‎I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
Warren Buffett

Why is America the No-Vacation Nation?

employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don’t have access to it … That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee its workers annual leave”.

Even when Rep. Alan Grayson introduced the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which called for employers to provide just one week of paid annual leave to employees, it was quickly turned down with opponents noting it would, as CNN reported, “have a negative impact on business and that the government shouldn’t get involved in the workplace in this way.”

It’s an interesting point to ponder. It’s almost akin to the minimum wage laws enacted forever ago. Minimum wage is now considered a basic right. Some argue that minimum wage reduces employment because if wages were lower companies could afford to hire more workers in some cases, and that may well be true.

I’m not 100% convinced that it really makes sense to advocate a guaranteed amount of vacation time, but I do think it pays to raise awareness of this issue because I think life is about living more than it is about working and making a buck, and I actually think that Europe is healthier than the United States in this regard.

Study: High-Tech Gas Drilling Is Fouling Drinking Water

Analyses of 60 wells paint a picture of contamination near active gas wells. Almost all water wells more than a kilometer from an active gas well had only a few parts per million methane in their water. But most wells 1 kilometer or less from a gas well produced water with 19 to 64 parts per million methane. That’s at and above the “action level” of federal safety guidelines for methane, which can displace air’s oxygen to cause asphyxiation. The higher levels are also in the flammable range. “I watched one homeowner light his water on fire,” Jackson says.

Crucially, additional chemical and isotopic analyses in effect “fingerprinted” the well water methane. Those results, the authors say, suggest that the gas from high-methane, close-in water wells was produced in the deep shale. The low-level, background methane from more distant water wells would have come from methane-generating bacteria living in shallow rock.

This is a pretty damning picture of gas drilling and the real lack of federal regulation. Pretty scary. We just don’t understand hydrofracking as well as the natural gas industry pretends that we do. Full study here.