Current Affairs

Double dutching might be back! I wonder if I can talk any of my friends into it … The New York Times > National > In San Francisco, a New Twist on a Schoolyard Pastime

Everything you do today requires an expert. From drafting a will to selling a home, you spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars to people that have an advanced degree and know the rules. My reaction to this is I’d better learn the rules! However, is the world really this complicated or do these experts

If you’re really interested in the details of the recent tax law changes, the Congressional Budget Office has put together a publication called “Effective Federal Tax Rates Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014” that provides tables that show how the laws affect different categories of tax payers over time.

Making prisoners pay for their prison stay is an appealing idea. I can definitely see why it would be popular with voters. However, you can also see the other side. How saddling people with debt, in addition to a criminal record, can make it even harder for them to fit into society and make ends

For my friends that believe torturing terrorists is ok. You’re in the minority. “Two-thirds of Americans believe the United States should never use physical torture of people it detains.” Yahoo! News – Poll: Americans Against Using Torture

Setting goals and then missing them may make people more likely to cheat than if they hadn’t had any goals, especially if they missed them by just a little. This Wharton article, Goal setting and Cheating: Why They Often Go Together in the Workplace – Knowledge@Wharton, talks about several studies that relate goal setting to

Sociology is not the only area where the Bush administration stretches the facts. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has issued a new report expressing its concern about the way the Bush administration uses scientific data. The UCS report is signed by 4,000 scientists, including “48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients and

A while back, Bush announced plans to encourage and help poor people to marry. His reason? Married people are less likely to be poor. I think Bush should have taken Sociology 101 in college, which is where I learned the difference between cause, effect, correlating statistics and other interesting tidbits that might help set public

What do you think is the minimum wage that you could live humanely on? Remember that the numbers below are pretax (the ones I gave in other posts were post tax) and that most minimum wage jobs come without benefits like paid time off and health care. What do you think is a “liveable” minimum