IPOPA has a nice rant on the brouhaha over Michael Phelps and the devil’s weed marijuana. Bottom line: the reaction to Phelps is as ridiculous as our demonization of marijuana as opposed to our approach to cigarettes and alcohol.

Meteor Blades has a nice explanation up about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics computes those unemployment numbers you always hear about on the news. Turns out that they’ve been rejiggered over the years so that “5%” now doesn’t necessarily mean what “5%” meant 15 or 20 years ago. Also, there are various categories. U3 is what the media usually reports.

The BLS definition of U3 is “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force.” The BLS categorizes U6 as “Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.”

Employed part time for economic reasons covers workers who would love to have a full-time job – who may need full-time work to pay all the bills – but can only find something part time. Marginally attached workers are those available for work, who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months, but who aren’t included in the unemployed count because they have not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the most recent BLS survey.

Which one might be “right,” depends on what you’re trying to learn from the statistics. U6 probably makes the most sense if you’re trying to figure out how the economy is treating people who want to work.

Finding out about the different categories was a light bulb moment for me. I had been doing collections and getting the feeling that people were having a rougher time than before, but the unemployment numbers were hovering around 4% or whatever. I was down on the ground without a good perspective, but even knowing that, the stats didn’t reflect the reality I thought I was seeing. The U6 numbers were probably a better correlation for me.

Is it just me getting old, or have we spent way too much time this January with temperatures in the teens, single digits, or below? Hopefully this link is permanent; it’s January 2009 historical weather data from Weather Underground. The low has been below 20 degrees on 21 days this month, most of the packed into the second half.

Grumble grumble.

I am going to think out loud for a second here. And, my grasp of formal logic is basic and 20 years out of the class room. So, I guess what I’m saying is that this one might not be worth reading. But when has that ever stopped me?

I have heard the proposition that “if you increase taxes on a thing, you get less of it.” I am willing to accept that as true. However, in propositional logic, as I understand it, the contrapositive of a true statement is necessarily also true, but the negative of that statement is not necessarily true. Roughly speaking this would mean that the contrapositive of the statement, negating both aspects, would be true — for the proposition above, that would be something like, “if you are getting more of something, you have not increased taxes on it.” Meanwhile, the negative of the statement would be “if you decrease taxes on a thing, you get more of it.” That could be true, but it’s not a logical necessity.

Conservatives, it seems to me are taking the negative of the proposition as necessarily true. They apparently believe as an article of faith that if we decrease taxes on production, we will necessarily increase production. The main problem, probably more so than the logical fallacy involved, is that our economy is not a binary system with the tax rate as the only meaningful input. People have to have to be employed producing things and services of value; they have to have to retain a great deal of that value for their own purchasing needs; and they have to spend that value on something other than debt service.

Seems to me we have a system where people work more sporadically than they would like; where the value they generate by and large ends up in someone else’s pocket; and where the money they earn is used to service debt while their purchases are made through incurring more debt. Too much of the value generated is pooled in the hands of too few who don’t spend the money in ways that add sufficient value to the economy. Our economy is like a leaky steam engine wasting energy.

O.k, this post didn’t turn out any prettier than I anticipated. But, I’ll post it anyway, warts, logical gaps, and all.

Jason Kottke noted a significant change in the “robots.txt” file for whitehouse.gov. “Robots.txt” is a file that tells web crawlers –Google’s indexing program, for example — what to index and what not to index.

The old whitehouse.gov site gave web crawlers 2,400 lines of instructions about what not to include. The new whitehouse.gov site gives two lines of instruction:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

This tells the webcrawler not to track the “includes” directory at the site, but everything else is fair game.