DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for July, 2013

The Price of Being a Superhero in Real Life: Then & Now

31st July 2013

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‘Where does he get those wonderful toys?’

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BeerSci: How Beer Gets Its Color

31st July 2013

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Two basic chemical reactions are responsible for beer being “beer-colored” rather than clear like water. One reaction couples amino acids to sugars; the other spurs sugars to decompose. In addition to adding color to beer, the products of these reactions also add significant flavor to the resultant brew.

A century ago in October, the Maillard reaction made its debut in the scientific literature thanks to the work of French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard. And the Maillard reaction is one of the most important reactions to understand how an amber beer looks different from a stout, which in turn looks different from a wit beer or pale ale.

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

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More Than 1,400 Cities Could Be Underwater by Century’s End, According to Climate-Change Model

31st July 2013

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

I’m hoping one of them is New York City — I want to see what sort of a ring it leaves around the Atlantic.

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The Decline of Privacy in Open-Plan Offices

31st July 2013

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I despise open-plan offices, and will not work in one. Open-plan offices are suitable for drones and paper-pushes, but it’s impossible to get anything done that requires even the most superficial amount of thought.

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Woolly Mammoth DNA May Lead to Resurrection of the Ancient Beast

31st July 2013

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The pioneering scientist who created Dolly the sheep has outlined how cells plucked from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses might one day help resurrect the ancient beasts.

Posted in News You Can Use. | 3 Comments »

Don’t Appear on a Reality TV Show if You Are Doing Illegal Stuff

31st July 2013

Good advice.

You should also click on the link and look at the pictures of the people involved, because it will help you to follow the advice I’ve previously given which is to avoid marrying anyone who looks like she could be on a “Real Housewives” show.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Don’t Appear on a Reality TV Show if You Are Doing Illegal Stuff

The Fallacy of Human Progress

31st July 2013

Fisking Steven Pinker.

Predictions about the future of humankind are better left in the hands of writers who see human nature whole, and who are not out to prove that it can be shaped or contained by the kinds of “liberal” institutions that Pinker so obviously favors.

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Human Rights Watch Protects the Arab Tyrants

31st July 2013

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In October 2011, as the Libyan uprising neared its end with the death of Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, Human Rights Watch (HRW)—a highly influential global organization claiming to promote universal moral principles—published a statement condemning Western governments for their “apparent eagerness to embrace Qaddafi because of his support on counterterrorism, as well as lucrative business opportunities” that, according to HRW, “tempered their criticism of his human rights record in recent years.”

What this statement conspicuously failed to note is that HRW had been an active participant in this eager embrace of the Qaddafi regime. Led by Executive Director Kenneth Roth and Sarah Leah Whitson, director of its Middle East and North Africa division, HRW has an overall dismal record with regard to “naming and shaming” Arab dictatorships. Over the years, it has devoted few resources to opposing the daily human rights violations that are characteristic of these regimes and has even built alliances with some. In 2009, for example, Whitson visited Saudi Arabia, where, instead of speaking out against attacks on women, minorities, and others, she sought funds to expand HRW’s role in the campaign to market the U.N.’s Goldstone report which falsely accused Israel of committing war crimes.

Not really news,  but a useful reminder.

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Increasing Number of Radicalized Western Muslims Heading for Syria

31st July 2013

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Good. As long as they’re killing each other, they aren’t killing us.

This is why we need to exit Iraq and Afghanistan and let those tar-babies go to work for us.

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Increasing Number of Radicalized Western Muslims Heading for Syria

The Laser Jihad Comes to Switzerland

30th July 2013

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Every video of the nighttime riots in Cairo shows the flashes and green spears of hand-held lasers being used by the demonstrators in an attempt to blind police and soldiers. Now the same tactic has been imported to France, and is being used to blind train drivers.

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Half of Retiring Senators Become Lobbyists, Up 1,500% in 40 Years

30th July 2013

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

Christopher Buckley’s review of Mark Leibovich’s “In This Town,” a Thackeray-esque exposé of official Washington, uncovers this buried morel on page 330 of the book. In 1974, just 3% of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. Today, 50% of retiring Senators and 42% of retiring House members stay in DC and become lobbyists. The more than 1,500% increase goes a long way towards explaining how an entrenched, permanent political class has risen in DC.

There’s gold in them thar shills….

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In Terms Of Cost-Per-Calorie, No Locavore, Organic Veggie Can Compete With the Mcdouble

30th July 2013

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What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.

The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Levitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on In Terms Of Cost-Per-Calorie, No Locavore, Organic Veggie Can Compete With the Mcdouble

Tiny Channels of Water Could Cool Windows and Cut Down on Air Conditioning Bills

30th July 2013

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Like blood circulating through the human body, a new system out of Harvard harnesses channels of running water to cool windows that receive a lot of sun. The water carries away heat, leading to less work for air conditioners and a lower electricity bill.

The channels are ultra-thin and encased in a sheet of clear silicone rubber that is stretched over a window. They crisscross to create a mesh-like pattern. While the channels are visible when empty, they become transparent when they contain water.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Tiny Channels of Water Could Cool Windows and Cut Down on Air Conditioning Bills

The Most Trendy Names in US History

30th July 2013

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I am not making this up.

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The Failure of Inclusionary Zoning

30th July 2013

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Data from the 2011 American Community Survey indicates that the median value of owner-occupied homes in Denver is nearly four times median family incomes. It should be just two times, which is typical for cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries or other restrictive land-use laws. So housing prices are nearly twice as high as they ought to be.

As this city document explains, Denver’s “inclusionary zoning” ordinance requires developers who build 30 or more homes or condos at one time to sell at least 10 percent of those homes at “affordable” prices. Typically, this means an average of about $40,000 less than market prices, which is likely below the actual cost of constructing the homes. To make up for the losses, developers have to sell the remaining 90 percent for more than they would otherwise.

The people who buy these homes don’t really get a windfall. They are required to live in the houses themselves (i.e., they can’t rent them out at market rates) and, if they sell them within 15 to 30 years after buying them, they can’t sell them for more than they paid for them plus inflation. None of the buyers are really poor; anyone who earns up to 80 percent of the city’s median income is eligible. It is likely that many of the buyers are young people whose lifetime earnings are likely to be well above median incomes.

Markets do what markets do, despite what cities tell them to.

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Why Labor Unions and Silicon Valley Aren’t Friends, in 2 Charts

30th July 2013

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None of the Internet giants have unionized employees, which has made Silicon Valley a favorite target for civil libertarians.

Ponder the assumption that not having unionized employees makes you a target for ‘civil libertarians’. Ponder what that says about those who pass as ‘civil libertarians’ today.

There’s a very good reason why unions have never had a presence in Silicon Valley: they aren’t fans of technology. Labor unions have aggressively fought Uber and Lyft, which threaten taxi drivers with increased competition. They’ve effectively paralyzed a multi-billion-dollar sharing economy industry from spreading around the country.

Unions — dinosaurs from an earlier age. And it makes perfect sense; unions are about getting benefits for workers, and modern technology is focused on machines doing work that people used to do. Unions and technology are natural enemies.

Not to be outdone, one of the largest labor unions in the country, AFL-CIO, is the leading opponent of more high-skilled immigrants, calling the tech community “greedy” for wanting to make it easier to hire foreign engineers.

While, of course, unions aren’t greedy for wanting to stick the ‘tech community’ with higher costs.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Labor Unions and Silicon Valley Aren’t Friends, in 2 Charts

Will Your Congressman Retire Richer Than You?

30th July 2013

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Yeah, probably. And why not? He certainly started out richer than me.

 “If you can get elected to Congress and stay there, you can retire pretty well,” said Chris Kahn, a Bankrate analyst, who conducted the research.

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

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Broken Bones Might Heal Faster With Help From Tiny Nanowires on Metal Implants

29th July 2013

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And if it gives you super powers as a side effect, well, who’s going to complain?

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The Quantified Patient: Boston Hospitals Show the Future of Data-Driven Remote Care

29th July 2013

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About seven in 10 Americans track some health indicator, like their weight, diet or symptom from their homes (even if they take a low-tech, paper and pen approach). But now hospitals are adopting more high-tech ways to help doctors follow along remotely.

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Booksellers Furious That Obama Is Giving Jobs Speech From Amazon Warehouse

29th July 2013

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Aw, poor iddle hipsters, maybe Auntie Hillary will kiss it and make it all better….

[Bugs Bunny voice] ‘Suckersssssssss….’

Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Booksellers Furious That Obama Is Giving Jobs Speech From Amazon Warehouse

NUKEMAP

29th July 2013

Check it out.

If you were to nuke San Francisco, how much better off would the country be?

Note that the pre-sets are all in Blue states….

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on NUKEMAP

Poll: Politics Is for Losers, According to the Nation’s Youth

28th July 2013

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Young people increasingly look down on politics as useless and think only losers choose a life of government work, a pessimistic new poll found.

Yeah, well, they’ve got a job and you don’t, ‘nation’s youth’ … who’s the loser now? (Your parents are paying for it in either case, but they don’t have to live in the basement.)

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Poll: Politics Is for Losers, According to the Nation’s Youth

End of Compulsory Dues Has Led to Plummeting Union Membership in Wisconsin

28th July 2013

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I guess unions and individual freedom just don’t mix. Whoda thunkit.

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State-Funded College Now Pretty Much Offering Occupy Studies Program; Register Now!

28th July 2013

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Laney is a state-funded, open-enrollment community college located in beautiful Oakland, Calif., America’s seventh-deadliest city (just behind Newark).

The community change studies program – which is accepting applications through August 5 – “combines classroom and on-the-job training to prepare students” for exciting careers in community activism, protesting and general mau-mauing.

The one-year program offers participants paid internships in addition to college credit. The 18 hours of coursework includes “Civic Engagement in Urban Communities,” “Grassroots Knowledge: Community Based Research in Action” and, of course, “Introduction to Ethnic Studies.” There are six classes total; each course is worth three credits.

Every class in the community change studies program qualifies for transfer into the prestigious University of California system as well the Cal State system.

Laney promises that completion of the program will give students “strong backgrounds” for work at nonprofits and in union organizing.

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Eminent Domain and the Decline of Detroit

28th July 2013

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Detroit’s sixty year decline, culminating in its recent bankruptcy, has many causes. But one that should not be ignored is the city’s extensive use of eminent domain to transfer property to politically influential private interests. For many years, Detroit aggressively used eminent domain to promote “economic development” and “urban renewal.” The most notorious example was the 1981 Poletown case, in which some 4000 people lost their homes, and numerous businesses were forced to move in order to make way for a General Motors factory. As I explained in this article, the Poletown takings – like many other similar condemnations – ended up destroying far more development than they ever created. In his prescient dissent in Poletown, Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Ryan warned that there was no real reason to expect that the project would produce the growth promised by GM and noted that Detroit and the court had “subordinated a constitutional right to private corporate interests.”

Detroit: Nobody Left to Steal From.

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Job Gentrification

28th July 2013

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What happens if Walmart starts offering to pay cashiers and shelf stockers $22/hr? As it raises wages, the kind of people who compete for Walmart jobs changes. As wages go up, workers with greater skill, human capital, and experience start to compete for these jobs, and, being better workers, they will beat out the kind of workers who are currently getting Walmart jobs. Call this phenomenon job gentrification. If Walmart increases its wage significantly, this will be very good for the people who end up working at Walmart. But that doesn’t mean it will be good for the kind of people who currently are getting the low-paying jobs at Walmart.

Eh, who cares about them? Obviously not the people on the D.C. city council.

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Charles Rangel Has a Fix for Student Loans – Free College

28th July 2013

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Of course. Free healthcare, free college educations, free money. Everything should just be free, free, free. Let’s make all of America look just like Detroit.

Sure, why not.

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Is there anything that progressives can’t blame on racism and homophobia?

28th July 2013

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The obvious answer to that question is no.

The issue: Student loan debt.

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‘Everything I Learned in College Was a Lie’

28th July 2013

Gavin MacInnes comes clean.

Getting a BA in English lit and taking all the insane lefty electives that surround it is a great way to spend tons of money getting brainwashed. Before I went to college, I had common sense. I believed women are fundamentally different than men and I didn’t think everything is racist. It took them four years to convince me otherwise and about twice that long to recover. (This was in the early 90s before LGBT persecution took over the lexicon.)

Liberal-arts programs don’t point out why angry young men are being irrational. They tell us we’re not angry enough. Professors believe the customer is always right, so they provide kids courses on Sticking it to the Man. We wanted to blow minds with radical ideas, but our professors outdid us every time. I was sorta pro-choice as a teen, but my professor went a step farther by telling us it was OK to have an abortion up until a year after the baby was born. All you needed to do to be outrageous in college was quote your teachers. By the time you get your diploma, you are convinced the Western world is run by rapists from the KKK. We learned to be offended on behalf of others, and how they felt about the matter wasn’t even important. If they didn’t agree with our crusade, they needed more “education.” That’s the same cure for people who resist Scientology: more Scientology.

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8 Reasons Straight Men Don’t Want to Get Married

28th July 2013

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In the course of researching my new book, Men On Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – And Why It Matters, I talked with men all over America about why they’re avoiding marriage. It turns out that the problem isn’t that men are immature, or lazy. Instead, they’re responding rationally to the incentives in today’s society.

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The Failure of Profiling Racists

28th July 2013

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

… the KKKrazy Glue that holds together the disparate elements of the Obama Coalition is fear and loathing of white racists, even when they aren’t racist. Or white.

The only reason Zimmerman was put on trial for murder was because, in their lust to find a white racist murderer of an innocent black baby who got away by flashing his White Privilege Card, the media didn’t bother checking a photo of Zimmerman before inflating this exurban police blotter item into the Defining Event of Our Times.

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Bad Science: CDC Forced to Reverse its Recommendations on Salt

28th July 2013

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In 1977, the federal government put a warning label on saccharine, claiming it caused cancer. It took only 20 years to to admit this was wrong. Then there’s the so-called Healthy Food Pyramid created by the USDA to advise Americans on the composition of a supposedly healthy diet. Although many still follow the recommendations of the food pyramid, it has since been questioned by researchers and nutritionist and even cited as a potential factor in America’s skyrocketing rate of obesity. Now we have another example of bad advice — government recommendations on sodium intake.

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State Tells Parenting Columnist to Stop Dispensing Advice

28th July 2013

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For more than 30 years, syndicated advice columnist John Rosemond has dished out old-school, no-nonsense tips to parents.

Now, Mr. Rosemond is getting a spanking of his own.

Kentucky officials say he violated state law by presenting himself as a psychologist and then giving parenting advice without a proper license. Mr. Rosemond is a licensed “psychological associate” in his home state of North Carolina, but not in Kentucky.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

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Education: Alabama Officially Expects Less of Blacks, Hispanics Than Whites

28th July 2013

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The Upper Crust makes sure that the Lower Crust is where they are supposed to be.

Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Education: Alabama Officially Expects Less of Blacks, Hispanics Than Whites

Express Lane

28th July 2013

Express Lane

Tell the truth: We’ve all wanted to do that.

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The Puzzle of the Other Hockey Stick

28th July 2013

David Friedman thinks of cool stuff so that you don’t have to.

Malthus started with the observation that humans like sex, and sex produces babies. He concluded that, unless there were large costs to producing babies, population would increase at something close to the biological maximum, leading to an exponential growth rate high enough to overcome any plausible rate of increase in human productivity. Looking around him, he observed that  most people were poor enough so that the cost of supporting an additional child was a substantial burden. He concluded that if that was not the case, if, as Godwin and Condorcet, the authors he was responding to, expected, the future saw a sharp rise in the standard of living of the masses, making additional children only a minor burden, population would increase rapidly and the pressure of population against a fixed supply of land would push standards of living back down.

It’s an elegant argument and provides a plausible explanation for most of human history, but one that stopped working within the lifetime of its author. Why? What went wrong with Malthus’ model?

 

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As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared

28th July 2013

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In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities “notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one,” Mr. Anderson recalls.

There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.

I can see a new Jeff Foxworthy tour: ‘If you were minding your own business, you might be a Federal criminal.’

Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Idaho, said the men were on an archeological site that was 13,000 years old. “Folks do need to pay attention to where they are,” she said.

How does that help them when they don’t know, and can’t be expected by any rational adult to know, that there is a law that they might be breaking? Was the site posted? Did it say ‘two years in prison if you dig here’? I rather think not.

As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors don’t necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent.

Which is a basic component of the Common Law, and its abandonment is a significant step toward tyranny.

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Someone Has to Make the Pie.

28th July 2013

Jerry Pournelle, whom you really ought to be reading all the time.

Democracies endure until the majority learns that it can vote itself largess from the public treasury. Up to that point awarding yourself money for doing nothing was known as graft. Old Ed Crump, the highly popular and successful city boss of Memphis when I was growing up, used to talk about ‘honest graft’ dishonest graft. Honest graft was the sort of thing like knowing where a road would be built or improved and tipping off your friends to buy out in that direction. Dishonest graft was stealing money from the treasury or intimidating taxpayers. Crump talked openly about it: he didn’t put up with theft and embezzlement and incompetence, but he rewarded efficiency and honesty. Oddly enough, most people believed him, and did so all the time I was in Memphis. I haven’t been back since. I suppose there has been some kind of debunking and posthumous degrading of the old man since I left in 1950.

Unfortunately, most of our politicians grew up reading Rawls, who just assumed that a pie drops magically from the sky and spent all of his time obsessing about how it was going to be divided; his intellectual progeny spend all their time focusing on distribution and not enough of it on production, with results as you see them.

Moore’s law is inexorable. We can do more and more with less and less. The precision gyros and accelerometers in a Minuteman missile cost millions of dollars. Now you can get a full set of gyros and accelerometers with a GPS receiver to boot on a chip for under $50, and that cost is falling. You can build a satellite capable of doing crop forecasts for a few thousand dollars and get it launched as a cube sat. Telemetry is no longer expensive – the batteries cost more than the electronics. In the early days of spy satellites we had to drop physical film packages and catch them off Hawaii before they fell into the sea to get good pictures of the Soviet ICBM installations. Now a cubesat can give you an instant picture at much better resolution.

 

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Unions Plead for Changes to Obamacare, Citing Lost Wages and Benefits

28th July 2013

Read it.

Hey, you voted for him, now suck on it.

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Ballad of a Marked Man

28th July 2013

Jim Goad looks at the future of George Zimmerman.

George Zimmerman is now a free man. He is free to be stalked, threatened, harassed, persecuted, and possibly killed at the hands of the perpetual malcontents who are sorely displeased with his acquittal late Saturday night.

But he is not free to sleep soundly—not now, nor possibly for the rest of his life. Like O. J. Simpson after his murder acquittal, he is likely to face big-money civil suits from Trayvon Martin’s family members. And like the LAPD officers who were originally acquitted on charges of using excessive force against Rodney King, he is now vulnerable to a federal civil-rights prosecution. In fact, the Justice Department is investigating precisely that possibility, despite the fact that an FBI investigation found no evidence that Zimmerman is “racist,” as if such a thing can actually be proved.

But if someone were to kill him, there would be no DOJ investigation into such a violation of his ‘civil rights’ (if the right to be free from random murder isn’t a civil right, what is?) because, as a ‘white Hispanic’, he has no rights that a black person need respect.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »

STUDY: If You’re Ugly, You’re Gonna Have a Tough Time at the Office

27th July 2013

New Fashionable Victim Group.

Michigan State University Today reports that “people who are considered unattractive are more likely to be belittled and bullied in the workplace, according to a first-of-its-kind study.”

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Laws, Norms and Shopping Carts

27th July 2013

David Friedman ponders the distinction between laws and social norms.

 You observe a stranger, in public, in possession of what is obviously stolen property of significant value. You might ignore it, but you also might call the police.

Unless it’s a shopping cart. The value of a shopping cart is about a hundred dollars and any that you observe outside the grocery and associated parking lot are almost certainly stolen. Yet, in practice, you do not call the police. My guess is that practically nobody does—or that the police don’t come, or that if they come they make no effort to arrest the thief. The basis for that guess is casual observation—if there were any significant chance that walking off with a shopping cart would get you arrested, tried, and jailed with a sentence suited to the value of the cart, very few people would do it.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Laws, Norms and Shopping Carts

World Peashooting Championships

27th July 2013

Read it.

Slow news day.

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From the Monkey Cage

27th July 2013

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Earlier today I spent some time with Andrew, his lovely and talented girlfriend Naomi Brockwell, and several other liberty-loving folk (btw, thanks Frayda & Ken!).  Andrew observed that professional politicians are unique among professionals in denying membership in their profession. No electrician who arrives at your home to repair your electrical wiring announces that he’s emphatically not a professional electrician.  No physician whom you visit to set your broken leg or to relieve your hemorrhoids eagerly lies to you that she is most certainly not a professional physician.  Yet the typical professional politician is forever announcing that he or she is not a professional politician.

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More on Soylent

27th July 2013

An update on the Soylent stuff.

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Sweating the Small Stuff

27th July 2013

Gavin MacInnes tells all.

One of the best things about living in the country is how little you care about “city” issues such as the Peruvian Kraut who killed a gangster’s son or a bunch of savages rioting halfway across the world. Here in upstate NY where nature’s tranquility meets summer’s heat, you sweat the small stuff.

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Today’s Words of Wisdom

27th July 2013

Everybody wants to be Hank Williams, but nobody wants to die.

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Supreme Court Shutouts Reveal Reckless Decisions

27th July 2013

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In Horne v. Department of Agriculture, a decision issued in June, the justices unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s argument that raisin farmers did not have the right to go to court to contest the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of raisins. The Fifth Amendment states that the government must pay “just compensation” whenever the government takes private property for “public use.” But the administration claimed that farmers could not even raise the takings issue in court without first enduring lengthy delays and paying a $483,000 fine.

Horne was the administration’s third unanimous defeat in a property rights case in 18 months. In Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, it claimed that a couple had no right to go to court to seek compensation after the EPA blocked construction of their “dream house.”

In Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, it unsuccessfully argued that the Fifth Amendment doesn’t require compensation when the federal government repeatedly and deliberately floods property owners’ land. Even liberal justices normally skeptical of property rights claims, including one of President Obama’s appointees, found these arguments too much to swallow.

The Obama administration has also suffered unanimous defeats in several other important cases.

Last year, the justices rejected the administration’s position that the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment does not apply to churches’ decisons to hire and fire employees with religious duties, such as teaching theology. Obama appointee Justice Elena Kagan called the administration’s position “amazing.”

In United States v. Jones, another 2012 case, the justices unanimously rejected the administration’s claim that the Fourth Amendment does not restrict the government’s authority to attach a GPS tracking device to a car.

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The Benefits of Monarchy

27th July 2013

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British interests have been represented for decades by the same person who embodies the non-political customs and traditions of the U.K. In the U.S., every four years America could be represented by someone who has a different sense of what it means to be an American than whoever previously lived in the White House.

And far too often they get it wrong: Woodrow Wilson. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson. Bill Clinton. Barakc Obama. ‘Nuff said….

Although not granted their position in virtue of their birth, American presidents enjoy some lifestyle perks that are similar, if not superior, to the perks the British royal family enjoys. The White House is a mansion that resembles a palace, yet the British prime minister, the most powerful politician in the U.K. and the American president’s counterpart, gets to live in the comparatively modest 10 Downing Street, an attached office and living area that does not have the absurd amenities that the president enjoys in the White House, such as a bowling alley, swimming pool, tennis court, and cinema. Neither the Queen nor her prime minister get a security detail anywhere near as large as the American Secret Service.

One of the chief benefits of monarchy is perspective — Queen Elizabeth has seen every political fad cone and go for over 60 years, and probably isn’t impressed by any of them. There’s an amusing story that in her final days Queen Victoria was presented by the War Office with proposals that were characterized as ‘entirely new’. After reviewing them, she allegedly responded, ‘No, Mr Bannerman. Lord Palmerston presented me with these exact same proposals in 1852. And Lord Palmerston was wrong.’ That’s the sort of perspective the American government has always lacked at the top.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Benefits of Monarchy

Predictive Policing

27th July 2013

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THE meanest streets of Kent are to be found in little pink boxes. Or at least they are if you look at them through the crime-prediction software produced by an American company called PredPol. Places in the county east of London where a crime is likely on a given day show up on PredPol’s maps highlighted by pink squares 150 metres on a side. The predictions can be eerily good, according to Mark Johnson, a police analyst: “In the first box I visited we found a carving knife just lying in the road.”

I can predict where crime will occur: Any place that has more than 10% Muslims, as Sweden, Norway, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Dearborn have discovered.

 

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Predictive Policing