For people earning less than $40,000 per year, the marginal tax rate is above 100%. This means that as people earn more money (but still less than $40,000), they actually get taxed more than the extra amount they are earning. This happens because SCHIP and other programs have discounts for people that phase out at certain incomes. The implication is that if you are earning close to $40,000, you are just as well off earning less money as you are earning more. From the Guardian, a whistleblower at the IAEA reports that the organization has overestimated the amount of oil still in the ground. This is in line with the David Rutledge talk I saw earlier this year, where he fit a curve to past oil production to show that the IAEA and the IPCC's estimates of oil in the ground were way too optimistic. If there's less oil in the ground, then there's less energy to burn and carbon dioxide to fill the atmosphere, implying that global warming models may overstate the problem. While global warming may be less of a problem, if we've already hit peak oil our economies are going to hit a wall when demand for oil vastly exceeds supply, which will be a much larger headache than a few-degree rise in world temperature. Here's a profile of food critic Jonathan Gold (subscription, or LexisNexis required). I hope to eat at some of the restaurants he found soon (and maybe try to get him to come to the Ath!) Here are 99 restaurants in LA that Gold recommended. I save interesting links I read on delicious.com. These show up in the "Recent Saved Links" bar to the right. You can also subscribe to them in RSS.

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