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Posts made in April, 2012

California: The Internet Caused Our Budget Deficit

In the 1990s “dot com” boom, a lot of people sold stocks and stock options at a profit. That windfall resulted in huge capital gains taxes for the state. Anyone literate enough to read this article knows that when you receive a gift, you don’t build that revenue into your budget. It is a gift, you spend it and it is gone. Deposed former Governor Gray Davis, instead of using...

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Michigan Grad Students Can’t Unionize

If you get into a Ph.D. program, are you there to learn and do research, like an academic, or are you there to earn a wage, like a corporate researcher?  Basically, are you still a student or are you an employee?A group of Michigan students who had sought to unionize a year ago has been denied. A few weeks back, Gov. Rick Snyder signed legislation clarifying that graduate student research...

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News Mob: A Flash Mob With Actual Value

Usually, when the majority of reporters in a newsroom rallies around coverage of a single story or event something really big is breaking. Maybe a mass shooting, a tsunami, or a terrorist attack.Or, if you happen to work for the Orange County Register, it’s opening day for the Los Angeles Angels — April 6, 2012 — and you’re part of the newspaper’s first official “news mob.”So what...

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Can Cartoons Be Sell Outs? Final Fantasy Characters Wear Prada

It's the team-up no one ever expected to see; video game characters and...fashion.  But it has. The latest issue of Arena Homme+, a men's fashion magazine, has a CGI photo shoot of Final Fantasy video game characters showing off the Prada 2012 Men's Spring/Summer Collection. So much for continuity.  What's next, medieval knights driving tanks? Cylons fighting Jedi? Whatever.  If...

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Let science drive regulation, not fear

I have long argued that while the kooky, anti-science conservative is a new phenomenon, the kooky, anti-science progressive has a decades-old history.  And it basically came into existence due to Rachel Carson's anti-science screed "Silent Spring"(1) - unless you really want to believe someone sprayed DDT, got cancer and died 6 months later.

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