| It's one of these weird things... |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|06:01 pm] |
There's this argument known as peak oil. It states that even as world consumption of oil increases, oil reserves fall, therefore, prices are always on an upward tangent.
Its complete nonsense. As years go by, oil recovery technology becomes more advanced, even as energy technology enables us to do more with less.
Why did this come up? Something very similar occurred with gold about 20 years ago. A new gold recovery technique was developed, and worldwide gold production damn near doubled overnight.
http://www.goldsheetlinks.com/production.htm
Two results... first, new players emerged upon the gold scene, much like shale oil has put Alberta on the world oil scene. Second...
South Africa is screwed. The decline in SA gold production is totally the fault of decaying infrastructure and failure to reinvest. SA mining has become the gold equivalent of Pemex.
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| Another one... |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|05:15 pm] |
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224813/The-state-pays-rent-homes-Britain.html?ITO=1490
And the analysis..
Holy mother of hades, have you seen how much you can get for housing allowance? I think I'm gonna move to London and stop working. Housing benefit is calculated as your "need" less "available" income. For example, if I moved to Havering, London, my "need" as a single adult over 25 is for a one-bedroom flat. That'd be L650/mo. If I had a kid, I could get child benefit, AND L195/mo more for a 2-bedroom. I could have income of L5250/yr and still get the max. Given my level of education, I could probably earn this income in under 16 hrs/wk of work, thus entitling me to jobseekers credit of an additional L5250/yr. The plan: Work for L5250 UI for L5250 Housing Benefit for L7800 Total support for sitting on my butt: L18300. That'd be ~$30,000. Tax free. For doing virtually nothing all day. Bye. I'll send you my address when I reach a London housing authority! |
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| You are about to witness the eighth! |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|05:14 pm] |
Anyway, I told K some time ago I needed to do this post.
Goddamn, I hate the movie Idiocracy.
Now, its funny. Sorta. But its nowhere near as cool as the movie Office Space, done by the same crew. And I've wondered why for a while, and in the process come up with some ideas on this...
Now since all ideas more or less hang from some extended worldview, it took me a while to figure out what my basic problem with Idiocracy. Then it came to me... goddamn, I hate liberals. My revulsion towards this movie is pretty much similar in psychic taste and smell to my revulsion towards liberals. I.E... that instinctive flinch every time someone uses the terms "social justice,' or "economic justice," or "communist" "socialist" "liberal" "progressive."
Let's start with the basic premise of the movie. The claim is that highly intelligent people are having fewer (or no) children, while irresponsible and stupid people (the titular idiots) are breeding left and right. First of all... as K pointed out in a recent post, (without thinking the rest of it through) science has failed to demonstrate that intelligence is hereditary. (related article) This is kinda a big thing for a movie whose central premise is that the children of illiterate, inbred drunken country folk are gonna be morons. In fact, this is something that was pretty definitively disproven about the same time Keynes was thoroughly debunked. Wait, crap, a new biography? ($!@$! I shit you not... my 85 year old grandmother sent me a newspaper article on the "new" keynesianism. God conspires against me!)
The reason it's still around? Because people can't get beyond the stone age idea that blood is destiny. It doesn't matter how many immigrants crawl into this country illiterate and without mastery of basic english, and then watch their children get doctorates. Stupid is forever! Compounding this error is the basic inability of the movie's writers to understand fundamental scientific concepts. Yep... stupidity in the movie is not only hereditary... it's a male dominant gene.
Look at the opening example of the process. A yuppie couple cant seem to find the time to have kids, then the husband dies. K.. first, anytime I see people this silly, I don't think "smart." I think "overeducated." But the message is clear... educated wealthy men have weak sperm and/or sex drives. (Yeah, I know I'm arguing from anecdote, a fundamental error in logic. They're jokes, fuck off!)
Contrasted with this... a stereotypical lower class trailer living sex obsessed male impregnating every female in the neighborhood.
Let me skip a bunch of snark. When looking at demographics, everyone with a clue (which would exclude the people who made this movie) looks just at women. Demographic growth is linked almost exclusively to either immigration or female fertility. In concentrating, almost exclusively through the movie, on how many children are linked to the male characters, the movie misses the fundamental point made wonderfully by a blogger... men are a breeding experiment run by women. Rita, the time traveler with "normal intelligence" has three children. The eight wives of the idiot vice president have a combined thirty two. The numbers we are supposed to compare are three to thirty two.. the patrilinear descent number. The real numbers are three to four, the average children per vp wife. (And note how the problem is expressed... not that the smart aren't having children, but that the stupid are having too many. Eugenics... the wet dream of elitists since well before Hitler.)
The title is "idiocracy." Which is to say, rule by the stupid. And the movie repeatedly tries to show the ruling powers in the future to be "idiots." Monster truck driving wrestlers who get elected by people who can't tell the difference between television and reality. So.. Frito, the idiot lawyer who becomes vice president, (personal motto.. "I like sex!".. cuz you know, only stupid people like sex...) goes from a loser alone in his apartment to being powerful, and having eight wives...
All of which means, while the men may be idiots, the women are still cleverly playing the power seeking sex games. Stupid women get impregnated by homeless guys. Smart women get impregnated by men of financial means. The example of an idiot from the start of the movie? His son ended up a football star bragging about how many cheerleaders he was going to have sex with. Um.. that's a male success story. At least in high school. I would've loved to have been that... "stupid."
Lets take the most nagging question. How the hell does this society function with so many stupid people in charge? Easy... the world is all but automated, and even professions like lawyers and doctors are nothing but glorified cashiers or walmart greeters. One dig... Frito got his law degree from Costco. ("Costco?" "Yeah I can't believe it either, but dad had some contacts and got me in!")
What the hell? An early story about the P.T. Barnum circus... they were doing a tour of europe, hit Germany, and freaked out the German High Command, who watched this small army pack and unpack from trains in the matter of a few hours instead of the days it took the military of the day... they immediately copied the techniques they saw, thus creating the german legend of efficiency and speed... outta the monster trucks/wrestling of the day.
Walmart is a technological wonder. I swear to god, you people need to understand how awesome things like McDonalds and Walmart are. Anything that knocks 10-30% off a grocery bill is a freaking miracle of science and organization. Walmart is currently doing more to help with affordable health care than all those idiots in congress. Walmart pioneered the same systems that make Whole Foods possible. And although I much prefer Whole Foods... props where props are concerned. Walmart is not run by idiots. The guy at the front that waves to you? HE'S NOT IN CHARGE.
Then there's the mcguffin, the stupid crop failure that is driving the political side of the second half of the movie. The problem? Due to add campaign and political corruption, crops are irrigated by a power drink rather than water. Power drinks contain electrolytes, a fancy word for salt. So.. the idiots have been salting their fields, and the fields no longer produce. The "smart guy" makes them use water, the day is saved. Except it isn't. Salt doesn't go away overnight. Watering a salted field wouldn't fix that problem. Its like shooting a guy with a gun instead of a hypo with medicine. After three bullets, if you switch to the penicillin... it aint gonna help at that point.
Um... modern agriculture is as complicated as modern supermarkets. The field is fertilized with chemicals from a mad scientist's lab (which require fairly intensive education to apply... there's a reason fertilizer is used in impromptu bombs), then planted with seeds developed by Dr. Frankenstein (tweaked continuously as new threats to crops develop). As a result... if we ever had a harvest of "biblical proportions," which is to say, if our harvest was ever equal to the most hyperbolic claims of milk and honey from the bible... it would be considered a disaster. If we had the same success in extending life expectancy, people would be living 4-5 thousand years. (Methuselah would be a piker.)
So the movie making fun of people not understanding agriculture... don't understand agriculture.
So whats going on here? They look at today's society.. see poor people, see walmart, see entertainment forms they don't understand, and say the world is going to hell. What's worse, these common people insist on having children, which everyone knows is a bad idea. This isn't a new argument. It happens every time the political elite loses touch with the people, and in the process, reality. Movie title implies that the problem isn't that world is filled with the stupid... its that the world is filled with the stupid, and the stupid don't realize how much they need a natural elite... determined by testing, the right connections, and an aversion to popular entertainment. That is until things go wrong and the elite are summoned back to fix things.
Sound familiar?
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| Shit you dont wanna hear... |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|06:37 am] |
"Damn, thats all the way in your scrotum. Deep, too."
My response...
"If it helps, I'm perfectly prepared to sign a form saying I only had one testicle when I came in."
Having to go to a hospital sucks. |
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| So its like this... |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|02:52 pm] |
I used to blog. Back when I was playing WoW. And I got into the habit of writing a lot, two-three times a week. Actually had something like a following.
And i would just dump links on this blog fer K to comment on.
Anyway, I've been outta world of warcraft fer a while now. But I'm kinda getting the urge to start writing again. So... I'm gonna post some crap from my old blog here while I work out what I wanna say.
Here's a review (kinda) of 30 days of night, a vamp movie from back in the day. Since its getting freaking cold here in VA again, earlier than normal.
So... I blew off Kimmu-sempai last weekend to farm honor via AV. Last night, she got back at me.
I had to go watch 30 Days of Night with her.
Damn, that was a scary movie. True, the ending was hokey, but well... a problem endemic to the genre, I'm afraid. Still... the theatre was cold, and I forgot my sweater. So... I watched a movie about vampires eating people in a frozen darkness, while sitting in frozen darkness. And drinking a 64oz diet coke.
I do not handle caffine well...
Needless to say, i was seriously freaked while walking home along a badly lit path, in the chill northern virgina night.
And... I take it back. Melvin really is an idiot. We were arguing over the value of resiliance... Melvin believes that it reduces all damage, not just crits and dots.
One harsh lesson on life I learned from working in a convienence store... you can put all the signs you want up, but it doesn't help unless you teach everyone to read first... Melvin can't be bothered to read the tooltips of his various class abilities. People can't be bothered to read the "STORE CLOSED, GO AWAY" signs.
So I went with Melvin to a movie a while back. I paid for for it. Melvin is one of those strange people who has problems with taking a favor... he wanted to pay his share. The only problem is... he can't be bothered to figure out what his fair share is.
You all know this phenomenon. You go out to eat with a buncha people... group ticket. Everyone figures out what they owe, put it in the center, and the group is always 20% short.
It takes a dictator... "Bob, you owe $15, John, kick in $13..." etc... to make it work out right. OR... well, I once did a meal with my japanese class... I made sure I was last so i could take up the slack... I ended up paying $45 for a $6 salad...
So Melvin tries to hand me $6 for the movie, which cost $10... and this pisses me off more than the time someone spit on me after I refused to sell them beer. Cuz either it's my treat, which I don't mind. Or you pay your share. But don't screw me over and then think you paid your way...
He watched me hand over the $20 for two tickets. He saw me not get change. He was holding the ticket that said "$10". And he still tried to give me $6.
He's not cheap. He's not poor. He simply can't be bothered to pay attention to what the hell's going on around him.
Unlike me... caffinated up, freezing, walking home in the dark, and trying not to think about how the vampires killed all those people.
Thanks a ton, Kim. |
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| Mixed feelings |
[Oct. 18th, 2009|02:51 pm] |
On the one hand, my section chief is at the saints game in new orleans.
On the other, hesa giants fan.
*MUST NOT INVOKE NEMESIS BY GLOATING TOO EARLY* |
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| Wow. |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|02:11 pm] |
It looks like america was a net exporter of steel last month, if one excludes certain classes (like semi-finished steel.)
First time in 50 years. |
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| So hypocritical... |
[Oct. 2nd, 2009|02:44 pm] |
I can just see the conversation between Letterman and his blackmailer...
"A very clever plan... clever indeed... you just made one mistake..."
"You honestly thought I had a sense of shame."
So ah... whats the take on Polanski? Me... I wonder who the hell he thinks he is... it's not like he's a kennedy or anything. |
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| Heal it up... |
[Sep. 28th, 2009|02:43 pm] |
Conversation from work on health reform...
http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2005/obgyn.htm
It's like this. There are about 2086 work hours in the year.
If malpractice insurance is around $200,000... then the overhead for a doctor's office that keeps typical hours is about $100. Per hour. Before anything else. Staff, building, utilities (haz disposal services!)
By contrast... drew knows a pathologist (specs in biopsies and autopsies) who was quoted a $65,000 rate for malpractice insurance in Alaska. Thats not much less. |
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| Just to annoy people... |
[Sep. 27th, 2009|04:03 pm] |
Everyone else posted some tunes a coupla weeks ago.. so here's my contribution...
9 Crimes by Damien Rice... should be "M" safe.
Burn My Shadow from War Crimes by Unkle. Def not "M" safe.
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 27th, 2009|12:41 pm] |
Note to pizza place.
Make goddamn sure the person answering your phone can speak english.
I'm just saying.
OTOH, in Canada... they have "press 2 for french." And a lot of anglos do. Cuz otherwise, the service call gets routed to India. All the french speakers are Quebecois, and bilingual. Also, there is apparently a lower wait time... |
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| But he aint gonna die... |
[Sep. 25th, 2009|03:15 pm] |
Why Michael Yon kicks ass...
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/bullshit-bob.htm
I had a specific incident with this British Media Ops Major.
The Major and I were driving in Camp Bastion around midday when it was very hot. A British soldier ran by wearing a rucksack. He was drenched in sweat under the blazing, dusty desert. I smiled because it’s great to see so many soldiers who work and train hard. Yet the Major cut fun at the soldier, saying he was dumb to be running in that heat. I nearly growled at the Major, but instead asked if he ever goes into combat. The answer was no. And, in fact, the Major does not leave the safety of Camp Bastion.
That a military officer would share a foul word about a combat soldier who was prepping for battle was offensive. Especially an officer who lives in an air-conditioned tent with a refrigerator stocked with chilled soft drinks. Just outside his tent are nice hot and cold showers. Five minutes away is a little Pizza Hut trailer, a coffee shop, stores, and a cookhouse. |
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