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Like the space race, the America’s Cup race brings out the rich-guy toys that advance tech for the rest of us.

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Never forget that new technology can be made the servant of some very old ideas.

Inadvertently, of course.

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It’s all about motivation.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

There’s always the Washington Post’s XX featurette for heaping mounds of Taking Everything Personally….

The star of Precious weighs 300 pounds. No woman is going to be drawn to make an impulse purchase of a fashion and lifestyle magazine because there’s a 300 pounder on the cover.

Capital is mobile.

“In 2004 New Jersey was one of the first states to adopt a ‘millionaires’ tax, imposing an 8.97% rate on income over a half-million dollars,” Forbes reports. The consequence? “In all, the state suffered a $70 billion net outflow in wealth from 2004 through 2008, compared with a $98 billion net inflow in the prior five years.

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

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Congress: Weapon of Mass Destruction.

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In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional  or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behavior – where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

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Let’s start the week off with a little gloom, shall we?

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Splendid news on the health front this week, as it has emerged that drinking beer is good for you – and that soft drinks will kill you.

Lynn Viehl, prolific writer, argues with Chinese fortune cookies.

Well, she’s a writer. They do stuff like that.

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The young men and women of America’s future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.

Training the Crustians of Tomorrow.

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A good trick, if it works.

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Richard Florida has hopefully labeled this trend “the rise of the creative class.” Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit. Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.

Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented. The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”

Jerry Pournelle is not optimistic.

On schools, infra-structure, the whole lobbyist scene, the problem isn’t too few laws and regulations but too many. We can’t build infrastructure projects without allowing lawyers to wet their beaks, not just instantly but for years and years. The nuclear industry in the United States is paralyzed by circling legal buzzards. We all know the schools are broken, but there is no possible way to fix the situation, and any attempt is met by frantic opposition. We can’t fire incompetent teachers or promote good ones. After a while we stop trying.

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Say what you will about Britain, they certainly know how to do whatever it is that they do.

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Hey! I like Spam!

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Take a look at this amazing color film footage of London in the 1920s.

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These are astonishing.

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A high-ranking Pakistani diplomat reportedly cannot be appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia because in Arabic his name translates into a phrase more appropriate for a porn star, referring to the size of male genitals, Foreign Policy reported.

The Arabic translation of Akbar Zeb to “biggest d**k” has overwhelmed Saudi officials who have refused to allow his post there.

The guys at PowerLine have fun with it — with a supporting Monty Python video, of course.

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

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Feel free to be depressed for, oh, about ten minutes. This is, after all, the most important thing we have to worry about today.

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The first entry, of course, ought to be ‘government’, but one can’t expect that sort of insight from just anybody.

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After my last post, some readers suggested that I was exaggerating the potential cost of paying unemployment insurance when you hire the wrong person. Fred from Florida wrote, “Payroll tax rates that fund unemployment insurance are affected by the company’s history, but it’s not a dollar for dollar payout.” Actually, in Illinois, it’s even worse.

Don’t look to government to help the unemployment crisis — it’s best at prolonging it, as Amity Schlaes has demonstrated with FDR and the Great Depression.

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

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

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A bit late – but better late than never.

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Oh, ya think?

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An excellent we-mind-everybody-else’s-business-so-that-you-don’t-have-to article from The New Republic, the paradigmatic SWPL publication. Part of the “think globally, angst locally” movement.

Jane Brody, in the New York Times, gives a tongue-bath to Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. This is such a poster-child piece of New Age Journalism that it has to be read to be believed.

I find Pollan’s books entertaining, but Brody freely admits the characteristics (‘Mr. Pollan is not a biochemist or a nutritionist but rather a professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.’ and ‘…this little book, which is based on research but not annotated…’) that lead me to take his aphorisms with a grain of salt. (Oh, wait, no, salt is bad … unless it’s kosher sea salt gathered by happy tribesmen in underdeveloped nations.)

Brody also cements her status as a member of the Crust with such PC sentiments as ‘I will add a third reason: our economy cannot afford to continue to patch up the millions of people who each year develop a diet-related ailment, and our planetary resources simply cannot sustain our eating style and continue to support its ever-growing population.’ People who use phrases like ‘economy cannot afford’ ought to be sent to re-education camps until they quit thinking in absurd generalizations and better understand the nature of markets.

Brody is also a devout communicant of the Church of Gaia: ‘No natural food is simply a collection of nutrients, and a processed food stripped of its natural goodness to which nutrients are then added is no bargain for your body.’ You’d think that somebody with a degree in biochemistry would hesitate to use terms like ‘natural goodness’, but apparently a lifetime in journalism degrades neural pathways more than one might expect.

Pollan certainly understands his audience, and will probably make a ton of money on this book, as he has on his previous two. It’s amazing how many people keep writing for The Whole Earth Catalog thirty years after its demise.

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Don’t look for the price to drop any time soon, though.

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You never know when an Iranian EMP attack will make all of your credit cards just so much plastic.

Megan McArdle is as unimpressed with the iPad as I am.

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Britain just isn’t what it used to be.

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Apparently not.

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Major textbook publishers have struck deals with software company ScrollMotion Inc. to adapt their textbooks for the electronic page, as the industry embraces a hope that digital devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad will transform the classroom.

This will be helpful.

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I’ve had girlfriends like that. Not in a while, though.

George Will takes Obama to the woodshed. And nobody does it better.

Barack Obama, in the 13th month of his presidency, is learning what Clinton learned in his third month: The grinding arithmetic of economic and budgetary facts sets the parameters of political possibility.

Today, with the economy still resembling a patient etherized upon a table, and with deficits causing voters’ hair to stand on end, Obama is discovering his inner Eisenhower Republican.

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Or maybe not. You decide.

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Detectives believe the victim was bludgeoned to death after 11pm on Sunday – and his body lay on the floor of his flat above the architect’s office in a “significant amount of blood” for around 12 hours before it was discovered.

Yeah, that would do it.

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I do not want to go to school today.I’d rather just relax at home and playComputer games, or maybe read a book;then, at the proper time, perhaps I’d cookA meal that takes some time and thought to do;Not like our lunches, spare and quickly madeBefore commuting to our daily trade,Where moments to relax are brief and few.

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This is what the monster movies don’t show you: The enormous commercial possibilities of, say, crabs the size of SUVs.

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Government is possibly the worst provider of goods and services available. The only time we ought to depend on government to provide something is if it absolutely has to get done and there is absolutely no one else that can do it.

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Be afraid.