Pun Salad

… tell me that I'm lying 'bout a job that I never could find:

• The headline is "US jobless rate up as economic growth stalls". One would hope that this will convince a few million more people that President Obama has no clue whatsoever about creating the conditions for a healthy economy.

  It should be noted that Will Wilkinson had it figured out over six years ago, when he deemed an Obamic utterance as a sign …

  … of the sickness at the heart of contemporary liberalism: the inability or unwillingness to recognize the cooperative market order -- our system of mutual benefit based on ownership and exchange -- as the primary source of American prosperity, security, and solidarity.

• Wired is one of my favorite magazines, but as Peter Suderman points out, they're not necessarily skeptical enough about the benefits of government expenditure. He links to an article deeming rural broadband expansion to be "a stimulus success story." But Suderman quotes some numbers found by a couple of economists:

  Eisenach and Caves looked at three areas that received stimulus funds, in the form of loans and direct grants, to expand broadband access in Southwestern Montana, Northwestern Kansas, and Northeastern Minnesota. The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.  The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.

  So how much did it cost per unserved household to get them broadband access?  A whopping $349,234, or many multiples of household income, and significantly more than the cost of a home itself.

• Ack, we need to lighten up a bit. But we'll maintain our generally libertarian bent by referring to a funny article at Open Market detailing daffy state laws and regulations. At the top of the heap:

  • In New Hampshire, it is illegal to have a ferret in your possession while on your way to a hunting trip.

  • Also in New Hampshire, ventriloquism is a licensed occupation.

  Wait, what? Could this be true of our Live Free or Die state? Sometimes these wacky legal yarns get exaggerated, right?

  But RSA 207:6, seems to be definitive:

  207:6 Ferrets. - No person, while hunting or obviously on his way to or from hunting, shall have a ferret in his possession, custody or control.

  And RSA 286:1 is even better:

  286:1 Showmen. - No showman, tumbler, rope dancer, ventriloquist or other person shall, for pay, exhibit any feats of agility, horsemanship, sleight of hand, rope dancing or feats with cards, or any animals, wax figures, puppets or other show, or promote any public competition, without a license from the selectmen of the town.

  That certainly seems unfriendly toward unconventional entertainers. I can't find anything specific about what happens if you're an unlicensed rope dancer agilely performing a hunting skit with a wax ferret puppet on a horse, but I suspect it's bad, very bad.

• Radley Balko made me laugh:

  Roger Clemens goes on trial for lying . . . to politicians. Which is a bit like putting a woman on trial for flashing her breasts at a stripper.

  Or a tumbler performing a card trick… oh, never mind.

• One of my painfully-acquired skills is how to talk to non-technical people about technical subjects, especially when it involves something they should have "done different". It turns out Apple Store Geniuses are forging new frontiers in this area:

  Apple employees are banned from saying "unfortunately" when delivering bad news to a customer, urged instead to replace it with the more positive "as it turns out." And management apparently takes the ban seriously: One former Apple employee tells us that his coworker was put under a 90-day probationary period because he said "unfortunately" too much at the Genius Bar.

  And an ex-genius is quoted:

  There was a whole class we took about things not to say, and what to say instead. One of my favorites was to resist the urge to say "That's stupid" or "That wasn't smart" and replace it with "That's not recommended" - For example, you say "I took my iPod swimming and now it don't work" I say "Ah, that's not recommended" when I mean "That was really stupid".

  "As it turns out, Mr. President, your economic policy was not recommended."

• A final bit of actual wisdom from Lore Sjöberg:

  There are two types of lazy people in the world -- those who don't want to do anything they don't have to and those who don't want to learn anything they don't have to.

  The former group drives progress. The latter impedes it.

  Lore is talking about game design, but… which kind of lazy is your typical politician?