This layout doesn’t have the same problems as my last attempt at a redesign (it definitely allows for comments to be posted, at least). I’m still not completely happy with it. I expect the picture at the top to change, and I’ll lengthen the sidebar with random pictures soon.

I’ve also noticed a problem that prevents blockquotes from displaying correctly when they’re beside the floating sidebar. It doesn’t seem to be a problem in IE, but it is a problem in both Opera and Firefox, and I’ve not yet figured out exactly how to fix it. I’ll keep looking, but if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Mrs. du Toit writes about the inaccuracies in her daughter’s Sociology textbook:

Last night Wendy told me something she’d read in her sociology textbook*. She got a great big “WHAT?” from me. So she fetched it and opened to the page where she’d read it.

It was in the section on nature vs. nuture. “It’s just wrong,” I told her. I set about to explain why it was wrong and how all of it had been disproven… a LONG TIME AGO.

Then she asked me to read another section. Wrong again.

I handed it back to her with the instruction, “Just pass the class and when it is all over, flush the contents from your brain.”

It wasn’t enough. She wanted me to read more of it and read it aloud so Kim could hear it, too. I told her I didn’t want to, because it just made me angry. She said she liked to see the expression on my face when I read it.

Our entire evening was spent going over a few other passages in the book with explanations and citations of ACTUAL science that had disproven these silly claims.

Beyond the obvious lies and distortions, the thing that was interesting to me is that it wasn’t a college level textbook, at least from the perspective of the textbooks I had in college. It was written exactly the way the remedial reading cards were written for 7th graders.

Wendy is lucky that she had someone to talk to who knew the facts to disprove this stuff. Most students don’t, and it’s a shame that there’s no accountability for these publishers publishing textbooks that are wrong, not because of simple mistakes on their part, but apparently out of bias and an unwillingness to even try to get the facts right.

A friend* of mine sent me a text message today with a headline informing me that the Senate had rejected the minimum wage hike. Suspecting what she thought of this development and how she would react to my own thoughts on it, I answered noncommittally, simply remarking that I was surprised they couldn’t pass it; after all, Democrats have the majority now, right? The conversation then turned into a debate about the merits of an increase in the minimum wage. As I disagreed with her, I was promptly informed that I was a disgusting, selfish, and bad person who thought he knew everything.

I already have an opinion about the minimum wage, but it’s not a particularly strongly held one, so I decided to examine it in depth here. Obviously, something in my current stance must be horribly off, because I’m not only wrong, but wrong enough that a friend of mine felt that it made me a horrible person. Whatever my error was, it also so glaring that she felt it was useless to explain it to me. As a result, I’ve taken a bit of time to explore the issue as neutrally as I could.

At the first glance, the idea of the minimum wage is very alluring. We know that there is a lot of poverty in the nation, and that some people living in poverty are actually working very hard to try to make ends meet. If we raised the minimum amount that employers were allowed to pay an employee, then, logically, the people working would make more money, and therefore be able to afford to make ends meet easier.

The problem with that is that while it’s (relatively) easy to change the dollar amount that workers are paid, it is much more difficult to change the value that society places on the work that they do. As an example, if society values a manhour of manning the front desk at a movie theater to be worth about the price of a movie ticket, and we tell the movie theater they must pay more for the person running the front desk, then it is almost a certainty that they will subsequently raise the price of the movie ticket**. This process will repeat itself throughout the economy, and the new “minimum wage” is essentially worth no more than the old one.

One of the reasons we use money is that it simplifies trade immensely. Bartering is a bit of a headache. If you want goods and/or services, but the person who provides those things doesn’t actually want any of the things you have, you’re forced to make a trade with an intermediary (or two or three or …) to get items you can trade for something you want. Instead, we use money as a stand in, allowing us to simply put a numeric value on the worth of various items, and simplifying everything for everyone.

Taken as a whole, a free market allows us to compare what various things are worth to society. A new comic book is worth approximately the same amount as a couple of bottles of soda. A laptop (depending on its configuration) might be worth approximately 1/10th of a car. An hour of “unskilled” labor is worth approximately the same amount as a new paperback book. A lot of people forget that the numeric amount of something’s value doesn’t really mean anything in and of itself. It only means something in the context of what it can be traded for.

Whether an hour of running a cash register at a small town store should be worth more to our society than it is is a question that is open for debate, but even if the answer is yes, changing the value that our society places on that service is a much more complicated process than simply telling the employer that they need to pay the employee more money.

* That should possibly read former friend, given the tone that the discussion took. I find that disturbing, but I will not claim to believe something I do not simply to preserve a friendship, even though it means a lot to me.

** Assume a best case scenario, where the process above never compounds itself (if multiple people in the life of a consumer product get raises, its effective cost, and therefore its price, will raise more than once). In this case, the people receiving the raise are effectively earning the same purchasing power they were before, but people who were making more than the minimum wage have essentially lost purchasing power. So, it helps those earning minimum wage only by hurting those who are making more than minimum wage. In a less-than-best-case scenario, everyone is hurt, and the people receiving the minimum wage “raise” are almost certainly going to be hurt the most, because they are the individuals most likely to be purchasing cheaper items that are most affected by the price hike.

Over at American Thinker, James Lewis explains Why Global Warming is Probably a Crock. His argument, in essence, boils down to this:

1. The climate, scientifically, is pretty complex — there are hundreds of variables to be considered before one can understand it.
2. For each variable, our certainty about its exact value varies, but is extremely unlikely to be exactly 100%.
3. As the number of variables increase, even a tiny uncertainty about each variable can lead to a huge uncertainty overall.

The problem with climate science is that while we might be able to isolate a single variable in the lab and determine the effect it has with everything else being equal, when we try to look at the real world, there are so many other variables exerting their own influences that the effect of the one variable that we understand is lost in all the “noise”, so to speak. I’m not going to go so far as to say that Global Warming is a crock, but I think that we don’t understand the problem well enough to understand whether we need to do something, much less understand it well enough to know what we need to do.

Thanks to Amy for letting me know that there was a bug in my new theme that was preventing comments.

I’ve reverted to the old layout until I can find the time to fix the problem.