Here are a few things to keep you amused until I get back to it:
If you give someone an engagement ring, then the wedding doesn’t happen, are you entitled to get the ring back? 
When I worked at the federal courthouse, I always wondered about how much contact the circuit court judges and their staffs had with the outside world.
Remember that phrase about “they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot?” 

I posted here last week information about making a tangible personal property list to go with your will.  It’s an efficient way to make gifts of collectibles, family heirlooms, jewelry, even a grand piano.  You can even put a car on such a list.
Another method of providing for the disposition of your car is to name a beneficiary for the title.  That’s the main topic of my new Estate Planning Law Report.  As always, it’s posted in the publications section of deconcinimcdonald.com.

I find the “debate” about the “morality” of air conditioning to be mildly amusing.  Aside from being the typical tempest in a teapot that comes up almost every day now because of all the know-it-alls using the internet to showcase their intellectual and moral superiority, I have noticed that the air conditioning debate doesn’t seem to have any participants who live in the desert southwest.  I think there’s probably a reason for that.  
My grandparents came to Tucson long before there was cooling of any kind.  My grandmother told me that in the summer they slept on the porch with sheets soaked with water.  I don’t think I ever saw my grandfather buy meat that wasn’t in a can, because that was all there was when he was young.  Neither of my grandparents ever lived in a house with central air conditioning.  
Did they survive?  Yes, but they also survived before there were refrigerators (my grandmother also talked about the ice wagon delivering ice to her house) airplanes (I don’t think my grandmother ever traveled on an airplane), cars (I know she never drove a car), dial telephones, electric typewriters, automatic washing machines, and many other things that use energy.  Just because people lived before those things existed doesn’t mean that we should do without them now.
Then there’s the fact that heating in cold climates uses far more energy that air conditioners in warm climates.  Why aren’t the people criticizing air conditioning saying anything about how maybe people in cold places could do without so much heating?

“Earth Overshoot Day” has come and gone, without any apparent consequences.  After I wrote about it week before last, a post about it appeared on the Cato At Liberty blog.  The analysis there looks pretty good, although it doesn’t go into the carbon dioxide issue. That post also points out that the people who have for years been predicting that natural resources would be exhausted have been consistently wrong.

Arizona law says that a will may refer to a written statement to dispose of tangible personal property other than money.  The list can be prepared before or after the will is signed.  The list can be either handwritten or typed, as long as it is signed, and describes the items and the beneficiaries “with reasonable certainty.”  
What can go on the list?  Here’s the explanation I use: anything you can hold in your hands, from a diamond to a grand piano, except cash money, is tangible personal property and can therefore be included on your list.  
The list doesn’t have to be exhaustive.  The list just won’t affect anything that isn’t on it.
So when you’re making a will, if you have tangible items that you want particular people to have, just make sure that the will includes a provision for a personal property list, then make the list.

A while back I wrote about an IRS program that allowed taxpayers to set up an online account to look at their personal tax information.  Later I wrote about a report that the program had been compromised, allowing unauthorized access to taxpayers' personal data.
Now it’s being reported that the number of taxpayers whose personal data was exposed is over 300,000, more than three times the IRS’ original estimate.
Sure, let’s have the government run a bank for consumers.  I’m confident the government will do a much better job (lower cost, better service, better security) than the local credit union, aren’t you?

Yesterday was “Earth Overshoot Day,” aka Ecological Debt Day.  I had never heard of it before.  It apparently has something to do with carbon dioxide emissions, which is what made me think that it’s somehow related to my post yesterday about the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.  That plan is about carbon dioxide emissions, even if it sounds like something else.
The idea, apparently, is that humanity is using more natural resources in a given year than the earth can produce.  That's bad, I guess.  Too bad more people don’t think the same view is relevant to the expenditures of the world’s governments exceeding their revenues year after year.

I had not really noticed it until today, but a blog post at the Cato Institute site points out that the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” announced by the President last week is an attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, not the carbon particles, commonly known as soot, that result from incomplete combustion.  So when the government says it is regulating “carbon pollution” with the new plan, don’t be fooled into thinking that they are making power plants cleaner by making them emit less soot.  Soot emissions were already stringently regulated.  What the government is attempting to limit is carbon dioxide, the natural product of combustion.
Just trying to keep you informed.  

The brilliant Thomas Sowell explains in a few words what the profit motive is and why it is good, not bad.
Via Coyote, who also points out that profit is the price paid for innovation as well as for efficiency.

A tenant got into a dispute with her landlord over a Peeps diorama.  It ended up in a trial in a local court in Boulder, Colorado.  Lowering the Bar (who else) wrote two posts about it.  You probably have to be a lawyer to find amusement in this.
If you have just emigrated from Mars and don’t know what Peeps are, you can see on their official web site, as well on the Wikipedia page about them.
I like my Peeps slightly stale (chewy, not crunchy).