I don’t like Jiffy Lube. They are expensive, slow, and worse, whenever I have been to Jiffy Lube, they tried to sell a bunch of other repairs that I didn’t need. But that’s not all, a number of Jiffy Lubes have been caught on tape not completing repairs people paid for. This video is pretty damning.

McQ at Qand O takes the Democrats’ opposition to Wal-Mart to task.

From Peter Gordon:

Virginia Postrel writes about “The American Standard of Whining … Supposedly only the rich are living better, while everybody else stagnates or falls behind. But if so, who is buying all those flat screens at Best Buy?”

This article on Voyager 1 is worth a read.

I just got back from vacation and this is an appropriate welcome back.

It is an addicting version of Risk.

Democrats still don’t understand the most basic economics. On the current debate on the minimum wage, Media Matters writes, “ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper and Washington Post staff writer Jeffrey Birnbaum both uncritically reported conservatives’ argument that a minimum-wage increase will eliminate existing jobs and discourage the creation of new ones. However, several studies show that minimum-wage increases do not hurt employment.”

QandO has a nice post about the economics of the minimum wage. I like their conclusions:

Fundamentally, debates about increasing the minimum wage are not really utilitarian arguments about ‘the greatest good’; they are a debate about whether we are economic pro-choice and economic anti-choice. Proponents of an increase in the minimum wage are economic anti-choice.

I fail to understand why Democrats are economic anti-choice, but I hope that someday they will understand a modicum of economics.

Bill Clinton understood a modicum of economics. Thank goodness he signed the 1996 welfare reform bill. Unlike current minimum wage proposals, welfare reform actually helped the poor.

What lies ahead

Originally uploaded by LynchburgVirginia.

My fiancee was taking the bar exam and while she worked hard, I rode my bike. The Blue Ridge Parkway made for some good bike riding–the only difference from the pictures is that the color wasn’t as cool.

All we hear from scare-groups like Environmental Working Group is that chemicals are killing us–dioxin, benzene, teflon, mercury, penta, PFOS, lead, PFCs, PBDEs, phthalates, etc. If their arguments are to be believed, we should all be dead or cancer ridden. But that isn’t what is happening. The NY Times published an interesting article about we are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. The NY Times write:

cientists used to say that the reason people are living so long these days is that medicine is keeping them alive, though debilitated. But studies like one Dr. Fogel directs, of Union Army veterans, have led many to rethink that notion.

The study involves a random sample of about 50,000 Union Army veterans. Dr. Fogel compared those men, the first generation to reach age 65 in the 20th century, with people born more recently.
…
Instead of inferring health from causes of death on death certificates, Dr. Fogel and his colleagues looked at health throughout life. They used the daily military history of each regiment in which each veteran served, which showed who was sick and for how long; census manuscripts; public health records; pension records; doctors