Half Sigma

Rudy Giuliani will be the next President of the United States

I have become convinced, in part by Dick Morris, that Rudy Giuliani will be the next President of the United States.

Every pundit "knows" that Giuliani can't win the Republican nomination because he's pro-abortion. I fell for this same line of thinking myself, but now I realize it was wrong. Sure, it's a hurdle, but with Giuliani way out in front, and McCain falling behind, Rudy looks like he's home free.

The majority of both parties are moderate. Most Republicans are slightly right of center and most Democrats are slightly left of center. The idealogical hardcore may have disproportionate influence at the leadership level, but they aren't the majority of voters. Maybe one third of Republicans won't vote for Rudy, but that third will split their vote between too many other candidates. The moderate Republicans will love Rudy's charisma. He's the hero of 9/11 and America's Mayor.

Mitt Romney won't capture the religious voters because evangelical Christians don't want to vote for a guy who believes that God is an alien from another planet.

I still support Newt, and indeed Newt is rising in the polls and may soon be in second place behind Giuliani. I correctly predicted that Newt was the only real conservative who had a chance of winning.

I still think that Sam Brownback will rise in the polls before this is over, but perhaps so will Mike Huckabee. One of them has to drop out because they are clones of each other who will just steal each others' votes.

In a matchup against Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani will win easily. And indeed, this is one reason why Rudy will win the nomination. What do conservatives hate most? Hillary Clinton as president. Hillary Clinton's likely nomination on the Democratic side will cause Republicans to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat her because they'd rather have a pro-abortion Republican. At least Giuliani says he opposes gay marriage and that he will appoint judges like Alito and Roberts. Newt Gingrich, who will rise as the alternative to the right of Rudy, will be deemed a risk in the general election.

This sure does make things interesting. Rudy will steal votes away from the smart half of the Democratic Party, reversing the trend of the past few election in which high IQ voters have been defecting from the Republican Party.

Contractors ripping off the government

NY Times article about government contracting:

In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.

My take on this topic is that the government is being massively ripped off by contractors.

I remember reading back during the 2000 election that Clinton reduced the government workforce. I thought, "How could that possibly be? Clinton's a big government Democrat." Then I worked for a government contractor, and I saw the government offices where 95% of the people working there were actually contractors and not government employees. The reduction of the government workforce was bogus.

I'm all in favor of privatization, but government functions are not really being privatized, people working at the government offices are just having their salaries paid by a third party instead of Uncle Sam. But what a premium the third parties are getting for the service of providing a semi-permanent workforce. The example from the NY Times article is probably pretty standard. CACI is probably paying the workers total compensation of half of the $104/hr they are billing the government. Of that the workers probably see about $90,000/year.

CACI would say that for the extra $100,000/year or so per employee the government is getting free management services, but as far as I can tell, based on my actual experience working for government contractors, 90% of the managers' time is spent trying to sell additional services to the government. So the government is paying this big premium for the purpose of getting a lot of sales pitches.

Why do agencies like being ripped off by contractors? It was never clear to me, but I think that there is strong pressure from the top to use contractors instead of increasing staff. And the way the salary structure is set by the government, managers are prevented from paying market values for employees. So certain skillsets are unavailable at the General Service Schedule rates. Only managers get paid GS14 or higher salaries, and GS15 salaries are pretty rare, only paid to a senior manager in charge of dozens of people, so don't be fooled into thinking that the GS14 salaries are available to a new employee. They aren't. On the other hand, you also have government employees with better salaries than they'd ever get working for a private company. This is what happens what salareis are set by bureaucrats rather than the market.

Government contractors are also free to fire their employees, something that government managers are highly constrained from doing. Incompetent employees who don't do any work get to hang around because it's too difficult to fire them.

Some other points from the article:

The most secret and politically delicate government jobs, like intelligence collection and budget preparation, are increasingly contracted out ...

I don't believe this matters at all. The same person becomes no more honest or loyal to his country just because his paycheck comes directly from the government.

The most successful contractors are not necessarily those doing the best work, but those who have mastered the special skill of selling to Uncle Sam.

Absolutely true, but of course this applies equally to the private sector. It's always better to have the best marketing than it is to have the best or least expensive product.

Rudy pulling ahead

A few days ago I said that Rudy Giuliani had no chance of winning the Republican nomination, but maybe I was wrong. Interesting analysis at FrontPage about how Rudy is pulling ahead.

In any event McCain look like he's falling behind, so if there's going to be a challenger to Rudy it's going to be Mitt who wears the Mormon underwear, Newt, or one of the Christian guys like Sam Brownback. What a weird race it's turning into for the Republicans.

Manhattan, part I

This post is about Manhattan the Woody Allen movie. It's Woody Allen's greatest movie, and it's such a big topic that I could never do it justice in a single blog post. So maybe one day I'll finish writing about it.

The movie begins in Elaine's, a famous restaurant in New York which was also mentioned in the Billy Joel song "Big Shot." Isaac (Woody Allen) is at dinner with his girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway) and his friend Yale and his wife Emily. Tracy shyly excuses herself from the table, which gives Isaac the opportunity to explain the premise of the movie.

ISAAC: She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father. Do you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father. That's the first time that phenomenon ever occurred in my life.

It should be noted that Woody allen is really 43 when this movie is filmed and not 42. It's Woody Allen's vanity that he thinks he can pass for 42.

The first thing you think of when you hear about Tracy's age is statutory rape! But the age of consent in New York is 17 and not 18. So Isaac isn't violating any laws. He's just incredibly lucky that a beautiful high school student would actually be interested in him, a whiny middle-aged omega male. Well, at least he looks like someone who would be an omega male in real life, but in the movie Isaac is somehow an alpha male who has two girlfriends at the same time: Tracy, who's 25 (or 26) years his junior, and Mary (Diane Keaton) who's 10 years his junior (based on their real life ages). Mary's not a high school student, but I think that someone like Woody Allen in the real world would be pretty lucky to have an attractive 33-year-old girlfriend.

Despite this portrayal of a sexual relationship between a middle aged man and a high school girl, Woody Allen somehow he escapes the vitriol directed at other older men, such as Rick Rosner, who sleep with high school aged girls. (And it's not even known for a fact that Rick had sex with any high school girls, but that hasn't stopped some commenters from being very angry at him.)

I also profess befuddlement over the the second part of Isaac's line. That he could beat up Tracy's father. Of course he's referring to an innocent time of early childhood when being older than someone meant you could probably beat them up. But still, not only is it out of place here, I keep thinking that not only couldn't Woody beat up Tracy's father, he couldn't beat up Tracy. I'm not just saying that to be cute. Mariel Hemmingway is taller than Woody Allen and looks pretty athletic--she played an olympic athlete three years later in the movie Personal Best. If they got into a fight, I really think that Woody would lose. This fact makes their relationship even more unlikely. As Bridget stated, women want a man to make them feel small. Are there really any tall athletic high school girls who dream about shorter whiny self-deprecating neurotic but intellectual and witty middle aged men?

Oh well, let's skip ahead a few minutes. Yale is home with his wife Emily.

EMILY: Yale? You ever thought any more about having kids?

YALE [whiny, but not quite as whiny as Woody Allen]: Oh god. Kids. Listen, I've gotta get this O'Neill book finished, it's never gonna get done. I've gotta get the money together to get this magazine started. Kids. [audible sigh]

EMILY: Well we always talk about getting a place in Connecticut. You could do it there.

YALE [still whiny]: Connecticut. I can't go to Connecticut. It's not practical. My stuff's here. [laugh] It [inaudible] here. It's just the wrong time. What about Isaac? We can't abandon him. You know he can't function anywhere other than New York, you know that.

For some reason, the thought of someone who can't function anywhere other than New York is hilarious. I'm not sure why, but it is.

The rest of the scene is the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy. Idiocracy is the movie about how an average man finds himself five hundred years in the future and he is now the smartest man on the planet because none of the smart people had any children. My favorite blogger, Steve Sailer, seems to think Mike Judge is brilliant for portraying the scene at the beginning of Idiocracy showing a smart couple who put off having children. But it's not really brilliant at all, Mike Judge stole the scene from Manhattan. The original scene from Manhattan is far better because (1) the line at the end is funny and there was absolutely nothing funny about Idiocracy; and (2) Woody Allen isn't trying to make any politically incorrect point about dysgenic breeding, he's just trying to accurately portray an intelligent and neurotic Manhattan couple. The fact that it demonstrates the birthrate gap between the intelligent and the unintelligent is entirely accidental.

This exchange between Yale and Emily also brings up the theme of children in the city. Emily thinks that maybe, if they moved to Connecticut, Yale would want to have a baby. Does city living discourage people from having children? Is that why people have more children in the red states?

Woody Allen (as Isaac) on Jewish mothers:

Years ago I wrote a story about my mother called "The Castrating Zionist."

Mary (Diane Keaton) bragging about her attractiveness:

I could go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT if I wanted to.

Does any woman really want to go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT? Does the faculty of MIT know about this?

Tracy to Isaac:

Let's do it some strange way that you've always wanted to do it but no one wanted to do it with you.

Isn't it every middle aged man's dream to have a 17 year old girl say that to him? But Isaac's stupid response will have to be left to the subject of a future post.

The Rick Rosner story

A commenter posted about Rick Rosner. Yes, I went and watched the whole interview, and you can watch it yourself at this link. Just start with the "Rick Rosner (smart dude)" clip, and then watch parts 2 through 7. And do be quick about it, because You Tube has an annoying policy of deleting copyrighted clips.

The story about Rick Rosner and and the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is a relatively boring storyline, and it makes it hard to sympathize with poor Rick because he was clearly wrong. If you have a multiple choice question with four answers, you are obviously expected to pick the best answer and Rick didn't. Yet this shows the sadness of Rick's story. A guy with an IQ of 180+ ought to be a millionaire on his own without having to go on a TV game show.

Some people will no doubt gleefully point to Rick and say "ah ha, the guy is so smart yet a loser, this proves that IQ is worthless." But my take on it is that Rick is an example of how society fails children who are geniuses. Genius children who grow up in blue collar backgrounds seem to be a high risk for bad outcomes in life. And that seems to be what happened with Rick.

Like many boys with genius IQs, Rick became obsessed with girls and his inability to get a girlfriend. Rick would have gladly traded away his genius IQ in order to be a popular jock with a hot cheerleader girlfriend. This reminds me of the book Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix, in which the author, a brilliant scientist who helped discover the secrets of DNA, writes about how he was a loser with women. (I haven't actually read the book, but the reviews really pan it.)

And then we come to the most intriguing part of the Rick Rosner story, how he kept repeating his senior year of high school, in various high schools, because he wanted to go back and do it right. Rick has correctly observed that high school is it's own indepedent little society completely separated from the real world. The rules of status are different than the rules of status in the real world. They only seem to be related because the people who are high status in high school absorb certain character traits that benefit them in the real world status game.

The full details of Rick's many journeys through high school are missing, but apparently it took him many tries to do high school right. The first time he repeated his senior year he was still a loser, so he kept doing it again.

At the time of the interview, Rick is married and has a six year old daughter, and he seems pretty normal except for his obsession with getting another chance to redeem himself on the TV game show. So maybe by repeating high school many times over he wound up being better off than what happened to childhood genius Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Nevertheless, it's sad that instead of becoming a great scientist or business leader he winds up being nothing but a bouncer.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.

So says the Woody Allen character in the 1989 movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. Unlike most other Woody Allen movies I've seen, in this one Woody Allen plays the loser. This is perhaps why I liked the movie so much. Woody Allen is much more believable as a loser than as a winner who gets to sleep with hot high school babes.

All the characters in the movie seem to be Jewish, but unlike most other Woody Allen movies the Judaism is more overt, with one of the characters being a Rabbi and with many flashbacks to childhood Jewish indoctrination. And there's a lot of guilt, which is the essence of Judaism, isn't it?

Unlike most Woody Allen movies, this one actually has a plot. Two plots rather--the movie alternates between the Woody Allen character's story and the Martin Landau character's story. So don't read the rest of this if you want to enjoy seeing the movie for the first time.

Today in the NY Times

From the New York Times:

Some blacks argue that Senator Barack Obama is distant from the struggles and identities of most black Americans.

The same could be said of any white candidate. "Hillary Clinton is distant from the struggles and identities of most white Americans." I guess the difference is that Hillary isn't saying "vote for me because I'm white."

Perhaps, in the future, when whites are no longer the majority race, white candidates will indeed appeal to whites to vote for them out of shared racial identity.

* * *

The U.N. report on global warming is prominent on the NY Times website. So it's pretty convenient that I was already writing about this topic this week.

I'm skeptical about global warming because if people were truly concerned about it then they'd promote (1) nuclear power; and (2) engineering projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Instead they just say "bad Americans, you drive too much."

So global warming just seems like a pseudo-scientific way for people who hate America to vent against our culture.

Who says you can't go back to junior high school?

This story is pretty amazing. Ignoring the whole sex offender stuff, I think it's amazing that a 29 year old man could get away with pretending to be a 12-year-old boy.

“He absolutely looked age-appropriate,” said Rhonda Cagle, a spokeswoman for Imagine Charter School, of Mr. Rodreick, who is listed on the Oklahoma Department of Corrections Web site as 5 feet 8 inches tall and 120 pounds. “We have several seventh-grade students who are taller and of a larger build than this individual.”

Joe Biden lol

In my previous post on the Democratic side of 2008, a commenter complained:

What about Biden? Of all the Democratic contenders, he is one of the few who can actually explain his beliefs without a scripting coach and stick with it.

Well, today's news story validates my leaving him off the Democratic short list. It looks like Joe Biden's announcement of his candidacy has helped Barack Obama more than it did his own candidacy. As Christine Bork observered:

[Biden's] plain spokeness and unguarded honesty are no longer acceptable in our teflon mickey mouse platitude mumbling culture.