Questions. It is odd to talk about how sleepy someone is if we don’t talk about when they went to sleep, only when they get up.

I disagree. Certainly, the number of sleep hours is important but so is WHEN those hours are slept.

Check the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM-IVTR) or this article:
http://www.minddisorders.com/Br-Del/Circadian-rhy…

- – -

Let me quote from the Libertarian Karl Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme (Part I(: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need or needs. (And, no, Karl Marx was not a libertarian. It’s a joke)

What Marx missed was that it is the market that accommodates needs and not the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (uh, dictatorship of the political class).

In a market economy, parents and children would determine the starting time of classes. At least parents and children would get a chance to select from several choices.

In our current politically driven system, the parents and kids have almost no choice. Their “choice” is to vote or to pay twice for their kid’s education. Their needs and desires are not being met.

Voting is horridly inefficient. It’s like a supermarket deciding what to carry by majority vote of its customers.

- – - -

And thank you, George Will, for correctly pointing out that kids don’t need (or deserve) constant praise.

Oh! How horrible. Actually taking some kids to task for failing or presenting bad arguments. It will send so many of them to mental health workers that the Great (bankrupt) Society will have to pay for.

Better to let them jump rope without ropes.

A poster, btm1001, wrote:

“And since the new minimum wage means employers will hire the most skilled applicants first, teens find they are left out in the cold.”

So prior to the new minimum wage, employers hired the least skilled applicants first?

It’s the economy stupid! In ALL recessions, teenager unemployment increases faster than general population.

If anything, the increase in minimum wage helped teenagers more than the general population, as 19.9% of teenagers are in minimum wage jobs, compared to only 1.1% of the general population.

It’s amazing how the story changes when you use actual historical study, statistical analysis, and FACTS as opposed to lies.
http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/tee…

I responded as follows:

I urge the Gentle Reader to look at the graph in http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/tee… carefully.

In previous recessions the teen unemployment rate went down about 10%. In this recession it went down about 33%.

But that hardly tells the whole story. Teen UNemployment has been going UP because (in my opinion) of the increases in the minimum wage outside of the recession.

- – - – - –

btm100: So prior to the new minimum wage, employers hired the least skilled applicants first?

No, employers hired the best fit for their needs. That’s usually a spread of skilled and non-skilled workers.

But if you raise the minimum wage, employers will often substitute automation and skilled workers for unskilled workers.

For instance, if you are, say, a home builder and you normally hired ditch diggers at $5/hr and now the minimum wage is $10, it is very likely that you will substitute ten ditch diggers for a $15/hr heavy equipment operator and some heavy equipment.

Or the local hamburger joint will install an automated hamburger griller instead of a teenage hamburger flipper.

Here’s the bottom line:
Raising the minimum wage will screw people out of jobs. SOME people (e.g. some ditch digger who can’t be substituted out) will be better off … but many other unseen and desperate people will be out of a job and not even know why they are out of a job.

- – - –

It would be awfully nice if government could wave a wand and magically create wealth.

It can’t. It can only distort the economy by fiat and force.

Sadly, it is always able to point at successes “Hey, that $15/hour heavy equipment operator has a job!” but it does not and cannot point to the want ad for ditch diggers or entry level hamburger flippers that never happened.

Ralph Shnelvar
Chair
Libertarian Party of Boulder County

Let me state the obvious: people die in car accidents and motorcycle accidents. People die skiing, too.

When someone dies unexpectedly, it is a loss to their loved ones. Nearly all who are reading this have experienced the horrid feeling of such a loss.

Let me state the obvious yet again: Every one of us participates in risky behavior all the time. Getting out of bed in the morning is risky. Apparently 600 Americans die each year falling out of bed.

Go look it up.

Associated with each and every one of our 24-hour-per-day activities is a risk of dying.

So, let me state the obvious again: people have sex. Some people even have standard heterosexual intercourse with strangers.

Go look it up.

The question that should immediately pop into your mind is “What are the odds of dying from AIDS because of a single unprotected ‘normal’ heterosexual encounter compared to, say, taking a single airplane flight?”

The politically incorrect answer is: Roughly the same. About one in 5,000,000.

Go look it up.

The odds of you being killed in a car accident each year is about 1:5000. Basically, you are at greater risk of dying driving to work than participating in an activity that a family newspaper only hints at.

Having said all that, there is a kind of sexual behavior that can dramatically increase the risk of contracting AIDS from nearly nonexistent to really really risky. Riskier, in fact, than the odds of dying base jumping (1 in 2600 jumps). You will have to look up what this fairly common naughty sexual activity is.

It is participating in this fairly common activity that causes the MAC AIDS fund to say that AIDS is the No. 1 killer of women under 35 in the U.S. The flipside to that statistic is that of the 2,426,264 deaths in 2006 in the US, 12,113 died from HIV. See National Vital Statistics Reports, Volume 57, Number 14.

So the MAC AIDS fund manages to cherry-pick the data to make this tragic disease appear to be even more tragic. I put this tragedy into context.

So why is it that a paean to AIDS victims, the play Rent, has the seventh longest run on Broadway and is mentioned fondly in Erika Stutzman’s December 2nd editorial in the Daily Camera?

I suspect that the reason is that the above-mentioned naughty behavior is a favorite of homosexual men. Homosexual men have been discriminated in our culture since … forever.

So in liberal New York with its heavy concentration of homosexual men and risky homosexual behavior, AIDS and death from AIDS is yet one more tragic burden that an already-oppressed group bears; a burden inflicted by nature, herself.

Since a large segment of our society would prefer that we be Puritan in our thoughts, words, and deeds, it is no wonder that HIV victims are discriminated against.

Yes, we could (almost) all avoid getting HIV if we did not participate in any sexual behavior. To me, that’s not a life I want to live.

What AIDS/HIV/sex education should teach is “If you do this then there is a chance you will get a disease that will kill you. Here are the odds.”

Erika wrote in that editorial, “… we`ve heard first-hand anecdotes from college-aged students who are less concerned about it than their predecessors.” To which I say, “Good. They have balanced the hysteria against the reality and are deciding that, yes, maybe life is actually worth living without the constant drumbeat of guilt.”

We can reduce the odds of dying by participating in less risky behavior. We can reduce the odds of dying from AIDS from very low to nearly zero; but is it worth doing that?

What I write, above, is politically incorrect. I have already been excoriated elsewhere for simply reporting what the odds of contracting AIDS are.

Life is short. We are all going to die. Some of us will die horrible and tragic deaths due to things we haven’t done wrong. Some of us will die of improbable things because of what we have done wrong. Some of us will die base jumping.

Many of us will die because we spent too much time writing opinion pieces rather than enjoying the breathtaking joy of spending quality time with the opposite sex.

PAUL DOUGAN : “And if you want to stop further Nat Turners, being harsher with the enslaved won`t help. You need to abolish slavery.”

There are two solutions to the problem. More terror or freedom.

The Roman Empire had Spartacus. He terrorized far far more than Nat Turner. The Roman Empire crushed his rebellion and further terrorized the slaves. It was a successful strategy of terror that worked for five hundred years. So, yes, being harsher does help.

Continuing to crush the slaves cost the Roman Empire dearly. Instead of having people who contributed to their society willingly, the Romans had to allocate vast resources to suppress people’s very intense desire to be free. Is it any wonder that Spartacus managed to raise an army of 100,000 slaves; many of them well-trained gladiators (as Spartacus was)?

The enslavement of all those people was part of a “Bread and Circuses” culture that celebrated violence and entitlement. Did the Roman Empire fall when Spartacus failed. No. Rome fell into disarray five hundred years later, which, in turn, led to the Dark Ages.

Our politicians have learned well from the Romans: Give them bread, wine, and circuses (i.e. free stuff) and stay in power.

Would Rome have been far better off not having slaves and a Bread and Circuses (Welfare and Entertainment) culture? This Libertarian thinks so.

This Libertarian knows in his gut that it would be so.

Ralph Shnelvar
Chair
Libertarian Party of Boulder County

Lessons not learned

PAUL DOUGAN

In fact, Milton Friedman reported (incorrectly) that a college education was NOT worth the investment in forgone income plus the huge additional cost. The reason he had reported it incorrectly was that one of his programmers had messed up the programming of his model. Friedman did make an apology to the economics community about the error. (It wasn’t my error. I was working for someone else.)

I have not paid any attention to the issue in at least 30 years but …

It surely seems that young people are acting rationally. The cost of the education has gone up and the value has gone down.

With the dumbing down of America (and it is not only happening here, but, anecdotally it seems worse here), the universities have to take in ill-prepared students and do remedial math, etc. This raises the cost to everyone. It’s cost-shifting from high school to colleges.

Then, of course, there is the issue of grade inflation across the entire spectrum of our educational system. For some fascinating reading on (gasp!) actual data: www.gradeinflation.com/

The quality of college educations seems (again, anecdotally) to have gone down, too. Which means that the value of that piece of paper has gone down because it no longer guarantees much of anything.

Why incur huge debt when, after you get out, you have a good chance of earning a whopping $15/hour on which you will be paying fairly heavy taxes and a huge debt, too.

So, what’s at least a partial answer? Perhaps schools should return to ranking. “This student ranked 97th out of 200 graduates” so that employers have some sense of the quality of the person they are buying.

And with marginal tax rates on higher income (”I’ll only tax those making more that $250K/year”) the value of an education goes down even farther.

I wonder if Milton Friedman’s econometric model were rerun today if the answer would be different. I suspect it would be.

The market has spoken: At an individual level and a societal level, as currently structured, a college education and beyond probably just ain’t worth it.

Photovoltaic arrays for energy efficiency

I was inspired by the photo in the paper (April 16) about the extensive 98-kilowatt photovoltaic (PV) solar system installed by SolSource of Denver on the roof of Blue Mountain Arts. When I think of all the acres of flat rooftops available in Boulder, imagine how much renewable energy we could produce if we placed photovoltaics on nonresidential rooftops throughout the city.

It’s estimated that for every acre of rooftop, we can generate as much as 0.7 megawatts of electrical power and supply energy to anywhere from 72 to 200 homes per year (depending on the system). Tapping into unused real estate on top of city buildings to generate renewable energy makes sense instead of covering up our open space with solar arrays (land, which we could better use for growing food). Urban rooftop solar systems will also help cool buildings further increasing the structure’s energy use. In the SolSource installation, the PV panels kept the roof intact and will prevent over 257,000 pounds of CO2 carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere every year.

By using the roofs of Boulder’s big box stores, city recreation centers, manufacturing plants and large office and municipal buildings for PV arrays, we can create local electrical generation centers across Boulder and make a noticeable dent in reducing our use of fossil fuels for energy production. Given the combined and unprecedented challenges of climate change and peak oil, Boulder’s citizens are increasingly aware that we need to transition as quickly as possible to renewable energy sources.

Boulder, we have the talent and knowledge to reduce our city’s contribution to global warming and be a leader nationwide for innovative environmental ideas. Let’s make rooftop PV arrays on nonresidential rooftops a long-term sustainable solution that one day, when we look back, we’ll say “well done!”

To which I replied

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/apr/20/20elet/

lafayetteeast: “Ralph: yes … you’ve hit your nail on the head … you despise …. you are a negativity freak … everything with you is negative … you are a person who ‘despises’ …. rather than being creative or positive. Think if you put all that energy into positive solutions rather than simply ‘despising.’ You spew invectives AGAINST nearly everything and everyone. You complain, complain, complain … for someone as bright as you are, I think it’s an incredibly wasted use of your considerable talents and energies.”

Let me make this clear.

If I were living in the 1860’s I would be an abolitionist because I _DESPISE_ slavery.

I would be negative negative negative … and the only solution I would offer is to …

GASP!

free the slaves.

I despise the unnecessary and ludicrous controls placed on humans by out-of-control governments and my solution — like Chuck’s [see Chuck Wright's comments of http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/apr/20/20elet/] — is to, well, …

Stop the slavery. Stop the controls.

Free the slaves.

- – - -

If you had been living back then, lafayetteeast, would you solution be to enact laws to make the slaves more comfortable? That’s a nice positive solution.

Sometimes the right solution is to stop the thing that is making people miserable.

Just tear down the institutions of slavery.

Ralph Shnelvar

http://www.dailycamera.com/blogs/community-blog-ralph-shnelvar/