Sunday, January 26, 2014

hope you all are staying warm. Another data breach. Other miscellaneous links.

We did get snow over night--maybe another 2 inches.  Temps right now about 10F.  We are supposed to get some really cold temperatures over the next week.  Cold as in below zero.  We are still hibernating.

File this story under "here we go again."  I haven't shopped at Michaels for a good while.  They changed their inventory to a lot of things I really didn't want or use.  I was glad when Hobby Lobby opened just so Michaels would get some serious competition.  I don't like the politics of either company so that is a bit of a wash.  I wonder how many other retailers have been hit.

We have often suspected that our "antiseptic" culture is detrimental to health.  This story lends credence to that notion.  Don't get me wrong.  Cleanliness is one thing but our focus on indiscriminate killing of any and all bacteria is another.

This is an argument I can support.  But it is interesting that all of the economic theories involved have more resemblance to religious belief than to science.

Some time ago I said that perhaps the way to handle the notion of gay marriage was to simply take the state out of marriage all together.  The problem, of course, is the legal relationship has so many repercussions which the Oklahoma law makers proposing a ban on all marriages have not considered.  Think about how marriage structures real estate ownership and inheritance.  Think about how marriage structures influence child custody and adoption.  Think about how marriage controls what benefits one can tap or how much one has to part with in taxes.  Instead, we would have to regularize a contractual system to cover all of the relationships wired into the notion of marriage.

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