On Friday, the House of Representatives passed its climate change bill by a slim margin. The bill's key feature is a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. That system would set national emission limits and would require affected emitters to own permits (called allowances) to cover their emissions. The number one thing you should know about this bill is that the allowances are worth big money: almost $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and more in subsequent decades.

A few weeks ago, I posted some charts showing that Americans are increasingly reliant on government transfers as a source of income. Friday's data on personal income for May confirmed that the trend is continuing.

This evening, I ran across a post by George, over at Decrepit Old Fool, called "Is Change Even Possible?" It's a good post that raises a vital question. The changes in human cultures that have come about in the past 500 or so years are exceedingly remarkable, but they are not the human norm. Change is for the most part resisted by humans. Any attempt to change us is an uphill battle.

India slipped 15 points on the Global Peace Index (GPI) ranking, from 107 in 2008 to 122 (out of 144 countries) in 2009. Whether one gives any credence to these rankings or whether one accepts the definition of peace as stated by them, what I can say from my personal experience is that as a citizen I have perceived a deterioration of "peace" over the past two decades.

The best thing anyone can do to continue making the Internet more closed, restrictive, and prohibiting is to use Adobe Flash as it exists today. The Internet was created to allow for the open and unconfined infrastructure to share information; yet, it is being used today for the opposite purpose: to stop this information torrent.

On Thursday evening, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary analysis of the latest version of Title I of the Affordable Health Choices Act, commonly known as the HELP bill or the Kennedy bill (since it's the product of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions which Senator Kennedy chairs). Based on a quick review, here are the top six things I think you should know about the cost estimate.

An exchange between White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and reporter Helen Thomas, 89, who has covered every president since John F. Kennedy.

Many studies examine whether insiders' trading activity is informative regarding future return on stocks. An underlying hypothesis tested in these studies is whether insider trades are driven by insiders' superior information about the prospects of their firm and whether these trades are informative in generating abnormal returns.

One of the best things about living in (or just following) Santa Barbara is reading Nick Welsh's Angry Poodle Barbeque column each week in the Independent " one of the best free newsweeklies anywhere. This week's column, El Corazn del Perro, is a classic.

As I hole up in my ivory tower writing about trademark fair use reform this summer, it's nice to know that the issue might matter in the outside world. In a pair of signs yesterday, I ran across two different news articles showing how seriously our overbroad trademark rights are constraining free expression.

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