Tuesday Links

• Formula One car racing is going hybrid.
• The level of creepiness in online advertising is getting extreme.  Bruce Schneier is absolutely right to characterize the Internet as a surveillance state. (he's recently made some changes to his blog to make online tracking harder - would be interested in my reader's take on these issues).
• The challenge of being a millenial in the current economy.
• Future generally not bright for the middle class, says Bruce Bartlett.
• Superb piece on how disability is essentially becoming the welfare program of last resort for the working class.  I had already pretty much figured this out, but there's lots of evidence and color at the link.  This (and related issues) is why I prefer to use the employment/population ratio for working age men as my employment indicator of choice, rather than relying on the unemployment rate. Excerpt from the piece:

After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. Timberlake. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about him. He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him they are in pain.

"We talk about the pain and what it’s like," he says. "I always ask them, 'What grade did you finish?'"

What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren't going to be able to get a sit-down job.

Dr. Timberlake is making a judgment call that if you have a particular back problem and a college degree, you're not disabled. Without the degree, you are.

Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?"