August 2008
Monthly Archive
Palin in comparison
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2008 |
An effective way for Democrats and progressives to attack Sarah Palin is not to besmirch her small town background and the fact that she likes moose casserole. I’ve seen this lately on several sites, and that’s just going to push all the Nixonland buttons, and it will absolutely lose Obama votes. That’s playing into the neo-conservative frame, and it’s actually what they want the leftie side to do. It’s what they’re hoping for, and so far quite a few lefties have been glad to oblige.
Not intending to offer any advice on how to attack Palin, but I can 100% tell you how not to attack her.
Gusty
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2008 |
If I thought like a Republican, Hurricane Gustav would be a sign that Jesus was reminding me not to vote Republican.
Overview
| Posted by Chill on 30 Aug 2008 |
Something I picked up from a Feynman book or anecdote was a strategy for optimizing the way I think about problems.
It seems to work for me, though I am not completely sure why. The quote was something like, “When I run into a problem, I try to think of what someone much smarter than me would do, and then I do that.”
I’ve found that attempting to think about what someone much smarter than me would do puts me in a state of mind that allows me to solve problems much more quickly.
Running that emulator, even if it is still all, of course, only running on my own hardware is a huge help. It allows me to step outside the situation and evaluate with a different mind. Try it sometime. It may not work for everyone, but it’s worked great for me.
Only worth
| Posted by Chill on 29 Aug 2008 |
The best sentence I’ve read today:
6) Places that had the biggest booms have the biggest busts, even if open property is scarce. Remember, a piece of land is not priceless, but is only worth the subjective present value of future services that can be derived from the land to the marginal buyer. When the marginal buyers are nonexistent, and lenders are skittish, prices can fall a long way, even in supply-constrained markets.
From this post.
This is a complicated (and thus more true) way of saying, “Shit only worth what somebody pay for it.”
That was the bomb
| Posted by Chill on 29 Aug 2008 |
I am puzzled by those who say that humans cannot change the climate, an assertion which I’ve seen online in a few different places in the past few days. A simple thought experiment proves this false. It’s well-known what would happen if we were to detonate all our nuclear weapons at once — severe nuclear winter, perhaps lasting for years, during which most life on earth would die.
We are detonating the equivalent of several such nuclear weapons a day via CO2 and other emissions, and the climate change impact is similar, just smeared out chronologically.
Truly, I am not sure whence comes the resistance to the idea that we can change the climate. Why is that so hard to grasp? I’m not talking about the oil industry shills, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, whose salary depends on them not understanding this, but about everyday people who seem to think the idea of climate change is perpetrated against them by some shadowy cabal.
Do they just resent that people who are smarter than them are, well, smarter than them? What is it? I really don’t get it.
The lily that’s not Evangeline
| Posted by Chill on 29 Aug 2008 |
I don’t know exactly where this is, though I’ve probably been there. I’m looking forward to seeing it all again.
The rain lilies are blooming in the photo, and some stunted palmettos gamely struggle near the bank. Even though I do not know the specific location, I know the reason why there is so little vegetation on the forest floor. It’s not because it has been removed or tended by we meddling humans, either. It’s absent because right below the leaves there is dense limestone, and most plants’ roots are not strong enough to crack through the rock. In addition, the canopy above is fairly effective at blocking light and the leaves make what little soil there is somewhat acidic. The same leaves are also responsible for staining the water in the stream the color of fresh-brewed tea.
Here you can see some rain lilies with a shelf of limestone below.
Rain lilies are among the first flowers to emerge in the spring, and they generally only bloom near rivers where it’s shaded and constantly moist. Often, they grow where little else does, though they are just as happy to sprout in the grass of a front lawn, too. To me, they were always the first sign of spring, the first scintillation of swimming and better fishing, of hand-churned ice cream and early morning boat rides.
I have such a dichotomous view of where I grew up. The rivers and springs there are probably the most beautiful in the world. Certainly, I’ve never seen anywhere like them. They may all be gone in my lifetime, too — destroyed by increasing need for water, agricultural run-off and unadulterated capitalist greed. See them now, if you can, because they might not be as they are now for much longer.
As beautiful as the area is, though, by and large the people there are terrible. Oh, they are nice enough, especially to me — a white boy who can speak their language. However, in reality, they are parochial, often virulently racist, buying into all manner of nonsense and convenient illogical beliefs that bear no resemblance to reality. I grew up there, so I understand them. I can speak their argot, have some insight into their beliefs. Some of their ways and their attitudes I even admire. But that doesn’t make them good people.
Seeing the rain lilies bloom — the first hint of a world awakening — was usually enough to make up for it all. Not always, but usually. Soon, it seem as if I may get to see them bloom again, that first fervent explosion of life after the brief winter.
I’ll stay away from the people, though.
Sit there
| Posted by Chill on 28 Aug 2008 |
I hate, hate, hate with a burning passion that borders on existential loathing when someone says, “Well, at least he/she is doing something.”
No. Just no. If the person or company or group is doing the wrong thing, or even a thing that doesn’t help at all, then doing nothing is vastly better than rushing off madly in the pursuit of some counterproductive goal. A cursory examination of the Bush administration is enough to confirm this idea.
There’s supposedly an old Zen koan that goes, “Don’t just do something, sit there.”
Damn good advice pretty often.
Carbonaceous fact
| Posted by Chill on 28 Aug 2008 |
After coal-fired power plants, industrial processes are the second-largest carbon dioxide emitter.
Of those industrial processes, making concrete releases far more CO2 than any other due to the limestone being heated to rid it of carbon dioxide.
Bedtime for bozos
| Posted by Chill on 28 Aug 2008 |
The best comment I’ve read in a while.
To keep this short – if New Orleans gets hammered again in the next few days is not relevant in terms of proving or disproving climate change – but it will be fascinating in demonstrating how incompetent American society has become in actually handling real events in the real world. Either in cutting losses by abandoning a poorly sited city, or in repairing the damage to allow the city to continue to exist where it is, hurricanes included. Hoping that nothing happens is not a plan, however.
I was hoping that Americans were waking up, from the shocks of the recent problem and realities coming to the fore. It turns out they are not, mostly. They’ve emerged from their somnolence long enough to look around and to determine they didn’t like what they saw, and have returned to slumber.
The impregnator
| Posted by Chill on 28 Aug 2008 |
I’ve never understood the idea, held by so, so many, that your life is pointless if you don’t have children.
What do I give a shit about posterity? I won’t be there.
This pressure to parturition is largely focused at women in our culture, but men get a fair heaping of it, too — this idea that your life is worthless if you haven’t somehow managed to impregnate someone or be impregnated by someone by the time you’re 40.
I saw just today on a forum, “Unless someone is changing the world through their other accomplishments, they might as well blow their brains out now if they’re not having children. What’s the point of being here at all if your ideas or genes won’t propagate any further?”
Who freakin’ cares what my genes or ideas do when I’m dead? I certainly don’t. I’m here to have fun, to be happy that I’m some of the mud that got to sit up and look around, not to spend half my life taking care of puling, ungrateful little shit factories.
So, no, I will not be having children — not now, not when I am 40, and not ever.
Volatility and vacillations
| Posted by Chill on 28 Aug 2008 |
Even if we are near a bottom in housing (we’re not), the bottom won’t look like most people expect it to.
A classic bottom is a decline followed by a very brief valley, and then a resumption of growth.
This is not what will happen in the housing market.
The bottom in the housing market will be almost undetectable, as it will see, at minimum, years and years of low to no growth in real dollar terms, with volatility and vacillations between negative and positive growth. The valley will be both deep and wide, and the peaks on either side prohibitively high.
Like most markets, though, whenever everyone gives up hope is when it will turn around.
Do you know where you are?
| Posted by Chill on 27 Aug 2008 |
The true story behind the song Welcome to the Jungle.
Kate, Cindy, and Susannah?
| Posted by Chill on 27 Aug 2008 |
Joe, Albert, Jake and the….
| Posted by Chill on 27 Aug 2008 |
Wow, this will get the fat acceptance people’s underwear all bunched up.
That said, some evidence seem not to indicate significantly worse health outcomes over the medium term for moderately obese people. I am not sure of the quality of this research, however, as other research seems to show the opposite.
Also, anecdotally, how many fat people have you ever seen who are older than 65 or so? I’ve never seen a truly fat person older than about sixty, and there’ a reason for that — they’re all dead.
To the people complaining that it’s punitive, it’s only punitive in the sense that it’s punitive to charge people more at risk for auto accidents more for insurance. I don’t think, though, that it will cause anyone to change their behavior, and cholesterol seems to be a largely hereditary matter, anyway.