April 2008
Monthly Archive
College degree, IQ up a tree
| Posted by Chill on 30 Apr 2008 |
There are exceptions of course, but the primary benefit to most people, especially those not in the hard sciences, of a college degree is that it is a class marker, no different than driving a Jaguar or shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Many people will cry like little babies upon hearing this, but the primary predictor of success in life is IQ. If you ignore absolutely everything else besides a person’s IQ, you can predict their trajectory more accurately with that single metric than any other single metric there is.
I am not saying IQ is everything. It’s not. But it is extremely predictive as to how someone will get along in this society as, surprise! That’s exactly what it was devised to measure.
A high-IQ person will succeed with college or without, while a person with middling or low IQ, absent family connections, will not succeed no matter their matriculation.
The truth hurts, yes. But it’s still the truth.
I’m a-shootin’
| Posted by Chill on 30 Apr 2008 |
Ah yes, this is the Florida that I remember.
Advice to criminals in Florida: When whipping out a gun anywhere in America’s craziest state, be advised that if there are three people around you, chances are two or more of them will have guns, too — even the sweet little old lady with blue hair (and a .357 Magnum in her handbag).
If you really must rob and shoot people, an easier state to do so would be one where many of the residents don’t learn to shoot before they learn to read. Just FYI.
Stupid money
| Posted by Chill on 29 Apr 2008 |
Something I’ve noticed in the stock market lately that proves that there is even more stupid money than usual playing there is that the most talked-about stocks seem to rally even when their fundamentals are absolutely terrible, such as financial and homebuilder stocks.
It’s sort of like the most popular kid in class being elected as class president, and about as useful.
When I was daytrading, this was not as pronounced. This market would in some ways be even easier to trade in and out of profitably than it was then, and I’d certainly spend less time on it.
However, I’m not going back to daytrading, but when the stupid money eventually gets flushed out of the market — which is inevitable — expect to see it leg down and not return to former levels for quite a long while.
Binge? Roost? Wah?
| Posted by Chill on 29 Apr 2008 |
This post has the best mixed metaphor in history:
Thanks to record low interest rates from the Federal Reserve, the US consumer went on a debt-induced home buying binge. That binge is now coming home to roost.
That reaches a level of awesome that few can even contemplate.
It’s not a wolf
| Posted by Chill on 28 Apr 2008 |
The era of cheap goods and cheap food is over for now, and possibly forever. Several events and inevitabilities are converging to create a climate of falling wages and higher prices, not the least of which is the serial kleptocracy by a cabal of plutocrats.
Hoarding is occurring for a reason. It is a rational act, even though the pundits are all laughing at it now. The time to hoard is not when goods are scarce, it is when they are not scarce.
How many times have I seen the flagrantly stupid statement that, “There’s no reason to buy extra food to hoard because there’s plenty of food on the shelves! These hoarding people are idiots!”
This argument is tantamount to saying, “There’s no reason to put a smoke alarm in! There is no fire right now!”
Fortunately, these are the people who will suffer when the hard times come.
When the sheep run one way, run the other. It’s not a wolf; it’s lightning, and the cliff is what they’re running toward.
Unsupported
| Posted by Chill on 27 Apr 2008 |
The problem is, the people who need this advice will never, ever read it.
Wrong!
| Posted by Chill on 25 Apr 2008 |
Inspired by this post, things I’ve been wrong about:
1) The mouse. The first time I saw one, about 1981 or 1982, I thought, Why would anyone need that? Why not just use the keyboard? I didn’t start using a mouse until Windows 95, almost 13 years later. Now, I use almost no keyboard shortcuts at all, as I greatly prefer the mouse.
2) The success of music on computers. I don’t mean for pay — I mean at all. With crappy speakers, sub-standard sound cards, I never thought MP3s and their ilk would become at all popular. I thought that would remain completely niche.
3) Mass adoption of the internet. I thought the internet would get popular, sure, but not to this level. I figured perhaps 20 percent of the US population would ever use it, mainly the cognoscenti, and everyone else would leave it alone. Ah, if I’d only been right…..
4) Linux forking. I thought the Linux kernel would fork innumerable times by now, and have competing factions that would lose all momentum and plunge Linux into irrelevance. Instead, it’s held together remarkably well, and gotten better every year.
5) Widespread rejection of DRM. I thought that more people would reject DRM as it started getting more pervasive and more noticeable to the hoi polloi. What I wasn’t counting on, though, was the most people have little enough technical knowledge that they can’t tell DRM from something just being “broken,” as technology often is even sans DRM. So, when they can’t move an audio file to their MP3 player, 95% of people can’t tell why, and thus have no animus against DRM, as most people have never heard of it and have no idea what’s causing the problem.
What have you been wrong about?
Not so common
| Posted by Chill on 25 Apr 2008 |
I thought it was common knowledge that we don’t actually know what magnetism is?
No one, not the smartest person in the entire world, knows what underlies magnetism. There are equations that describe the results of magnetism, but no one has any idea why those results actually occur.
Magnetism is intimately related to the deep mysteries of the universe that we may never understand.
Tired of Pidgin for dinner?
| Posted by Chill on 24 Apr 2008 |
More pidgin poop
| Posted by Chill on 24 Apr 2008 |
The comment quoted below from this Reddit story explains the Pidgin developer’s behvior very well:
One of the main motives for writing free software is the license it gives nerds, who have been abused their whole lives, to abuse other people (i.e. users) in public. Once you understand this, much Open Source politics becomes clearer.
I agree with that completely, from what I’ve seen in most open source projects that are user hostile, such as Gnome, Gimp, and a passel of others.
A bunch of socially deficient geeks being able to exercise some sort of power for the first time in their lives — yep, that explains it pretty well.
This comment is also worth quoting:
A number of times over the life of gaim I have had some rather gimpesque style conversations with developers:
One is: Why can’t I change the size of my font in gaim?
Response: we should respect the font-size of the OS
Me: No, I mean the fonts I am reading and typing in the chat pane not the UI…
Response: No, You shouldn’t be able to do that
Me: Are you fucking seriously arguing against letting people be able to change font sizes in a fucking CHAT program that is all about reading and fucking writing text?
Response: Lol I will kick u from irc with ma leet prowers!
Me: Fucking idiot
Someone else: Errr. I think there is a plugin for that
Someone else else: Yeah. the real reason is actually it is hard to set this up in QT development or some shit
Developer response: NO, NO! No Kyle! You can’t triple stamp a double stamp! It isn’t because it is hard, it is because he is a retarded user who wants to change the font size and that is wrong!
Me: Lolcats, you knobhead.
True story. Gimpesque because I had the same conversation with that idiot lead gimp developer a few years back.
Yes, I am on my own personal crusade against the Pidgin developers. Why? They deserve it, and it’s fun.
Now, for some immature comments and phrases to game the Google results when someone searches for “Pidgin Developers.” Pidgin developers molest farm animals. Pidgin developers incest arrested. Pidgin developers orgy Newt Gingrich George W. Bush. Pidgin developers erotic asphyxiation Michael Hutchence. Pidgin developers furry yiff all day. Pidgin developers heads rectum. Pidgin developers committed mental hospital. Pidgin developers bomb Iran. Pidgin developers Ron Jeremy Hermione Granger.
Forks, knives and spoons
| Posted by Chill on 24 Apr 2008 |
Wired has noticed that Pidgin has forked due to the supreme arrogance and massive brain damage of its developers.
Follow the yellow brick meme
| Posted by Chill on 23 Apr 2008 |
Following this meme:
history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head
96 sudo
22 cd
7 make
6 ./configure
5 startx
5 ls
4 make-kpkg
3 wget
3 rm
3 locate
A bit anomalous, since I just reinstalled my system.
Don’t erase the race
| Posted by Chill on 22 Apr 2008 |
Before Danica Patrick, there was Jutta Kleinschmidt, who won the Paris-Dakar rally, one of the most difficult races in the world; Michelle Mouton, who stopped competing in and winning rally races after the rules changed and the cars got too slow for her; and Shirley Muldowney, who drove the most powerful cars in the world and is one of the best drag-racing drivers ever to live.
A Paper scam
| Posted by Chill on 22 Apr 2008 |
The funniest line out of this New York Times article about how the three big ratings agencies converted B paper into triple-A rated securities: “It may seem like a scam, but it’s not.”
So says one clueless Times reporter.
Yes, yes it is a scam, and most of the directors and raters of those corporations should go to jail for perpetrating the scam. To paraphrase another great quote, you can’t use math to change B paper into A paper. It just never works at prices that will be profitable, as any shock will knock the transformed B paper’s veneer off and reveal it for what it is — which is crap.
But thanks, NYT, for incisively informing me that one of the biggest scams in history is not a scam.
And, oh yeah, fuck you.
No poll position
| Posted by Chill on 22 Apr 2008 |
It would be interesting — and probably beneficial — to run a major election during which opinion polls were not allowed.
It would cut down a bit on the herd mentality, and force people to make their own choices.
Not possible to do in America, but an interesting thought experiment.