Maggie's Farm

10 Job Search Mistakes You're Probably Making

LA: $111 million for 55 jobs. It should be a scandal.

The Tea Party has already won

Who loves ya, small business?

The limits of science. A quote:

Physicists, in particular, have long believed themselves to be on the verge of explaining almost everything. In 1894 Albert Michelson, the first American to get a Nobel prize in science, said that all the main laws and facts of physics had already been discovered. In 1928 Max Born, another Nobel prize-winner, said that physics would be completed in about six months’ time. In 1988, in his bestselling “A Brief History of Time”, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote that “we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.” Now, in the newly published “The Grand Design”, Hawking paints a picture of the universe that is “different…from the picture we might have painted just a decade or two ago”. In the long run, physicists are, no doubt, getting closer and closer to the truth. But you can never be sure when the long run has arrived. And in the short run—to adapt Keynes’s proverb—we are often all wrong. 

City Journal on charter school lotteries

AVI thinks about poverty. Before I even get to his considerations, I need to know who is in those stats, and how poverty is currently defined (for example, does it include the value of government benefits? I know it excludes assets, and only looks at income.). Does it include grad students with stipends and free housing? People with two cars? Women's Studies grads living at home who can't find a job? 19 year-old single moms with four kids? People who are temporarily out of work? People who work off the books? - (Who hasn't heard "I'll do it for $500, or $200 in cash"?). Maine potato or blueberry farmers with 200 acres? Chronic schizophrenics and the mentally disabled who can only work in sheltered situations? The creepy Goth gals with the tats and body-piercings who work part-time in the truck stops in St. Johnsbury and Lebanon NH and live with their boyfriends? Unemployed actors and dancers? Waiters in Colorado Springs who do not declare their tips?  Drug dealers who declare no income? The elderly living on Social Security? I mean, I know there is some poverty (and tons of programs to assist them), but who are they? And how much of it is elective in some sense, like my hippie Maine Guide who wants to follow his heart and doesn't give a damn about income? Or people who won't leave Michigan when there are jobs for them in Texas and Alabama? Money is not everybody's primary motivator, but I know there are tons of ambitious Americans looking hard for work right now in this crappy Obama economy. I just want to know who is in those stats.

Powerline on the politics of the stupid and obnoxious lightbulb ban

Castle seems to have felt entitled. Here's another sore loser. Grow up, people. Take your lumps, and go get a $1 million/yr lobbying job in DC if you don't like living in your home state. Or is it about a twisted desire for power?

What does Take Back America mean to you? For years, a common yard and barn sign in nothern Vermont has been "Take Back Vermont." (I don't think they took it back yet, and soon the posters of those signs will be dead. Dead and buried, ayup.)

Nice Magazine You’ve Got There, Mr. Forbes… Be a shame if something were to happen to it…