyurl.com/m5u3zdh

also this has been posted everywhere. It was started by some campaign and I'm sure Laci helped spread it message. But she didn't come up with it. Can we demote her to Bronze Cluon? Or do we let her keep it for spreading a good message anyways.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/12/02/would-you-pay-five-grand-to-work-at-huffpo/

http://www.minimumwage.com/2014/01/maximum-hypocrisy-on-the-minimum-wage/

honestly, I was a bit surprised.

So the house of representatives passed a bill 223-204 that essentially eliminates overtime pay. I get why, overtime pay is a disasterous policy. No one (hyperbole) ever really gets paid overtime anyway. You either work an artificially low number of hours capped by this policy or work two part time jobs. It also has far too many loopholes that create the wrong incentives for employers. It is a complete failure. If its goal was to stop low income workers from working 60 hour weeks, its failed. If its goal was to get employees more money then it has REALLY failed. For every person who is getting paid overtime, ten people are shackled to low hour part time jobs (hyperbole).

But, with all that being said, the proposal doesnt seem much better. Essentially, if you work 45 hours you will only get paid for 40 hours and get 5 hours of paid vacation time later BUT the employer can deny when that is if the business is really busy. Unused hours at the end of the year are supposedly paid back to employeee.

Any thoughts from the bogosity forum?

does anybody know if the dinosaurs were brown and yellow?

I liked that, I didn't want them to be green.

http://tinyurl.com/6s52984

Legalizing (didn't even realize it was illegal) direct to consumer car sales could reduce price 3000 dollars.

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2013/02/28/mit-report-us-manufacturing-hits-a-wall-when-its-time-to-scale/

Or http://tinyurl.com/buv9fut

MIT researchers find that shipping jobs overseas result of not having enough domestic investors

Cough*federal reserve*cough

One fallacy that keeps rearing its ugly head is a fallacy I call "The fixed starting point fallacy" Its a modified version of the correlation causation fallacy.

Here is a real world example

liberal: "For the last 30 labor unions have been destroyed and income inequality has gone up."

At first it just seems like a correlation causation fallacy. But here is the twist.

income inequality started to go up in 1980, but labor union participation had declined since 1953. In fact, the percent of the workforce in a union went from 35% in 1953 to 20% to 1980. The person merely claims that they started at the same time to make it APPEAR that there is a correlation! In this sense the starting point of event A is "fixed" to the starting point of event B to create the illusion they started simultaneously.

a modified correlation causation fallacy indeed.