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Daylight Savings Time clock change is 2am on Sunday March 9th. Spring Forward, means put your clock ahead one hour effectively leading you to adjust your natural sleep schedule to get up one hour earlier. If you ask people what advantage comes from daylight savings time, most would tell you the main purpose is to save money on energy costs. Benjamin Franklin forwarded the idea with his whimsical 1784 paper entitled An Economical Project, and it made sense. Back then, if you could reduce the amount of time you burned your oil lamp or candle, you could save money. But the idea is out of step with the modern world.

States can decide whether or not to participate in DST and three states in the United States do not follow the Daylight Savings Time (DST) model. They are Hawaii, Arizona, and Indiana. In April 2006, that changed when Indiana joined the ranks of DST observers.

And with that change came statistical information. University of California Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew J Kotchen studied the numbers and would you believe what he found? Changing the clocks actually costs the average household more money! Energy providers benefit at the hands of the American population.

How? While it is true lighting costs are reduced, this is more than offset by the increased cost of heating and air-conditioning expenses. We’ll keep you informed of this and other entertaining news.

Here’s how to buy the forever stamps: They’re not an investment. There might be some numismatic or philatelic value to the stamps themselves, but as a way to cut costs it is a loser. Buy them as a convenience. They’re something that you can get and not have to worry about buying upgrade stamps. But don’t buy into the idea that if you buy a lot of them you will be saving money over the next price increase.

Marketing stamps as a way to save money makes perfect sense from the post offices perspective. You give them money now, but won’t use the service until sometime in the future. It’s almost like a free loan, as if the American public isn’t loaning the post office enough money.

Here’s how it works: Instead of buying say, a roll of 100 at the current rate of 41 cents, ($41.00) and use them up in a year, you buy three years of the forever stamps ($123.00)

Next year the post office has another once cent increase. From 41 cents that is an increase of only 1/41 or about 2.4%. As long as just about anything short of deflation is a part of the American consumer landscape. Don’t stock up.

Numismatic? From French nuismatique latin numisma or nomisma, of or relating to coins and currency. Philatelic From greek philo exsemption of payment latin a, tax or charge. The collection of postage stamps or post related materials. We’ll keep you informed of this and other entertaining news.

Medical Marijuana is at the center of a serious debate between the power of the State and the federal Government. If California were to be considered its own country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. Conversely of course, that means if California were not a part of the United States, the remaining states would be a much weaker place –economically speaking. But these are just pondering points in the debate. Basically the state has allowed medical Marijuana and protects its citizens in their lawful acts while federal agents harass them. So far, there have been no incidents where state and federal law enforcement officials have met in opposition

But back to the story. The machines won’t be like a pop machine, they’ll have some identity verifications built into them. It might be more accurate to call it a “Marijuana ATM on amphetamines” since they will not only require an identity card, a fingerprint bio-recognition scheme and it takes a picture! When you pick up your Medical Marijuana you might want to be wearing theFutonPoncho. Slip and fall down? No problem with a portable asylum strapped to your back.

Detractors of this “stand-your-ground” voting system have noted that social and peer pressure can have a prejudicial effect on the outcome of the vote. Stephen Levitt, author of the excellent book Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything wrote a working paper available at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In it, Mr. Levitt used statistics from the TV show weakest link to conclude some interesting facts about how race and prejudice can alter the outcome of a vote. In particular He found what seemed to be an outward discrimination towards Hispanic and aged players in the game. He noted that other race groups or gender did not seem to have the same level of prejudice, and were voted off the game no more than the average white male. It is the motivation for this lack of racism that would make any public voting system suspect.

Here’s an excerpt of his conclusions:

Using the unique institutional set-up of Weakest Link, this paper tests for the presence and type of discrimination. Perhaps surprisingly, no evidence of discrimination towards Blacks or women is found, whereas there is substantively large magnitudes of observed discrimination towards Hispanics and the elderly. The data are consistent with statistical discrimination toward Hispanics and taste-based discrimination toward the old. There is also evidence that women tend to vote more frequently for men and vice-versa. It is important to emphasize, however, that characteristics such as race, gender, and age do not appear to be the primary determinants of voting behavior.

Given the highly stylized nature of the interactions on this television show, one must use extraordinary caution in trying to draw general conclusions from these results. Indeed, one could imagine that the absence of observed discrimination towards Blacks in this artificial context might arise precisely because of the presence of real-world discrimination towards Blacks which has sensitized Americans to the importance of not appearing outwardly racist, regardless of inward beliefs. At some conscious or unconscious level, contestants may shy away from targeting Blacks on a nationally televised program. In contrast, players may be less concerned about appearing to target Hispanics and the elderly. Ideally, one would like to isolate real-world settings in which the strategic incentives flip as they do on Weakest Link to provide a more readily generalizable test of competing theories of discrimination.

Can the same kind of discrimination have been exhibited in the Democratic Iowa Caucuses? Time will tell.