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Comment Re:Link it to the ooverty line (Score 1) 1106

First problem: the poverty line is variable. For one person under 65, it was ~$11k, for a family of two (single mom + kid, for instance) it's $15k, for a family of four it was $23k. Would you advocate a different minimum wage in each case? Or would you choose one? Those create, respectively, a $5.37, $7.27 and $11.08 minimum wage.

Second problem: at the minimum wage, you have to work every day of every week just to not be impoverished. There's no way to retire if you can never save, no way you can take an unpaid day (sick day, vacation day, personal day for your kid's doctor's appointment; I didn't have paid leave when I was a wage earner)... Heck, if your hours are reduced one week due to factors outside your control (your boss schedules your hours), you're in trouble. You're basically fighting every day just to tread water.

Comment Re:Logical Fallacy Bingo (Score 1) 706

The polling threshold is set at 15%, which would have excluded all third-party candidates for the last hundred years.

Not quite true. Teddy Roosevelt in '12 (27.4%), La Follette in '24 (16.6%), Wallace in '68 (13.5% of the final vote, but was polling higher than that), Anderson in '80 (6.6%; was polling closer to 20% at the time of the debates) and Perot in '92 (18.9%).

Comment Food acceptance issues in autism (Score 4, Interesting) 163

My socially awkward and geeky personality led to pretty much every pre-med I met in college trying to diagnose me with autism. One of the diagnosis criteria that I remember them mentioning was food acceptance or preference issues (eating the same thing all the time, refusing to try new things, etc.). It's since been removed from the diagnostic criteria (it's not nearly selective enough), but it still occurs in a significant majority of cases. I'm curious if there could be a link here. The mice in the study were treated with a diet high in branched chain amino acids. According to livestrong, those foods are... well, I'd generally call those "kids food": red meat, chicken, nuts and cheese. I wonder if food acceptance issues in autism have a biological underpinning and kids are, essentially, trying to self-medicate with chicken fingers.

Comment Re:Is It Wrong? (Score 1) 363

News International's share price has dropped 6%, which whilst isn't a fine, but will certainly hammer the profits of the organisation as a whole.

News Corp closed at ~15 yesterday. At the end of January, it was ~15. So, while they lost some of the gains for this year (to be expected with the scuttling of the BSkyB deal and NotW), they're not exactly going to be hard up on cash.

Comment Re:2 questions for the TSA (Score 1) 570

The TSA has an $8.1 annual billion budget and has yet to have a single success.

The TSA actually has a new section dedicated to their successes at http://www.tsa.gov/press/goodcatch/

There are currently three stories: on March 30th they found some pot in a jar of peanut butter, on April 15th they found what appears to be a really tiny knife (or a normal knife in a gigantic DVD player) and on May 5th they found a knife in a shoe (knife not shown).

So, they have had some successes, but these are small, meaningless victories (and, in the first case, completely unrelated to safety).

The Courts

Daylight Savings Time Puts Kid in Jail for 12 Days 881

Jherek Carnelian writes "Cody Webb was jailed for calling in a bomb threat to his Hempstead Area high school (near Pittsburgh). He spent 12 days in lockup until the authorities realized that their caller-id log was off an hour because of the new Daylight Savings Time rules and that Cody had only called one hour prior to the actual bomb threat. Perhaps it took so long because of the principal's Catch-22 attitude about Cody's guilt — she said, 'Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.'"
Communications

Submission + - Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Anonymous Coward Inc. writes: "Snippet from article . "Seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world — the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon — which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe — was beginning to hit Britain as well.""

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