What $29 A Week For Food Looks Like For Actual Low-Income People (And Not Gwyneth Paltrow) →

Gwyneth Paltrow was tapped by Mario Batali to do the#FoodBankNYCChallenge and eat on $29 a week. She tweeted a picture of her groceries: ...
I know other people are critiquing this already, but this bothers me on a basic level because eight of those 16 items are not calorically significant. Nutritionally speaking, this is a vitamin bonanza. But people who live on SNAP benefits don’t just have to get nutrients, they have to get actual calories, because they tend to have very physical lives, doing service labor and taking care of children and not necessarily being able to afford acar and so forth.
I mean, let’s break this down to calories, right? ...
Altogether, that’s 7059 calories. That means that Gwyneth will be surviving on about 1000 calories per day this week. That is, by all means, possible for a week for someone who has the option to be physically active or not. It’s possible for a week for someone who doesn’thave that option, too, actually, but it’s not sustainable over the long term for someone who has limited transportation options, negligible assistance with childcare, and probably a minimum-wage-or-less service job. The average sedentary adult burns at least 1600 calories in a day. Supposing that the average woman in America is 5’4” and weighs 165 pounds, she’d burn about 2400 calories a day even if she was moderately active, meaning that she worked a service job and took care of kids. She would be working at a 1400-calorie deficit on Gwyneth’s diet.

Why Hillary Clinton Is More Vital to the Democratic Party’s Future Than Even Democrats Realize →

Now, she’s one of the most popular political figures in the country. HuffPost Pollster’s average gives her a 48 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable rating.  As an isolated number, that sounds just OK. But consider this: President Obama has a 48 percent favorable rating and a 48 percent unfavorable rating.  Vice President Joe Biden has a 42 percent favorable rating and 45 percent unfavorable rating, and outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid—albeit less well-known than the president and vice president—has a 23 percent favorable rating and a 43 percent unfavorable rating. Even Warren—crusader of the Democratic left—has just a 30 percent favorable rating (and a 33 percent unfavorable rating as well). If Clinton were unknown, this might be a problem. But she’s among the most known figures in politics. An almost 50 percent favorable rating, put differently, is fairly impressive.

Among Democrats, there’s no competition. In the most recent average, Clinton takes nearly 60 percent of the primary vote. Her next two competitors—Warren and Biden—take 12 percent each. By contrast, in 2007, she was just a modest favorite for the nomination.

...

And as for Clinton versus Republicans? Neither Jeb Bush (33 percent favorable, 49 percent unfavorable), Scott Walker (26 percent favorable, 27 percent unfavorable), nor Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (30 percent favorable, 31 percent unfavorable) have comparable ratings. Indeed, there’s no one of Hillary Clinton’s visibility and prominence who is as popular as she is.

Alternatives to the FBI's Manufacturing of Terrorists →

John Mueller suggests an alternative to the FBI's practice of encouraging terrorists and then arresting them for something they would have never have planned on their own:

The experience with another case can be taken to suggest that there could be an alternative, and far less costly, approach to dealing with would-be terrorists, one that might generally (but not always) be effective at stopping them without actually having to jail them.

It involves a hothead in Virginia who ranted about jihad on Facebook, bragging about how "we dropped the twin towers." He then told a correspondent in New Orleans that he was going to bomb the Washington, D.C. Metro the next day. Not wanting to take any chances and not having the time to insinuate an informant, the FBI arrested him. Not surprisingly, they found no bomb materials in his possession. Since irresponsible bloviating is not illegal (if it were, Washington would quickly become severely underpopulated), the police could only charge him with a minor crime -- making an interstate threat. He received only a good scare, a penalty of time served and two years of supervised release.

That approach seems to have worked: the guy seems never to have been heard from again. It resembles the Secret Service's response when they get a tip that someone has ranted about killing the president...

WaPo Column Asks: "Should Mitt Romney Be Able to Use Fund Managers' Tax Break to Buy Filet Mignon?" →

No, that actually is not what the column asked. The question was instead whether people on TANF or food stamps should be able to buy steak or spend their money in other ways that politicians consider lavish.
It seems that if we think the government has a right to dictate people's spending habits based on giving them $1,600 a year in food stamps (the average benefit per recipient), there should also be a case for dictating their spending habits if we give them thousands of times as much in tax breaks, as would be the case with the fund managers' tax break.
For those not familiar with it, the fund managers' tax break (also known as the carried interest tax deduction) allows managers of hedge funds and private equity funds, as well as other types of investment funds, to pay the lower capital gains tax rate instead of the tax rate on ordinary income. In order to get this lower tax rate they have to be paid on a commission, like a car salesperson or a realtor. While other workers who get paid in part on commission still have to pay the same tax rate on their income, because of their enormous political power fund managers like Mitt Romney were able to get Congress to give them a special lower tax rate.
The gains to these fund managers can be enormous; it is not uncommon for successful managers like Romney to pocket $10 million a year. With a tax rate on normal income of 39.6 percent and a capital gains tax rate of 20 percent, this implies a government handout of $1,960,000 a year (@1230 years of food stamps)...

Florida teen charged with felony hacking for using password his teacher showed him →

A 14-year-old middle school student in Holiday, Florida, was arrested this week and charged with "an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access," which is a felony, the Tampa Bay Times reported this week.
The student reportedly used an administrator password to log into a teacher's computer and change the background image to a photo of two men kissing.
Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco suggested that the criminal charges relate to the level of access he had obtained by logging onto the network as an administrator, according to the report. For example, he could have seen the questions for the state's standardized tests, although Green said he didn't actually tamper with anything other than the teacher's PC background image, the report says.
Holiday, Florida's big-time hacker also revealed his secrets after he was caught – the password was the teacher's last name, and the teacher had typed it in in full view of the students. The student told the Times that many other students used these administrators' passwords (their teachers' last names) so they can screen-share and video chat with other students.

Why Is the “Middle Class” Stressed?: An interesting New Hypothesis from Emmons and Noeth →

There have long been a bunch of hypotheses about why the American “middle class” feels “stressed” in spite of constant real incomes and what appears to me increased utility over time as more expenditure shifts toward information goods where consumer surplus is a higher multiple of factor cost:

  1. Americans are used to seeing real incomes improve at 2%/year–doubling every generation–and they have not been getting that. Living little better than your predecessors a generation ago is an unpleasant shock.

  2. The things that have been becoming cheaper are not seen as things key to your “middle class” status, while the things becoming more expensive and difficult to obtain–a detached house in a good neighborhood with a short commute, health insurance, secure pensions, a good education for your children–are things that it used to be taken for granted a middle-class family could get.

  3. The widening gap between the middle class and the upper class.

Now come Emmons and Noeth with a new and very interesting hypothesis: that people who have done better than their parents with respect to education and family structure are no richer, and people who have matched their parents with respect to education and family structure are poorer. In other words, people who thought they were upwardly mobile are finding themselves with no higher real incomes. And people who thought they were sociologically stable are finding themselves poorer:...

Millennials support sex ed but don’t find it helpful in real life →

Hmm, I wonder why...

The great majority of poll respondents said they learned about topics such as sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, birth control and abstinence. But only 45 percent said they discussed healthy relationships, and only 12 percent said they discussed same-sex relationships.

Bingo.

“It’s no wonder so many millennials didn’t find their sex education that helpful,” said Debra Hauser, president of Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that pushes for comprehensive sex education.
“Many were in school during a time when schools taught only abstinence. Others may have received clinical information about disease or pregnancy prevention, but few were provided the information young people truly need to traverse puberty, understand the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships, develop a positive body image, make informed decisions, communicate effectively or navigate the health care system.”
...
“We’re barely getting the basic information out to kids. We’re not getting to the advanced, secondary conversations around dating and relationships,” Tenner said. “I probably know as many adults as teens who say that they’d love to have more information about what it means to date, what is a healthy relationship, how do I know if I’m in one — these are big questions that even adults struggle with.”