Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight web site has the article The American Middle Class Hasn’t Gotten A Raise In 15 Years.

Take the generation born in 1970. In early adulthood, these Americans outearned their parents, those born in 1950. But their gains stalled in the 2000s, when they were in their 30s. Now in their 40s, their earnings have fallen behind those of their parents at the same stage in their lives.

If you are in your 40s and you haven’t reached your economic expectations for this stage of your life, it’s probably not your fault. The world economy has turned against you because all the economic gains are being gobbled up by the top 1%.  The beauty of this for the top 1% is that you are struggling so hard, you don’t have time to do anything about this.

I have the solution for you though.  Stay away from the election on November 4th and turn the Senate over to the Republicans.  You’ll soon be unemployed and have plenty of  time to riot in the streets.

The Republicans may have stopped the Obama administration in its tracks, but at least we can be thankful that the Senate has the Republicans stopped in their tracks too.  Imagine if these people were to get their way.

I read a complaint on Randy Katz’s Facebook page about a quality journal having a pay wall.  In reply, Randy said the following:

Why should quality content be free?

I posted the response below.

Quality content should not be free. Quality content providers should learn that the 21st century needs a completely different subscriber model from the 17th century, let alone the 20th.

When you only had access to a small number of publications, it was easier to decide which few you were going to pay to subscribe to.

Now that we all have access to 100s if not 1,000s of publications, the choice is not so easy. Any whole dollar subscription to each of 1,000s of sources would still be too expensive.

Google and all the ad selling web sites have the technology to make micro-payments to people who agree to host ads on their web sites. They could use this technology for subscribers to web sources. Why couldn’t Google or other site create a “Publisher’s Clearing House” of the web? You would pay one subscription fee to Google, and you would get access to 1,000s of sites. A micro-payment would be taken out of your subscription and paid to the source of whatever articles you actually read.

With this system the subscriber does not have to decide beforehand which publications are likely to have an article that he or she wants to read on any given day, week, month, or year. For a set fee, the reader can decide on the spur of the moment which source to read with the knowledge that the chosen source would get a fair payment.

When you use up your fee in micro-payments you replenish your subscription with some more money.

I am going to keep pushing this idea until someone finally takes up the challenge.  I think my last post on this topic was Monetizing Internet Content – Refresher Course.  It’s not so much a question of why people can’t think outside the box, but more of a question of why am I the only person who can think outside of this particular box?

Think Progress has the article Watch Obama’s Top Science Advisor Repeatedly Shut Down Climate Deniers At House Climate Hearing.

There are three videos in the article. I’ll include the first one here.

The Congressional climate change denier did not understand how his argument was cut off at its knees, but I do understand it. Whereas the congressman will go on repeating that nobody can answer his question, I will remember the answer quite clearly.

This segment did not include the explanation that ice melting in a glass of water does not raise the water level in the glass, but ice dropped into the glass from outside the glass raises the water level quite dramatically. Apparently, this congressman has no idea that the Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet, Alaskan ice, Siberian ice and all of our mountain glaciers are not yet sitting in the oceans. Once they melt it will be like dropping them into the ocean.

What are these ignorant people doing judging science in the halls of Congress?

After posting this, I ran across a posting on Jacquelyn Wells’ Facebook page. This link points to the Politicus USA article Jon Stewart Obliterates Republicans By Highlighting Their Ignorance On Climate Change.

Here is a snapshot of the Stewart scientific experiment.

Here is the video of the segment. The scientific experiment is only a small part of this great segment.