DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for February, 2013

Millions of Americans Losing Current Coverage Under Obamacare

28th February 2013

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Oh, noes! Do you mean Bary lied to us?

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The Shape of Cheese and Chicken McNuggets

28th February 2013

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On a sponsored media trip to McDonald’s US headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, Barbara J. Booth, the company’s director of sensory science, told Kim Bhasin of Business Insider that Chicken McNuggets come in four carefully designed shapes: the “bell,” the “bone,” the “ball,” and the “boot.”

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VAWA Bill Likely to Pass Congress This Week, Despite Violating First Amendment

28th February 2013

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Congress never lets the Constitution get in the way of passing a law with a catchy title. Thus, the Senate’s version of the bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act will likely pass the House this week, even though UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a leading First Amendment scholar, earlier noted that provisions in it violate the First Amendment. (Legal scholars have criticized other provisions in the bill as violating Articles II and III of the Constitution, and for undermining due-process safeguards.) The House GOP had earlier objected to the Senate’s version, citing various flaws in the bill, but under political pressure, some GOP members in swing districts have switched sides and endorsed the bill, which is backed by Democratic leaders and the White House.

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Scientifically Accurate Spider-Man

28th February 2013

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In this video, we are reminded that spiders are weird little assholes and that we probably shouldn’t model our superheros after them.

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The Times Does Geometry

28th February 2013

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Don’t you wonder, sometimes, how the Times’s reporters and editors did on their SATs? Just remember, next time that paper tells you the science on some topic or other is settled, that you are getting that assurance from people who don’t know the difference between diameter and circumference.

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Researchers Claim to Have Found Cleopatra’s Murdered Sister in Turkey

28th February 2013

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Where she was beheaded, no doubt, because she wasn’t Muslim. Hey … it happens.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie. I hope.

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Louisiana Health Inspector Destroys Venison Donated to the Homeless

27th February 2013

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A Louisiana state health inspector poured bleach on 1,600 pounds of venison donated to a homeless shelter last month because the health department doesn’t recognize the group that provided it.

Just wait until people like this are put in charge of our health care. Won’t that be fun.

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Travel by Pneumatic Tube: 1905 Predictions and the Jetsons

27th February 2013

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Why the School Bus Never Comes in Red or Green

27th February 2013

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I always assumed it was for visibility.

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3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production

27th February 2013

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Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

And nary a Union worker in sight. Nirvana. Cheap Nirvana.

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.

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‘District of Corruption’ Indicts, Traces Roots of Permanent Political Class

27th February 2013

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It has been said that Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and Bill Clinton’s lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky respectively started and accelerated the distrust Americans have for both political parties, elected officials, its institutions, and the federal government.

But a new film, “District of Corruption,” directed by Stephen K. Bannon, exposes the real roots of the modern disenchantment with the political system — the commercialization of government started by the Clinton administration, continued under George W. Bush’s administration, and put on steroids by the Obama administration.

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‘Britain’s Atlantis’ Found at Bottom of North Sea – A Huge Undersea World Swallowed by the Sea in 6500Bc

27th February 2013

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‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.

Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Cue hordes of Global Warming lemming running around and screaming about how we’re all gonna die when the sea levels rise.

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Why Misquotations Catch On

27th February 2013

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Mostly because not every author is the best expressor of a particular thought, even though the originator thereof. Look at the third line of Spenser’s THE FAERIE QUEEN and tell me that it doesn’t read better as ‘Wherein deep dints of old wounds did remain’ than the original ‘Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine’. Or Pope: ‘Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.’ is just not as good as ‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to cast the old aside.’

Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right—sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There’s a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information. The more fluent the experience of reading a quote—or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind—the less likely we are to question the actual quotation. Those right-sounding misquotes are just taking that tendency to the next step: cleaning up, so to speak, quotations so that they are more mellifluous, more all-around quotable, easier to store and recall at a later point. We might not even be misquoting on purpose, but once we do, the result tends to be catchier than the original.

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‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

27th February 2013

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The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today’s fast-changing job market.

Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of “badges” to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain—intentionally so—to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom.

I think this is a great idea. Establish ‘merit badges’ for specific skills, and establish various educational ‘ranks’ — perhaps even ‘degrees’ — based on specified numbers and types of badges. We could do a lot worse than emulate the Boy Scouts.

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Art, Elephants, and Duct Tape

27th February 2013

Patrick Rothfuss, one of my Recommended Writers, undergoes a life-changing experience.

Because you only get wrapped in duct tape so often in your life, (this is #2 for me) I figured I might as well take some pictures.

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Why Speaking English Can Make You Poor When You Retire

26th February 2013

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Strong future-time reference languages (strong FTR) require their speakers to use a different tense when speaking of the future. Weak future-time reference (weak FTR) languages do not.

Speakers of languages which only use the present tense when dealing with the future are likely to save more money than those who speak languages which require the use a future tense, he argues.

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Make Way For Mughalistan

26th February 2013

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The Hindu genocide at the hands of Islam lasted more than a thousand years, and continues in a reduced fashion to this day. It is the largest genocide in recorded history, with many millions of Hindus — possibly over a hundred million — slaughtered by the Muslim invaders, and countless millions more enslaved or forcibly converted to Islam. The sheer wanton destruction wielded by the Islamic conquest staggers the mind — the opulent flower of Hindu civilization was simply wiped out, with idols broken and burned, temples razed, and untold quantities of exquisite artifacts destroyed or melted down for their precious metals. Although it guttered, the flame of Hindu learning was never fully extinguished, but only after the arrival of the Pax Britannica did Hindu scholars regain the ability to realize their intellectual potential.

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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

26th February 2013

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On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it.

Aha! Obesity isn’t related at all to, you know, actual personal choices that people make! It’s an EPIDEMIC! You catch fatness, like a DISEASE! It’s obviously a Public Health Problem that is (as with all other Public Health Problems, like trans-fats and how much salt to use or soda to put in a container) The Job Of The Government!

“We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.”

In other words, they anticipated (rightly so, based on recent history) that they were about to get butt-fucked by politicians ginning up a crisis in order to demagogue their way to retaining their taxpayer-funded jobs, and so (like prey everywhere) were trying to figure out how to escape — the swine.

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease.

Pillsbury, of course, was obviously holding the little brats down and stuffing popcorn down their maws — the swine.

Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

Oh noes! Food companies actually try to make food that people will like! And BUY! The horror! The horror!

Message: You’re too stoopid to know what’s good for you — that’s why God gave you food columnists in the New York Times.

Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | 1 Comment »

Ag Tech Startup FarmLogs Nets $1M in Seed Funding

26th February 2013

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What FarmLogs offers is a one-stop farm management destination loaded with features such as profit forecasting, risk management, expense and crop tracking, and even weather monitoring. “FarmLogs helps farmers plan their year to maximize profit and track what they’re spending during the year,” says co-founder Jesse Vollmar. “We have the tools and do the math to see what the profit per acre will be, which helps with forward contracting and how much risk a farmer is willing to take.”

Vollmar, the son of organic farmers, grew up in the thumb of Michigan in the tiny town of Caro. He was always much more into software than seeds, he explains, so he and his co-founder, Brad Koch, started a business in high school helping people in the community build websites. “It became a real business,” Vollmar recalls. “We went from building websites to building custom software.”

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Foursquare Expands ‘Specials’ Discounts to Visa and MasterCard Cardholders

26th February 2013

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Today, Foursquare is expanding Specials to the rest of the world through partnerships with Visa and MasterCard for both credit and debit cards. This means that Visa and MasterCard can approach Foursquare to reward cardholders for checking in to places like Burger King. Merchants, on the other hand, get enhanced analytics from Foursquare about the kinds of people spending money at their location. “Every person in the US has an American Express, Visa, or MasterCard credit or debit card, and the offers now work for all of them,” Product Manager Noah Weiss says.

I wish someone would tell this to the stupid women who stand in the grocery checkout lane taking half an hour to write a check. Sheesh.

Once you’ve initially added a credit card to your Foursquare account, discounts activate automatically any time you check in to an eligible location, like a restaurant or bar.

My bank has a similar program that gives me rebates (miniscule, but better than nothing) when I shop with local merchants and use their debit card. Once I ‘load’ the discount on the card (which takes about a second), I get the rebate whenever I use the card at that merchant. Since I use the card to pay for damned near everything, it’s totally painless for me. At the end of the month, they total up the rebate and credit my account. Granted, the rebates are miniscule, but they’re nevertheless greater than any interest I could earn on my checking or savings account in the Ben Bernanke Era, so I am content.

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Spidey Silk Can Actually Halt a Train

26th February 2013

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

In fact, the physicists found that just one spider web could do the job — if it were the web of Darwin’s bark spider from Madagascar. The silk has been found to be tougher than any other known material and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

 

Posted in News You Can Use. | 1 Comment »

Garry Wills, Sigh

26th February 2013

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Why Priests? falls below his usual low standards. The main thesis is that priests ruin everything. They’re power-hungry monsters who’ve taken over the Church, destroying the affirming, companionable, and egalitarian message of Jesus. Moreover, the priestly fixation on ritual sacrifice adds a bloodthirsty, prosecutorial, and altogether primitive cast to Christianity, which Garry Wills promises to deliver us from, restoring for the first time in two millennia the original spirit of Jesus and his followers.

Wills has been coasting on the virtues of his one good book, Nixon Agonistes, for about 40 years now. (If you haven’t read it, I urge you to do so; it contains valuable insights about the sixties and seventies, even to those of  us who lived through them.) Like the Republican apparatchik who hates Republican principles (cue Kevin Phillips, David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, and David Brooks), he makes his living off of pandering to the Crust while pretending to be from the other side. (You’d think they’d get tired of this sort of thing, but they don’t.)

Like many other pretend Catholics, Wills makes the Protestant mistake of thinking that he knows more about what Christ intended than the people who were taught by Christ and or the people whom they taught. (This is an attitude that I have never been able to understand, myself, but it’s sufficiently widespread that it appears to be deeply rooted in human nature.) Odd thought: Nobody ever tries to tell the Latter Day Saints that they’ve got Joseph Smith all wrong. I wonder why that is….

There’s a lot of angry bluster in Garry Wills, but little else.

And that pretty much sums it up.

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Explaining the Inexplicable

26th February 2013

Victor Davis Hanson scratches his head — as well he might.

The president, as is his wont, blasted the “one percent,” the “millionaires and billionaires,” and the “well-connected” in his recent State of the Union speech — and then he flew off to golf and hang out with the one percent of the one percent in South Florida while his wife and kids jetted to Aspen to ski. Then Obama flew back for more class-warfare rhetoric over so-called sequestration, ridiculing the Republicans as again being for the “rich” — and on Al Sharpton’s radio show, no less (of Tawana Brawley fame).

Obama’s main talent lies in recognizing that there are a ton of Really Stupid People in the United States who will love him even when what he says would make a normal person’s brain hurt. That’s the only possible explanation.

I filled up today in a rather poor Selma (per capita income under $20,000; unemployment over 15%). The cheapest regular gas I saw in town was $3.99. I paid $4.06 a gallon. It was under $1.90 when the evil Bush left office.

If there were a Republican President, this would be on the Evening News daily until the next election. The Magic Negro, however, gets a pass.

I understand why millions come to the U.S., given the wretched poverty of Latin America, the proximity of the U.S. border, the ability to work here, and the generosity of the American people and government. I don’t understand at all the ensuing iconography of the open-borders movement.

Why the obsession with the Mexican flag and the racialist identification with La Raza and the reversion to 19th century ethnic chauvinism? Why the ethnic stickers on cars, on mobile kitchens, and on homes?

For much the same reason as the Boston metro area expats go to New Hampshire in order to enjoy the benefits of low taxes and minimal government intrusion, yet as soon as they get there start agitating for the same thing that they left. I believe that scientists call this ‘shitting where you eat’.

There are no major programs that the president wishes to cancel, but plenty of new ones he envisions. Given the scale of borrowing, and given the abject denial that there is a spending problem, what gives?

Whatever gives, it’s the Republicans’ fault. Some things remain constant in this ever-changing world.

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North Korean Citizens Told: Socialist Haircuts Are AaThing… Go Get Some

26th February 2013

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Next step: Mayor Bloomberg does the same for New York City.

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City Workers Paint Handicap Space Around Car, Then Tow It

26th February 2013

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This was in Tel Aviv, demonstrating that government workers are much the same the world over.

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Beretta May Leave Maryland Because of Gun Ban

25th February 2013

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Beretta USA in Maryland is thinking of pulling up stakes and moving out of the state because of pending assault-weapons ban legislation. Beretta USA is a division of Beretta, the 500-year-old family owned company which won a contract in 1985 to become the standard sidearm of all U.S. servicemen, replacing the Colt 45.

Funny how that works.

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The Long-Run Gains of Not Mixing Genders in High-School Classes

25th February 2013

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In a recent study (Anelli and Peri 2013) we ask if the gender composition of the high-school class attended by an individual affects his/her choice of study programme and subsequent long-term earning potentials. We use data that we collected on 30,000 students in Italian high schools over the period 1985-2005, including information on their high school, college career, family background and income as of 2005. We find that the gender ratio of high-school classmates significantly affected their choice of college major. In particular, women who attended a high-school class with a significant larger percentage of other female students (more than 75%) were significantly more likely to go on to choose college majors leading to high-paying jobs, namely engineering, economics, business and medicine. Those are also majors typically dominated by male students. On the other hand, female students in classes with a balanced gender mix were more likely to choose typically ‘female’ majors, that is, largely in the humanities and arts, and leading to lower earnings and limited overall career potential.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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The Jacksun Also Rises

25th February 2013

Jim Goad undertakes to be politically incorrect, with a modicum of success.

When is a ridiculous black name too ridiculous for the proper functioning of a sane society? Personally, I think we’ve reached Peak Black Name and it’s time to start dialing it back a tad.

Can we all get along? No, not when you have silly-ass, fundamentally divisive names like that.

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‘Eat Some Ribs’

25th February 2013

Freeberg speaks truth to glower.

Young girls, their heads crammed full of feminist claptrap, no longer want to grow up to look like real women. They’d rather be walking skeletons. And then this is supposed to be mens’ fault.

Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »

‘Minimum Grade’

25th February 2013

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, applies the logic of the Minimum Wage to academia.

In a bold effort to improve the educational fortunes of students who perform at academic levels significantly below the average of their peers, Congress has mandated a minimum grade to be assigned to each student in each course taught at any school in the country.  Starting in September, it shall be unlawful for any teacher, professor, or instructor charged with assigning course grades to assign to any student a grade lower than C-.

Sponsors of the Fair Academic Standards Act decry the injustice that occurs each time a student earns a low grade, such as a D or an F.  ”It’s impossible for students with ‘D’s and ‘F’s on their transcripts to succeed as they deserve in life,” remarked Sen. Bernie Franken, an Independent from Elitia.  ”This law ensures that no American will ever again suffer that hardship.”

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‘College Degree Required. But Why?’

25th February 2013

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There’s an idea that the person with a degree is “better” than a person without one. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported on the relatively new phenomenon of companies hiring people with college degrees for jobs that historically didn’t require college degrees. Are you doing this in your business?

If so, I have to ask, better for what? Yes, having a four year degree does show a degree of dedication. You have to pick a major, take class after class, write paper after paper and work on dreaded group projects. (Which, in my humble opinion, should be banished off the face of the educational earth unless the professor is willing to act as a proper manager, which most are not.) But, anyway, in theory you learn some things and you demonstrate that you have stick-to-itiveness. This is worth something.

But what? You also have to assume that no one enrolled in college, shelled out fantastic amounts of tuition and studied for hours to memorize the philosophies of 40 different dead people with ambitions of becoming an administrative assistant. No, they had other goals.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »

‘Yahoo doesn’t trust their people. Especially their management structure.’

25th February 2013

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Lot of that going around.

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Geneticist Predicts Facial Characteristics of Wills and Kate’s Future Child

25th February 2013

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In addition to making our lives more comfortable, advancing technology allows us to waste time in ever new and different ways.

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German Couple Who Want to Homeschool Their Kids Fighting to Stay in the U.S.

24th February 2013

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A federal appeals court has agreed to hear arguments from a German couple who are seeking asylum in the U.S. According to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, the German authorities could take their five children away from them if they return to Germany because they want to homeschool their children.

This sort of thing is why America is superior to Europe. Our bureaucrats are assholes idiosyncratically, but their are assholes systematically.

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A Simple Solution to Credit Card Fraud (and Why You Won’t See It Any Time Soon)

24th February 2013

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I learned some things about how the world works that I couldn’t figure out how to write about without coming across like a paranoid loon, and I couldn’t get them far enough out of my head to write cogently about anything else.  I’m still not sure I can tell this story without sounding like a paranoid loon, but I’ve decided to take that chance.

There are some fairly straightforward technical solution to the problem of credit card fraud.  Some of them are new and innovative, while others are already in widespread use throughout the world, but not in the U.S.  But none of these solutions will be deployed in the U.S. any time soon, not because it’s hard, but because the established players in the financial industry won’t allow it.

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10 Fascinating Facts About the World of Chocolate

24th February 2013

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Gallery: Aircraft Fan Builds Amazing Replica of a Pan Am 747 Jet

24th February 2013

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Some people just have entirely too much time on their hands.

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Bees and Flowers Communicate Using Electrical Fields, Researchers Discover

24th February 2013

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Flowers’ methods of communicating are at least as sophisticated as any devised by an advertising agency, according to a new study, published today in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol.  However, for any advert to be successful, it has to reach, and be perceived by, its target audience.  The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.

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Annals of Government Medicine

24th February 2013

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For a surprisingly long time, the British were proud of their system of socialized medicine, apparently because it was considered egalitarian. Now, however, a series of scandals in the National Health Service has focused attention on how low-quality government medicine is. The National Health Service has been rocked by one report after another of appallingly bad care, with many Britons demanding that NHS officials be criminally prosecuted.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Anybody who would trust their health care to the functional equivalent of the Post Office deserves what they get.

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The Curse of ‘College for All’

24th February 2013

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 Class mobility is not what it used to be in our country, but there are few notions less constructive than that the only way to a middle class life is college. Vocational training should be thought of as the American Dream just as much as four years in a dorm.

For one thing, plenty of people without B.A.s have nice homes and raise nice kids. Besides, too many people in college are there only to get “that piece of paper” for things college has nothing to do with. In a better America, we’d let them realize themselves years earlier.

I like a report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce . First, mandatory schooling should end after 10th grade. That 10-year education would be fully packed, based on schooling techniques proven to work.

This is how it works in Britain. People who finish what we would call 10th grade get their GCSE; only those headed to college take the two-year program called Sixth Form.

 But factory jobs are not the only ones that don’t require college. Did the guy who installed your cable-TV service have a college degree? How many sound technicians, mechanics or building inspectors spent four years on a college campus? How about the person who did your ultrasound? They are perfectly skilled — without having gone to college.

Most jobs in Information Technology are the same way. Nothing that I do in my daily job, for which I get paid six figures, is built on any one of my three degree programs. What matters in native intelligence — as notorious college dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrate quite handily.

 You will hear that some employers are requiring college degrees for low-level jobs, but this is static amid a larger reality. Commonly, those employers are grooming these people for higher-level jobs that have always required college.

Horseshit. They require a college degree to have some confidence that their applicants know at least what high school graduates of our parents’ generation knew — our educational system sucks that bad. Modern American high school graduates are lucky if they graduate with the literacy and numeracy skills that elementary school graduates had back before WWII.

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The Minimum Wage as a Tax

24th February 2013

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, elaborates.

Many people – including a seemingly growing number of economists – intuitively sense that a mandated higher minimum-wage will have little or no negative impact on unskilled-workers’ employment options.  For the person-in-the-street, this intuition, I suspect, springs from the common perception that employers generally have some sort of undue power over both workers and consumers and, as a result of that power, rake in excess profits.  These profits can therefore be tapped into by government diktats such as minimum-wage legislation without causing employers to adjust their operations in response.  For example, a minimum-wate diktat simply effects a redistribution of wealth; employees’ gains are employers’ losses, but losses only of some surplus that serves no economic function.

The intuition of economists who support the legislated minimum-wage is not much different from that of the person-in-the-street, although it is expressed more analytically.

My suspicion – and that is all it is, a suspicion – is that some of the more thoughtful proponents of the minimum-wage would pause to realize that, when seen as a a kind of tax upon the employment of unskilled workers, a minimum-wage hike might not be so lacking in negative consequences after all.

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The Gun Distraction

24th February 2013

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Indeed, the entire premise of the blue-state anti-gun proposals is based on an absurd fallacy: that honest citizens who own guns are potential criminals, and that real criminals will dutifully conform to the new laws, even though they’ve defied all the earlier ones.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

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‘Why I Can’t Work At Google’

24th February 2013

Read it.

From my interaction with Google recruiters, I can tell that by not knowing anyone at Google I am unfit to work at Google. This reminds me of the classic Economist article on the topic of teacher credentialing that shows a picture of Einstein with the caption “unfit to teach.” A hiring heuristic that gives massive preference to internal referrals means you’ll throw away some of the best candidates.

Reading all three-million unsolicited resumes is certainly not the solution either. Using technology like the Bright Score, TalentBin, Entelo, or Linkedin, smart companies can mine the pool to find the best talent. It is surprising, however, that the company that revolutionized the way we find information is still basing its hiring decisions largely on internal word of mouth.

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Virginia: Two Suspects Dead, One at Large Following Home Invasion

24th February 2013

Read it.

Prince Edward sheriff’s deputies are investigating a deadly home invasion that happened early Sunday morning in Prospect. Two of the three suspects are dead, shot by the homeowner in self defense, according to investigators on scene. Meanwhile, the search continues for the third suspect.

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The Book: An Elegy

24th February 2013

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, waxes poetic.

Interesting and unusual quality books, fiction and nonfiction alike, used to make a huge splash, and that “used to” is not so long ago. In 2001 everyone seemed to be reading McCullough’s biography of John Adams; and before that, Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain. A few years earlier, it was Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories if you wanted to keep your end up at dinner parties—I read the first 17 of them seriatim. (And a biography to boot.) Even further back, in the 1970s, you could get a conversation going with lower-middle-class cube jockeys about James Clavell’s Shogun or Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness. It’s been a decade and a half since I worked in a business office, but I feel pretty sure they’re not talking about books around the water cooler nowadays.

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On Immigration, Fool Us Twice

24th February 2013

Read it.

Their intentions are, and always have been, crystal clear–unlimited immigration and unconditional amnesty. Everything else is a lie.

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We Broke the Tomato, and We’re Using Science to Fix It

24th February 2013

Read it.

Thanks to decades of breeding, the modern agricultural tomato has a lot of properties that are great for farmers: the plants are incredibly productive, and the resulting tomatoes hold up well to shipping. Just one small problem: they are nearly tasteless. Heirloom tomato strains have become available precisely because people aren’t especially interested in the mass-produced, modern tomato.

In the words of a panel at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science, we “broke” the tomato by allowing the plant breeders to respond to the needs of farmers, instead of the tomato’s end-users: consumers.

Gee, Congress does the same thing. Unfortunately, voters don’t have any panel of scientists to stick up for them.

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Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered

24th February 2013

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You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a “language protein” in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

 

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Schools Without Classrooms

24th February 2013

Arnold Kling understands the dialectic.

In the legacy education model, teachers combine coaching, feedback, and content delivery. By coaching I mean advice, guidance, and encouragement. Feedback includes formal grading as well as informal praise and criticism. Content delivery includes lectures and reading assignments.

Perhaps the key to radically changing education is to break up those functions.

Absolutely.

Most education reformers want to focus on low-end students. While this is a noble idea, I think it is not a good path for reform. When you fail, you do not know whether it is because the innovations were not good or because the student population is too difficult to reach.

As long as we have a government-run factory school model, where children classed by age are thrown into the same pot (regardless of ability) and are run through the system in batches, the system is going to be run on the basis of the politics of ‘Leave No Child Behind’, which means that the brighter a child is the shorter the end of the stick the child receives.

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Human Cells a Chimera of Ancient Life

23rd February 2013

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Our cells remain chimeras, a hybrid fusion of unrelated creatures.

The genes date from an event 1.5 billion years ago, when two kinds of simple cells, neither having a nucleus or cellular membrane, shacked up and created an entirely new form of life: eukaryotes.

While the two distinct communities of genes work together to keep cell machinery ticking, they otherwise stay out of each other’s hair, report biologists from the National University of Ireland.

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