Friday, April 28, 2006
Quickies
- I had heard of the notion, but I didn't realize that the Hygiene Hypothesis was a respected enough idea to have a fancy medical name.
- I bought a pair of Altec Lansing AHP712i Headphones with Active Noise Reduction headphones a month and a half ago and have been very pleased with both the noise reduction and sound quality. They're great for office work, running, or lawn mowing and have better bass response than any other headphone I've tried. At $28, they're $12 cheaper than I paid. My biggest complaint is that noise reduction system introduces a fair amount of hiss; fortunately, I can't notice it after about two minutes.
- A senior official in the Department of Homeland Security is proposing a global ID system to expedite travel and to inhibit terrorists.
- Republican senators recently proposed a $100 gas rebate for the vast majority of American tax payers. I thought the idea was asinine. How can the government rebate us for something we didn't buy from them? Moreover, what happened to those open-market, free-trade Republicans? It's nice to see that 86% of respondents at CNN.com thought the idea was silly, too.
- A little back-of-the-envelope math estimates that there are 150,000,000 eligible tax payers potentially receiving $100, for a cost, before administrative overhead, of $15,000,000,000. If the government took all of the profits that Chevron, ExxonMobile, and Marathon have reported this quarter, they'd still need to come up with a few billion to cover that bill. But what's a few billion?
posted by Leif Wickland @ 11:55 PM 
