Don’t hold your breath that good things will just happen

E.g., Don’t hold your breath that the Democrats will save us.  Or that anyone will.  It might take something far more dramatic.  Perhaps something revolutionary.  But it's going to require far more than sitting around watching our TV's to make it happen. Marty Kaplan is a really smart media-reform and political-reform…

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Bridging Engineering Compromises

In recent news, another highway bridge collapsed. Every 20 years or so, a major bridge fails unexpectedly. The nature of civil engineering is to understand how things fail, and design the next generation to avoid that failure. Each failure leads to better designs. Each of the major bridges that collapsed…

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How do payday lenders get away with charging such high interest rates?

The topic of usury laws and payday loans arises frequently these days. Payday lenders commonly charge interest rates of 300%, 400% or more on their loans to desperate consumers. Why do I suggest these consumers are desperate? It’s because they are writing postdated checks to payday lenders, agreeing to give up a large chunks of their next paychecks, and paying exorbitant interest rates in the process. How many people who are not financially desperate would be willing to sign away the proceeds of a future paycheck and pay 450% interest for this “privilege”? With repeated real-life scenario as the backdrop, the question often arises: do usury laws exist anymore? This topic has been addressed by Christopher Peterson in a comprehensive law review article entitled “Usury Law, Payday Loans, and Statutory Sleight-Of-Hand: an Empirical Analysis of American Credit Pricing Limits.”

It’s not hard to determine what motivates Peterson’s work. He writes that the American consumer is now dealing with “a new, largely unregulated credit marketplace.” The center of the storm is the payday lending industry which, “despite spending millions on lobbying and public relations, is at the center of an inferno of rage and public controversy.” Peterson takes time to discuss the history of usury laws throughout the history of the American republic. Usury laws, according to Peterson, have “historically been the foremost bulwark shielding consumers from harsh credit practices.” At the time our country declared its independence, no state had an interest of greater than 8%. Benjamin Franklin warned of …

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Bush versus Science, again.

It's another chapter of a disturbing and repeating story: Where good science conflicts with the aims of the Administration, science loses.  Stir in the arrogant ignorance of yet another unqualified Republican political hack.  This story is from today's Washington Post: A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to…

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Bush makes a huge mistake by hammering Michael Moore with a subpoena

The federal government's decision to lay a subpoena on Michael Moore provides a psychological insight (not a new insight) into the Bush Administration. The suboena probably has something to do with Moore's visit to Cuba.   American law doesn't prohibit Americans from visiting Cuba, but it does prohibit American citizens spending…

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