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Friday, December 18th, 2009
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Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
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Monday, November 16th, 2009
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Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
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Monday, October 19th, 2009
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Imagine you are on an aircraft carrier with 4000 sailors on board. Each sailor gets issued 3 ration tickets every day by the paymaster. The sailor can then get a meal in one of the ship messhalls. The paymaster realizes he can issue an extra ticket to himself every day and get 4 meals. Nobody will notice. After a while the other officers begin to notice the paymaster is eating 4 times a day. He issues them with 4 tickets each day to keep them quiet. Eventually even the Captain is in on the deal. Meanwhile the chef has noticed that his stores are being depleted too fast. He is forced to cut the amount of food in each meal because the total amount has already been budgeted. As more people join the group getting 4 tickets a day the normal ration size has to get smaller.
Soon the ordinary sailors get annoyed by the small portions since they only get 3 tickets a day. The Captain orders the paymaster to give everyone 4 tickets a day since this is the easiest way to solve the problem. After a few days the paymaster starts the cycle again by giving himself 5 tickets a day. I am not going to follow that process any further. But we can analyze what happened in the first cycle. When only a few privileged people were getting 4 tickets a day, they received more than their fair share. Everyone else received less. Once everyone got 4 tickets, there was an equal share for all. However the ordinary sailors still got cheated. Also they will be cheated again when the new 5 ticket scam starts operating.
This is a description of inflation that clearly shows that the politicians and their friends benefit from inflation because they are effectively stealing from the ordinary people. Of course a real monetary inflation process is much more complicated but the general scam is the same.
[What do you think of this as a very basic introduction to inflation?]
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Comments: Read 39 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
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A judgment body from whose decisions there is no appeal; secret regulations, unknown, typically, even to body members; an ever-widening scrutiny, even of mundane activities, for unconforming ideologies.
We can see the bureaucratic mindset of prior restraint in its full horror here. Every attempt by any person to rationally investigate a topic must first obtain approval from religious or secular ethicists (witchdoctors). It would be far better to allow any investigation without restraint and then provide recourse to civil or criminal procedures when important ethical rules are breached. The irrational sects have always longed to bring science under their power and IRBs empower them to do so. I expect their stranglehold on research to become ever tighter.
Criticism of an IRB, however gentle, is probably career suicide for any researcher. Since there is no appeal from their decisions they are likely to punish anyone who dissents by curtailing their research projects. (I base this purely on my cynical view of human nature not any actual evidence.) I found one brave skeptical commenter on this subject :
But in his account, the FBI was not Harper's biggest problem; it investigated a threat of nuclear terrorism and closed the case with reasonable efficiency. The IRB, by contrast, apparently offered no such resolution. Perhaps Price needs to worry less about the National Security State and more about the Human Subjects Protection State.
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Comments: Read 9 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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There is an old fallacy still current amongst leftists that companies thrive by providing bad products. The most common example is that cars are made to last a set period and then rapidly deteriorate. Now it is true that some companies followed a strategy of deliberately limiting the life of their cars. The market has decisively rejected this ploy. Toyota has for decades been renowned for cars and engines that last longer than most others. Their resale value remains higher than normal even when they age. Toyota has since become the largest car company in the world and is strongly profitable. This proves that people do in fact recognize durability as a value (just not the only value).
Furthermore Toyota has for decades pursued cost containment strategies for continuously improving productivity and reducing waste of materials. This was done for profit reasons yet is is also good for the environment. Every saving of raw materials means that less natural resource are used to make cars.
Lately Toyota also developed a hybrid car. This is a bad idea on the whole but it is probably the least bad way the environmental movement's agenda could be furthered.
So Toyota is eco-friendly, profitable and produces good cars. Why are American politicians not begging Toyota to take over American companies and introduce better management? Instead they ignore Toyota and praise incompetent wasteful companies that produce inferior cars.
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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I am not personally opposed to gay marriage. It seems pointless to forbid such a thing, but I do have some comments for those who are enthusiastic about it.
1. Regarding the recent California Supreme Court decision : They can't declare a part of the constitution to be unconstitutional. It is their job to interpret the constitution as it applies to certain legislation or litigation. They can't decide to ignore a part of the constitution, any more than your cable guy can decide not to install the Disney channel because he hates mice. Not their job!
2. Single people are also subject to much of the same discrimination as gays who are not allowed to marry. If gays receive no medical, pension etc. benefits then single people don't get those either. Why should a married person whether gay or not, get more benefits (really money) for the same job? If you buy a newspaper on the street do you give the guy an extra dime if he claims to be married?
3. As for such access issues as hospital visitation or health proxy. These also discriminate against single people if enforced. If a single person cannot specify a friend of either sex for such a role, then that is also discrimination. A single person might prefer to have a friend of the same religion (or non-religion) to make a health care decision in an emergency. Why should they have to be married to do so?
In short gay marriage is really a red herring from a libertarian POV. Unequal rights for married people versus single people is the real discrimination.
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Comments: Read 11 or Add Your Own.
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I need some fairly urgent house repairs done. I have been waiting this week for 4 separate builders to return my call and give a quote. How bad can the economy be, if not one of them bothers to do so? I suspect the stimulus is working. Construction workers would rather have a long term overpaid government contract than do a quick market priced job for me. The perverse thing is that I am paying via taxes for them to do useless make-work construction but I can't get them to do useful work at any price. Thanks FedGov - no wonder I love you so much.
While I am ranting I might as well start on a related topic :
In 1945 American engineers threw a bridge over the Rhine in one day despite hostile fire. In 2007 American engineers throw a 2 lane road bridge over a single line railway track in only ... 18 months. I realize that the Rhine bridge was only a temporary bridge with minimal safety requirements. However, there have been many advances in material and mechanical technology since 1945, not to mention complete absence of bullets and artillery. How can it take five hundred times longer to build a shorter bridge?
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Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
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So, Obama gave the British Prime Minister a set of DVDs :
- "2001: A Space Odyssey"
- "Casablanca"
- "Chinatown"
- "Citizen Kane"
- "City Lights"
- "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial"
- "It's a Wonderful Life"
- "Lawrence of Arabia"
- "On the Waterfront"
- "Psycho"
- "Raging Bull"
- "Schindler's List"
- "Singin' in the Rain"
- "Some Like It Hot"
- "Star Wars: Episode IV"
- "Sunset Boulevard"
- "The General"
- "The Godfather"
- "The Graduate"
- "The Grapes of Wrath"
- "The Searchers"
- "The Wizard of Oz"
- "To Kill a Mockingbird"
- "Vertigo"
How could they leave out V for Vendetta?
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Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
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Thursday, February 19th, 2009
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The following is my personal speculation. I don't remember coming across this idea from any other source. Luther's demon is an adaptation executer. It is a sub-routine of the human brain that runs without any conscious oversight. I will use anthropomorphic language to make my explanation easier.
The function of this demon is to detect when a long period of sex with a given mate has elapsed without any reproduction. When one has spent a long time with a lover and there is no pregnancy, the demon will attempt to reject that lover. It will 'create' negative emotions towards that lover. It will encourage the desire to search for other mates. In short, it will try to break up your relationship. The evolutionary motivation is that the current mating is infertile. Mating with a different lover may well be fertile.
This demon is not concerned with your conscious decision to delay/forego reproduction. It doesn't care.
My speculation is based on personal observation of my friends. Couples who choose to remain childless or to delay having children tend to split up after about 3 years. This is in spite of (my perception of) their great love for each other. I am not thinking of flighty people whom one would expect to split up every few years but sober mature couples. (I understand this is not scientific evidence of any kind, but every formal observation or experiment has to start with some hypothesis.)
I call this Luther's Demon because of the famous opinion of Martin Luther on the duty of women :
Work with all your might to bring forth the child. Should it mean your death, then depart happily, for you will die in a noble deed and in subservience to God.
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
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Friday, January 9th, 2009
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Friday, December 12th, 2008
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Thursday, December 4th, 2008
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selfishgene's journal
amused.