Prrometheus

The download button appears to be broken for 32 bit Ubuntu 8.1 systems running Firefox 3.0 with Flash 9.

What change? We have a trillion dollar pork bill getting bludgeoned through congress right now. Essentially the President said to congress "Just make it big, and make sure we have some token expenditures on energy subsidies. Otherwise, here's the checkbook. Yes, there's more than a thousand economists against this, but we're going to ignore them and listen to the ones who are Democrats."

So far, the new boss looks a lot like the old ones, except being black, young, and charismatic. plus ca change...

Also, sustainable energy is an engineering problem (unless by "sustainable energy" we mean proven technologies like nuclear, which leftists inevitably don't). No amount of Presidential hope-rays is going to make windmills or solar cells more efficient.

Rest assured, however, that we will give more money to corn farmers for ethanol, despite the fact that it is neither environmentally or economically sound as an energy source. Obama comes from a corn state.

Yes, I do hope he's marginally better than what came before. But this attitude that "I hope he's the one to make change stick", I just don't understand. There's only so much change you can make atop the world's largest bureaucracy.

When was the government ever run with an eye on efficiency?

He's just a journalist, dude, doing what journalists do.

The Ad Council is my least favorite government agency. It takes billions of dollars from the public. In exchange it produces such necessary propaganda as "if you smoke pot, you'll kill babies on accident".

Meanwhile, no Ad Council advertisement has ever been shown to make a quantitative difference in the social dynamic it was meant to address.

Every time I see an AdCoucil ad, I can't help but thinking that they could have refunded a few thousand people their tax money instead of providing me with this "public service".

It sometimes affects what I write, but not in a bad way. If I see a comment that I wrote has poor karma, or a critical response to a comment I wrote has high karma, I will often go back and flesh out my argument better.

At least on Hacker News, it seems to be a sign that my comment was poorly written rather than against popular wisdom.

The most strict libertarians I can think of are the anarcho-capitalists. Even they do not desire a society with the absence of laws, but rather they desire a market it law and law enforcement to replace the public monopoly.

You can argue about whether or not that is realistic, but to say they desire no laws is unfair.

And yes, the LP has an overabundance of socially challenged types. A rational man should be able to weigh arguments by their worth and not by their bearers.

The funds have the $billions. If you want a piece of it, you go to them.

Or perhaps financial firms should hire hackers to talk to investment funds and tell them how irrational they are being by refusing to do things remotely.

From what I remember, there was nothing in the article about gay marriage, or the pledge of allegiance. The author wasn't even particularly religious, though he hinted at deist tendencies. He certainly wasn't advocating religion, rather he was discussing the role it played in the lives of its adherents, and what that meant for popular atheist advocacy.

But from the reaction on this thread, he could have been linking to a Jack Chick tract. The anti-intellectualism on display is stunning. It looks to me that a Pavlovian anti-religious response is kicking in and a bunch of folks are spewing worn out canned responses orthogonal to the topic at hand. The reason this topic was dead-ed is surely more due to the juvenile discussion here than the thought-provoking article.

Should we refuse to listen to Christmas carols over the holidays because California passed proposition 8? Ought we boycott history lectures that mention popes because of Catholic stances on birth control?

If we temporarily drop our feelings about how people ought to act and examine how people actually do act, I promise you that we will learn interesting things. What happened to the geek ideal of learning about the world around us?

What happened to the inquiring mind? When I meet people that think different from me, I try to understand what motivates them, why they are different, what their history is like, what their culture is like, and how they see me. That shouldn't be hard for smart people like you and me, and I think it's a valuable thing to do.

The downside is that when you start to understand people, you start to lose enemies, and it is fun to have enemies.

Sadly, there are few places where one can have a good conversation these days. Most of the people who are capable of interesting discussion are old. It seems few young people are learning the art of entertaining ideas without changing their minds. Such a flat society it will be when every conversation must be an occasion for advocacy or agreement.

But maybe I am missing your point and you are just going to restate how gay people are okay and evolution is correct again. How thrilling.

I'm fascinated by how impossible it is for geeks to have an intelligent conversation about religion. This was a good article that many people chose to misread.

Yes, there is no invisible man in the sky, and gays are normal people. Evolution is real. Look how smart you are.

Now, there is a fascinating history of religion in human society probably dating back 500,000 years. To most people, it continues today. Yet we are so insecure that we cannot examine that tradition as inquiring minds while noone is demanding that we accept it for ourselves.

Such intolerance and misbehavior from intellectuals! How do they interact in our society, hating and condemning most whom they meet, totally unwilling to take others at face value? I do not know. I hope that I can be more generous.

Do you throw out your jets after one year?

My little firm did billion dollar deals, and we used private jets to flit our management teams from one investment fund to the next. Citigroup is much, much bigger. 400 hours (per year!) could easily be worth $50 million.

There were surely some bits worth celebrating in the thousands of years of prologue to manned spaceflight.

As far as I know, it is mostly restricted to certain strains of American Protestantism.

To throw away Christianity is to throw away Western Civilization and much of our heritage. I enjoyed this bit from TFA:

"Arguably, the highest achievements of the human species have been motivated by that instinctive spirituality just mentioned. The great cathedrals, the precious heritage of religious art and music, are not only monuments to religious belief, but more persuasive testimonies to and arguments for faith than the disputations of theology. Have you ever read the story of the conversion of St. Vladimir, the founder of the Russian Orthodox Church? He was, as the account goes, a pagan prince of the line of Rurik; and an enthusiastic pagan, having built several temples. Yet he was not quite satisfied with his religion, and agreed to hear deputations of Muslims, Jews, and Christians each deliver their respective sales pitches. The presentations of the first two were rather arid, but the Christians (who had come from Byzantium) put on by far the best show, high mass with all the smells and bells, rich vestments, singing, the whole nine yards. Vladimir was convinced - any religion that was so beautiful had to be the right one (it also didn't hurt that it had the least restrictive dietary rules, and no ban on booze). Accordingly, Russia became Christian, and Vladimir a saint - all on the basis of his aesthetic judgment.

I suppose these anthropological and aesthetic reasons explain why many people remain culturally Christian despite an abundance of doubts and discontents. They aren't willing to dismiss the spiritual out of hand; they see more benefit than detriment accruing to society from religion in spite of their doubts (as did Jefferson and Franklin); and they find Christianity aesthetically appealing (as did St. Vladimir). They are therefore unwilling to discard it in favor of the barren and austere horizon offered by the crusading atheism of a Dawkins. For my part, I'll wait to see whether Dawkinsianity produces anything equivalent to Chartres, Handel's Messiah or Mozart's Requiem, the Pietà or the Sistine ceiling. When it does we may re-evaluate it to see if it offers anything worthwhile."

Ha! Another UR reader. One day we will all be rounded up in some sort of camp.

That's impressive for a blog comment. UR's comments will never decline in quality, because the masses will never have the patience for Moldbug's meanderings.

This is a reddit article. And not one of the better ones.

It's even from the NY Post. Ick.

Say an executive saves 400 hours a year by flying private. If that makes him a few percent more effective in a company the size of Citigroup, it's worth it.

Trips on commercial airlines takes hours longer, mostly due to security precautions.

Your wife has a linux expert at home. Sadly, none of my friends that knew linux were close enough/evangelical enough to help me with my driver issues.

>"Microsoft has a moral obligation to protect these American workers by putting them first during these difficult economic times."

One loses track of all the moral obligations of corporations these days. While trying to meet them all, it can be hard to find the time to make a good product and earn money.

Let's see, official recessions are 1907, 1918, 1929, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1973, 1980, 1990, 2001, and 2007.

The evidence looks pretty weak, although it's hard to eyeball. It would be nice to throw up a simple regression and get objective.

It's interesting that banker pay continued to rise well into the Great Depression. I'm guessing that this was due to all the demand for financial talent to work the bankruptcies and restructurings, and maybe businesses needed more folks to comply with exponentially expanding government regulations.

On the other hand, maybe LOW banker salary correlates with depressions, since there are fewer deals to do. Thus, high banker salaries would be A Good Thing for a country, since it signals high economic growth, and low banker salaries would be A Bad Thing. The more that I look at it, the worse this "excess wage" statistic looks as a predictor. Sure, it grew during the housing bubble, but this is the millionth statistic I've been shown that shot up like a rocket during that period.

Lastly, what the hell is "excess wage"? That's surely the low-hanging hole in this analysis. They didn't teach me about that in Macroeconomics. It's hard to look at this graph and make generalizations when you don't know what the hell this new, undefined quantity is and how they calculated it. I guess someone could say, "well go look it up on your own". But then I could say, "Your blog presents pseudo-information that is not useful, and is frankly misleading".

Of course, the lesson we are supposed to take home is " Greed without Governance, allowed to build over N years, equals depression, and its absolutely predictable - now isn't that depressing....". Gee, I wonder if the blog owner came up with that after being exposed to this information, or before. And I can't think of any "governance" that would have stopped the massive capital flows going into the housing sector that is even close to a good idea for the long term economy. But that is another issue altogether.

On the bright side, reading inane writing in support of preconceived ideas like this inspires me to do better in my own work.

What I'd really like, though, is deaths per mile with and without a helmet.

Yep, and the site didn't provide those stats, so all its data is essentially useless for ascertaining the safety effects of wearing a helmet.

That's not the answer to the question. That's "government statistics". It's meaningless to refer to a safety statistic like "45 to 88 percent of brain injury can be prevented by a helmet" without understanding how frequent brain injury is in the overall population of bicycle riders.

According to that site, having everyone wear a helmet could prevent 250 to 500 deaths each year out of 80 million bicycle riders (700 deaths, two-thirds with brain injury, 45 to 88 percent prevention with helmets, 80 million riders). So if you wear a helmet, there is a half of a thousandth of a percent chance that you will benefit from it.

When you look at it THAT way, the safety improvement sounds trivial, nowhere near the size of the benefit from wearing a seatbelt. It gives a whole different perspective than "45 to 88 percent of brain injury can be prevented by a helmet".

And, that site pulls data from "multiple sources", not all of which may be legitimate, and appears to be a pro-helmet propaganda site.

And more than $5,000!

In style, anyway. We'll see what happens when people want to look into his affairs, or when they want a detailed accounting of the proposed $1 trillion Obama bailout.

edit: okay, those changes have some (mostly symbolic) substance to them. But there is not enough light in the world to illuminate all the caves in Mordor. I am not going to bet the house on the age of secrecy being over in Washington

edit edit: This is priceless. Rules without teeth, now that is change you can believe in!

"The Republican National Committee criticized that requirement and said the new administration was already violating it. Mr. Obama’s nominee for deputy secretary of defense, William Lynn, has been a lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, and his nominee for deputy secretary of health and human services, William V. Corr, lobbied for stricter tobacco regulations as an official with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, conceded the two nominees did not adhere to the new rules. But he said that Mr. Lynn had the support of Republicans and Democrats, and would receive a waiver under the policy, and that Mr.Corr did not need a waiver because he had agreed to recuse himself from tobacco issues.

“When you set very tough rules, you need to have a mechanism for the occasional exception,” this official said, adding, “We wanted to be really tough, but at the same time we didn’t want to hamstring the new administration or turn the town upside down.”"

So, could I embed it on my Facebook feed or in a blog like sharing a video? That sounds pretty cool.

Edit: Messes with my browser back button function. Not cool.

My sister can tell you how little a democratic voice matters from 18 years of getting outvoted by my brother and I. The Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Chinese in Malaysia, and the Sunnis in Iraq might also disagree with you about the legitimacy of mob-rules democracy.

I really don't see why people think they have some "input" in democratic decisions, other than decades of conditioning in schools run by a democratic government. Try submitting a story and getting it to the front page of Digg. You have approximately zero chance. Your influence over public policy is much, much smaller.

Once you realize that there are more than two choices for any given policy decision, in fact there are almost as many choices as there are people, then you realize how incredibly farcical your "democratic voice" is.

I still don't get what "nation" vs. "freedom" tells me.

Obama is smart enough to realize when he is veering into self-parody. Thus, the early campaign slogan of "hope" and "change" eventually gave way to "yes we can!" and other such rhetoric. He needed something fresh.

I would guess he briefly touches on the old slogans to give his supporters a familiar, comfortable feeling. But he will probably roll out a new slogan or two that he will really work and focus on (nothing this trite, but along the lines of "a new America"). These will be incorporated into the headlines tomorrow.

Has there ever been a President with such a mind for style?