Half Sigma

Geek tip -- buy laptop with Windows XP

Shopping for a notebook computer, I discovered that all of the notebooks sold in stores now come with Windows Vista. The problem is that Vista is a huge bloated resource hog, which creates two problems unique to laptops. The first is that laptops, especially the small and light ones, sacrifice raw computing power for size, and they are just too underpowered to run Vista. The second is that, even if your notebook computer can handle it, Vista will use up the battery faster and cause the fan to stay on more often.

What's the purpose of Vista, anyway, when the old operating system works better? (Obviously, the real purpose is for Microsoft to make money on lemmings who buy "upgrades" to Vista.)

I just ordered a Sony TXN15P/B, the last model in the TX series to still come with XP. Buy one while supplies last.

Should you get your 8 to 12-year-old a cell phone?

According to the NY Times, "6.6 million of the 20 million American children in that age range had cellphones by the end of 2006."

It's my opinion that if all the other kids have cell phones, then you need to get one for your kids also, or move to a neighborhood where the other parents are poor.

Tween status contests are practice for real world adult status contests. If you don't buy your kid a cell phone today then he's more likely to wind up as an underemployed loser when he's an adult. I bet Rick Rosner's parents didn't buy him what the other kids had.

Video games conquer "retirees"

Older people are playing video and computer games.

When I read the title, "Video Games Conquer Another World: Retirees," I immediately thought "World of Warcraft." But it turns out they are playing some game called "Bejeweled" which seems sort of like Tetris.

I can see the appeal of World of Warcraft because you can become the Big Man or Woman on the server, even though you may be a nobody in real life. Bejeweled seems pretty pointless.

I'd rather play cards. My grandparents spent a lot of time playing cards. Seniors don't play cards anymore?

Why people stay single so long

From the NY Times (and this is currently the #1 most emailed article):

Ms. Armbrister met a man online through Yahoo and after a month and a half of e-mailing they had dinner. It went well: The man, who was 29, owned a business, he did not ask Ms. Armbrister to pay for her own meal or try to borrow money. On the second date, they stopped by his house to pick up an umbrella. The house had belonged to his mother, who had died five years earlier. The plastic-covered gold sofas and the heavy gold tasseled lamps suggested to Ms. Armbrister that her date had not redecorated — never a sign of an enterprising personality. But the deal breaker came when she saw his room.

“We walked up three flights of stars to the attic,” she says. “It looked like a teenager’s room. The computer was up there and the twin bed, his clothes were all over the floor. I was like, uuuuuh-huuuuh. He didn’t even seem sorry that he lived in a 12-year-old boy’s room, this was like normal behavior. It said to me, this person is not grown up yet. It was frightening. He’s lived his whole life in the attic.”

Penn and NYU move up in the law school rankings

The new USNWR law school rankings have been leaked.

Penn is now tied for 6th place with Chicago. This is really big. For a long time, Columbia, NYU, and Chicago have comprised the bottom three schools of the Top 6, but now Penn joins into the Top 7.

I find it odd that NYU's law school moved ahead of Columbia. How is it that an institution whose undergraduate school was considered a "safety school" back when I was applying to college is able to have such a highly ranked law school? (Part of it has to do with geography. Manhattan is the nation's biggest legal market.)

What remains immutable is that the same Top 14 schools always remain in the Top 14.

The death of the generalist software developer

This is my first major followup to my post on why a career in computer programming sucks. It probably won't be of much interest to this blog's regular readers who come her to read my articles on economics, politics, evolutionary psychology, and social class.

IQ and the collective consciousness

Jewish Atheist has been on a roll when it comes to giving me stuff to blog about. Here is his recent noteworthy comment:

By that definition of hypocrisy, almost everyone on earth is a hypocrite. Consider the overwhelming majority of Americans who hold absurdly stupid views about religion. Denial is a very powerful thing and it afflicts the smart as well as the dumb. As for education, most people simply do not know about the importance of IQ, not necessarily out of denial, but because it's a relatively young field that hasn't yet made significant inroads into the collective consciousness.

For example, it never occurred to me personally that there could be such a wide gulf between average IQs among races. When The Bell Curve came out, I assumed it was a crock without reading it because it was so roundly dismissed by almost everyone. I can't go investigate every maverick's thesis or I'd be able to do nothing with my life but study cold fusion, alternative causes to AIDS, cars that run on water, thinking cures to cancer, bizarre theories about Jesus's descendants, etc.

It was only through these blogs that I started to do research to defend my beliefs about IQ and race when I realized that they were not true. (It was specifically the APA's agreement that the correlation exists and matters that convinced me. I'd had no idea.)

So my point is that you shouldn't assume people know the things you do, especially when said thing is disbelieved by a majority of the population including most of the elite. Sometimes, we really just don't know.

(I'm pretty impressed that Jewish Atheist can write such a long comment without any apparent spelling or grammatical errors. Wow!)

Jewish Atheist is correct when he writes that the importance of IQ is not part of the "collective consciousness," although he is incorrect about the reason. He says that IQ is a young field. Actually, the study of IQ goes back more than a hundred years, making it an older field than scientific endeavors we take for granted such as nuclear power, penicillin, or space travel.

A hundred years ago, if you had asked an educated person if some people were born smarter than others, he would have said, "of course." And you if you had asked him if blacks were typically not as smart as whites, he would have also said, "of course." So what has happened is that the fact of differences in intelligence has been purged from the public consciousness. If something which is true is somehow eradicated from the public consciousness, it can only happen by a deliberate conspiracy.

If you would ask someone today why an educated person from a hundred years ago would have these politically incorrect thoughts about intelligence, the typical response would be, "Back then we were scientifically ignorant. But today we know the truth." This is somewhat ironic because there is no body of research disproving the original theory. The more the issue is studied, the more evidence there is that the person from a hundred years ago had it right.

Whether a person is amenable to even contemplating the truth about intelligence has a lot to do with his political persuasion. Conservatives are more likely to accept this as true. But some conservatives, such as George W. Bush, have completely bought into the standard liberal argument that there are no racial differences in intelligence. His No Child Left Behind program would be very good public policy if the politically correct view of racial differences were true.

The people most amenable to understanding the truth about intelligence are the real racists such as the White Power people, the Skinheads, the Neo-Nazis, etc. These guys already hate blacks, so any evidence that blacks are mentally inferior to whites is taken up not with skepticism but rather with glee. This creates the unfortunate situation where these white trash types are the only ones who are publicly stating the truth. This situation simultaneously gives these groups more power because they are the only groups who are publicly proclaiming this hidden truth, and it also tends to taint the whole field of study making it even less likely that regular non-racist people will believe it.

But I have to wonder about what the hard core leftists believe. As I said before, I find it hard to fathom that something which is true and which everyone took for granted was somehow erased from the collective consciousness. This implies the work of a leftist conspiracy. The same conspiracy which is in operation today and which actively seeks to suppress any politically correct talk of differences in intelligence. If the leftists truly believed that there were no differences in intelligence, they would actively support scientific study in this area in order to prove they are right. Instead, they vehemently try to suppress any such study.

But returning to Jewish Atheist's comment, he is correct that the typical moderate liberal, the type who lives in Manhattan, votes Democratic, and makes a lot of money, has bought into the notion that the races are equal and therefore he believes it's possible to have a public school system which includes minority students but which he could also send his own children to. He probably hasn't given much thought to the issue and it's easy for him to believe what he's supposed to believe. But it still doesn't make him less of a hypocrite for preaching the benefits of "diversity" yet making sure his own kids attend a private schools that's predominately white (with just enough token minorities to assuage his guilt).

Children, day care, and disruptive behavior

The NY Times reports on a study which shows that "keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade."

I found the following from the article intriguing:

And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

I would certainly expect that genes would have a strong influence on how children behave, but I would not expect that a reporter from the NY Times would expect that! I certainly wish that more could be said about how genes influence children's behavior. And does this vary by race? Is one race, because of genes, predisposed to better or worse behavior?

Going back to the issue of daycare, I can buy the following explanation:

The study was not designed to explain why time in day care could lead to more disruptive behavior later on. The authors and other experts argue that preschool peer groups probably influence children in different ways from one-on-one attention. In large groups of youngsters, disruption can be as contagious as silliness, studies have found, while children can be calmed by just the sight of their own mother.

I am sure that adults are a positive influence on children. When children spend too much time with other children, there's a Lord of the Flies effect.

"Conservative" types will use this study to say, "Ah ha! The traditional way of life where the mother stays home is better for children."

But I'm not really so happy about that, because as a feminist, I understand that staying home with children will ruin a woman's chances of ever accomplishing anything professionally.

Public schools and Manhattan

The reason why the public schools in Manhattan will never be acceptable places for affluent white kids is that throughout the city there are pocket housing projects. Only in school districts free from this scourge can there be a quality public school.

Manhattan baby boom

This story caught me by surprise. Manhattan is having a baby boom. White children under the age of five increased by 40% from 2000 to 2005. "For the first time since at least the 1960s, white children now outnumber either black or Hispanic youngsters in that age group in Manhattan."

Maybe this explains why housing is so unaffordable? Couples who used to move out in order to have children are staying here and increasing the demand for housing.

How much money do you need to properly raise a white kid in Manhattan? "The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005."

In order to give the kid his own bedroom and a private school education, you need a lot of money. One father says, "Even though philosophically and politically I believe all public education should be of equal quality and wish that my kids could go to the public school...." End result, only private school is acceptable for his precious white kids.

Says one mother:

“I like them to see the variety of what’s in New York and have interactions with different kinds of people,” Ms. Lustig said. “If we lived in the suburbs, I don’t think my daughter would know much about the Trinidadian way of life or the Muslim holidays that are celebrated. She accepts that like it’s water or air.”

This diversity praised by Jessica Lustig is only good so long as the children don't have to attend the same public school with it.

Is it possible that there could one day be so many wealthy white kids here that they would overwhelm the poor minority kids and, once again, make the public schools safe for whites? I doubt it. Throughout Manhattan there are housing projects, each one a source of poor minority kids for the local school. Unless the housing projects are demolished, the public schools will remain bad and not suitable for rich white kids.

Do women like men who like football

This is not a topic I'd normally write about, but my readers seem to think it's very important. Since I recommended selling all oil and gas stocks, the sector has been in a raging bull, causing me to lose all kinds of money. So maybe I don't have anything else worthy to write about anyway and I may as well write about this.

A few years ago I overheard a cute woman in her twenties telling another how she dated some guy, but he didn't like football, and she found this a big turnoff. So for those who say that women don't ever care about this, there's some proof that at least one does. And she was very cute too.

Not liking football would obviously be big a big turn-off for women who do like football, because such women would obviously see watching football with their significant other to be an important activity.

One might suppose that the more typical woman, who doesn't watch football herself, would prefer a man who also doesn't like football, because she doesn't want to hear his boring football talk, and she doesn't want to lose him to the television on Sunday afternoons.

On the other hand, liking football is a sign of a normal healthy American male, the kind of men that women prefer over oddball strange men who don't like football. Non-football liking women might even think they'd prefer it if their significant other wasn't a football fan, but deep down on a more subconscious level they might be turned off by the sign of non-conformity. Because women are big fans of conformity, more so than men. This is why women are slaves to wearing the same brands of clothes as other women, why women are more likely to be religious, and why women are a lot less likely to be members of any sort of oddball movement (for example the Libertarian party).

Is Ilkka Kokkarinen back?

There's a new blog which claims to be authored by him.

No toilet paper

In order to maintain an environmentally "no impact" lifestyle, this nut is forgoing the use of toilet paper.

Yuck.

This makes me wonder what the world was like before toilet paper was invented.

StudentLoanJustice.org

I am putting in a plug for the website StudentLoanJustice.org, which seems to be a lobbying effort to reform student loan laws in order to protect the victims of student loan injustice.

Most other types of borrowers are protected from injustice by the bankruptcy laws. Student loan borrowers have no such protection.

While it's fine to quote statistics that the average college graduate earns more money than the average non-graduate, averages tend to hide the fact that many college graduates aren't better off than non-graduates, and it's also true that people who drop out of college tend to have no better career prospects than those who never went at all yet they can still rack up a lot of student loan debt.

I am personally in favor of allowing student loan borrowers to file for bankruptcy just like all other borrowers, but the StudentLoanJustice.org people are pushing for the much more modest goal of fair interest rates and penalties. (Under any other borrowing situation, outrageous interest rates and penalties would simply result in a bankruptcy.)

Reading through the testimonials, one can't help but notice that many of the people were screwed over by law school.

Long live Fortran

John W. Backus, the man who created Fortan, is dead.

The NY Times obituary has a fascinating account of how Fortran came about.

First of all, I can't help but note that John Backus has a Bill Gates-like background. He came from a well off family and dropped out of the University of Virginia. But unlike Bill Gates who worked for himself, John Backus wound up working for IBM (after a detour in the U.S. Army and at Columbia University), so instead of being rich and famous he just disappeared into obscurity. I remember Fortran but I never heard of John Backus until today.

Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.

“They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills — bridge players, chess players, even women,” Lois Haibt, the Vassar graduate, recalled in an interview in 2000.

Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.

Backus violated all the rules of software development followed today. There were no project managers, requirements documents or CMM Level 5 processes. He just gathered together a bunch of young and very smart people, many who seemed to have absolutely no experience with computers, and they just hacked out Fortran, one of the most successful accomplishments ever in the field of computer programming.

One thing that hasn't changed is that the best hackers are young. Everyone on the Fortran team was in their twenties and thirties. This is one of the reasons why computer programming is a bad long-term career.

Finally, I will close this with a geeky thought: it's too bad that simple languages like Fortran were thrown out and replaced with bloated object oriented crap like Java.

Girls who lift weights

Given the popularity of my post on girls who wrestle, how can I resist commenting on the latest girls' sports article from the NY Times: girls who do competitive olympic-style weightlifting.

Unlike wrestling, this sport doesn't involve physical contact between the sexes, and therefore it ought to be less controversial.

And unlike football, there's less risk of brain injury or death. Although I wonder if lifting extreme weight, beyond what the human body is designed to handle, is really so healthy for either sex.

At that moment on a recent Saturday, Jessica Reynolds, 17 and weighing in at 261 pounds, broke the state record for girls’ weightlifting ...

Damn, that's a big girl.

Being as old as I am, I'm not supposed to notice that the blonde girl in the photo looks cute, or that there are several cute weightlifting girls in the video.

The photographer who did the shoot has more photos here (but unfortunately he was trying too hard to be artsy--some basic portrait shots would have been appreciated).

[The broken links in this post have been fixed.]

Buying with help from mom and dad

Another article in the New York Times about how parents pay for their children to live in Manhattan and trendy areas of Brooklyn. As long as the NY Times keeps printing these types of articles, I will blog about them!

The emphasis here is on the pyschological problems caused by this, and the fact that parents often use their financial leverage to control their children's lives.

More buyers are turning to therapists to help them work through how they feel about depending financially on their parents when they have carved out independent careers and lives. Dr. Richard Shadick, a Manhattan psychologist who works mainly with 20- and 30-something New Yorkers, said that “a good portion” of his cases focus on the problems of seeking financial help from parents to pay for housing.

Who knew that therapists specialized in this?

Should parents be taking advantage of the high cost of real estate to exert this power? Maybe some parents are happy that they can still run their childrens' lives. The children don't have much of a choice if they want to live in Manhattan, and I bet their parents aren't encouraging them to move to cheap places like Oklahoma City.

Marilyn Kane, who has run Butler Kane Commercial Real Estate in Manhattan with a partner for 17 years, offered to help her 26-year-old son buy a $500,000 one-bedroom co-op in Murray Hill.

The son, who has a different last name, asked not to be identified because he did not want his co-workers to know how much his mother had helped him.

Because of the taboo against talking about money, and because people keep these financial arrangements hidden, many people don't realize how extensive this is.

* * *

Russ makes a good point in the comments belows:

Look at anywhere in the rest of the world, people live with their extended families. The American nuclear family where a husband and wife solely take care of the expenses is a post WWII hiccup.

I think the general history of mankind is that there weren't enough resources available for young people to leave their parents. Extended families provided a pooling of resources and a safety net (prior to government safety nets) that were necessary for survival. In Europe, I believe it is still more the norm for parents to support their adult children in their twenties (and someone with more knowledge of European lifestyles may comment on this).

I think there were two hiccups in America that are unique. During the 1800's, the government was giving land away for free to anyone who would settle on it. And an 18-year-old can farm as well, or more likely a lot better, than a 40-year-old. The frontier provided a means for young people to make it on their own, and this established an American tradition.

Post WWII was a time of booming prosperity and a recently created government safety net which made the extended family safety net no longer necessary. It was also a time when young people seemed to be able to earn as much as their parents. When people were working in factories, an older worker wasn't necessarily more productive than a younger worker.

But today, there is no frontier, and there is now a huge differential between what a young person makes and what his parents make (because of the increasing importance of human capital, and there is even a bigger differential in total wealth because the older generation has benefited from the huge asset appreciation of the last fifteen years.

For families with money, it's actually a lot less of a sacrifice to give a child a $900,000 house than it was just to raise children at all back in the days of the Great Depression when there was a real danger of being forced out on the streets.

The trend for parents to give more financial support to their adult children is more of a return to what has been normal throughout human history rather than some radically new and uncharted territory.

Government says that any moron can become a millionaire

From the WSJ Wealth blog, we see that the SEC has proposed revising the rules regarding how much wealth one needs to be an "accredited investor," in other words one who is allowed to invest in private investment pools. The proposal calls for raising the net worth requirement from $1 million to $2.5 million.

The theory behind the requirement is that people worth at least a certain amount of money have the sophistication necessary not to be ripped off by the unscrupulous. But the SEC has determined that these days, a million dollars means crap, and even morons who are incapable of evaluating a private investment are now worth a million dollars.

Sell all oil and natural gas stocks

I've been bullish on oil and natural gas stocks since 2000. That's seven consecutive years. But today I sold it all.

Tisha B'Av and the New York Bar

The Board is aware that the first day of the July 2007 bar examination conflicts with the religious holiday of Tisha B’av. The Board has determined that any applicant who requires a modification of the dates of the July 2007 bar examination, because they observe the religious holiday of Tisha B’av, will take the bar exam on Wednesday and Thursday, July 25 and 26, 2007. ... To request an accommodation for Tisha B’av, observant applicants must ... download and mail to the Board offices no later than June 1, 2007 the Tisha B’av Affidavit together with a letter on official stationary from the applicant's Rabbi confirming that his or her religious belief required their observance of Tisha B'av and precludes him or her from taking the New York State bar examination on Tuesday, July 24, 2007.

For some reason I found that funny.

Should people with weird religious beliefs be accomodated in this manner? I was raised Jewish yet I had no clue what "Tisha B'Av" even is until I looked it up on the internet.

There's also a great deal of irony here, because Tisha B'Av is a day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple (twice) and thus the loss of the original Jewish state. So, by preferring to mourn and fast instead of taking the bar exam, the Jew says "I would rather obsess over the failures of my ancestors rather than take positive action to become an officer of the courts of the state of New York."

Furthermore, if Tisha B'Av is anything like the horrible Yom Kippur "holiday" that my parents made me observe when I was younger, I would much prefer to take a six hour exam.

Football is bad for the brain

It seems that an unusually large number of ex-football players have dementia. It often happens as early as an ex-player's fifties, but in some cases even earlier.

In January, a neuropathologist who examined the brain of Andre Waters, the former Philadelphia Eagles player who committed suicide last fall at 44, said that repeated concussions had led to Mr. Waters’s brain tissue resembling that of an 80-year-old with Alzheimer’s disease. And last month, the doctors of the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, 34, said he was exhibiting the depression and memory lapses associated with oncoming Alzheimer’s.

I can buy into the idea that being banged on the head and knocked out is bad for the brain's long-term health.

It's interesting how our supposedly civilized and modern society is in love with this barbaric sport. (Although it's not quite as barbaric as boxing, neither is boxing as popular as football.)

Response to dumb comments

Here are my responses to some of the dumber things written in response to my post on why a career in computer programming sucks. (Yes, I can milk that one post for a lot of blog material.)

Who wants to be a billionaire?

One commenter to my post on why a career in computer programming sucks wrote:

But how many billionaire attorneys can you name? How many rank above Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Sergey and Larry, etc. etc. in any list of income, net worth, or name recognition?

I should begin by pointing out that no one will pay you a billionaire's salary for doing actual work in either computer programming or law. The billionaires mentioned are people who were once programmers but who became entrepreneurs.

To answer this know-it-all's question, I consulted the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. I got bored with the endeavor after examining the first 75 people on the list, so for the rest of this post we will only discuss the 75 richest Americans, all of them billionaires.

It turns out that there are five law school graduates who are among the 75 richest billionaire Americans:

Sumner Redstone, Harvard JD
Samuel Zell, Uniiversity of Michigan JD
S Robson Walton, Columbua JD
Robert Rowling, Southern Methodist University JD
William Morse Davidson, Wayne State University JD

To be fair to the commenter, the last three don't count because they inherited their money. Any idiot can use a law degree to become a billionaire if he inherits a billion dollars.

It should be noted that 100% of the self-made billionaire lawyers graduated from Top 14 law schools.

The most common way to become a billionaire is to inherit wealth. 23 of the 75 richest Americans inherited their wealth:

Jim Walton
Christy Walton
S Robson Walton
Alice Walton
Helen Walton
Abigail Johnson
Barbara Cox Anthony
Anne Cox Chambers
David Hamilton Koch
Charles De Ganahl Koch
Forrest Edward Mars
Jacqueline Mars
John Franlyn Mars
Ruperty Murdoch
Donald Newhouse
Samuel Newhouse, Jr.
Robert Muse Bass
Robert Rowling
Herbert Kohler
Lester Crown
William Morse Davidson
Leonard Stern
Ray Hunt

One of the best ways to become a self-made billionaire is to attend an Ivy League school. 16 of the 52 self-made billionaires have Ivy League educations:

Warren Buffett, Columbia
Bill Gates, Havard
Carl Ichan, Princeton
John Werner Kluge, Columbia
Edward Crosby Johnson, III, Harvard
Sumner Redstone (Viacom), Harvard
Charles Bartlett Johnson, Yale
Edward Lampert, Yale
Steve Ballmer, Harvard
Geroge B. Kaiser, Harvard
Leonard Blavatnik, Columbia, Harvard
Ronald Owen Perelman, Penn
Michael Bloomberg, Havard
Stephen Schwarzman, Yale, Harvard
Eric Schmidt (Google), Princeton
Jeff Bezos, Princeton

An additional six billionaires have near-Ivy quality education:

Sergey Brin, Stanford
Larry Page, Stanford
Philip H Knight, Stanford
Charles Schwab, Stanford
George Soros, London School of Economics
James H Simons, MIT

The conclusion is clear. If you want to become a self-made billionaire, get the most prestigious educational credentials.

The best degree to get is an MBA. The following nine self-made billionaires have MBAs, and it's worth noting that eight out of the nine have an MBA from one of the nation's top three business schools: Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford.

Steve Ballmer, Harvard, Stanford MBA
Geroge B. Kaiser, Harvard, Harvard MBA
Philip H Knight, Stanford MBA
Charles Egen (Echostar), Wake Forest University MBA
Leonard Blavatnik, Columbia, Havard MBA
Ronald Owen Perelman, Penn, Wharton MBA
Michael Bloomberg, Havard MBA
Charles Schwab, Stanford MBA
Stephen Schwarzman, Yale, Harvard MBA

Finally we get to computer programmers who have become billionaires. There are nine.

Bill Gates
Larry Ellison
Paul Allen
Sergey Brin
Larry Page
Pierre M Omidyar (eBay)
Eric Schmidt
Jeff Bezos
James Goodnight (SAS)

And one honorary mention:

Leonard Blavatnik

Leonard Blavatnik has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Columbia, but he doesn't owe his fortune to software.

Why are there fewer billionaire lawyers than computer programmers? Because law is a more egalitarian profession. All of the BIGLAW firms are partnerships in which there are many decamillionaire partners but no single billionaire founder. If BIGLAW firms were dominated by a single lawyer who owned one third of the firm's wealth, then there would be a lot of billionaire lawyers.

I will wrap up this post with the following admonition: a young person deciding upon his career should not place any weight on whether it will likely make him a billionaire. There is a near infinitesimal chance of becoming a self-made billionaire. It's hard enough just to make it to the top 10% of a profession.

Important things to consider are how well the average member of the profession does, as well as your chance of making it to the top 10% and and how well they have it. Graduates of Top 14 law schools have nearly a 100% chance of getting a BIGLAW job and BIGLAW starts people out these days with $160K, and there's the chance you could make partner and be making as much as a million dollars a year. It's not billionaire status, but it's not so bad. However, if you have the lucky opportunity to get an MBA from Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, or Columbia, then you should definitely choose that over law.

A much easier way to become a billionaire would be to marry an heiress. This is really a lot easier to do than you might think. I personally dated women whose ancestors were billionaires on more than one occasion. I had more dates with heiresses than interviews with BIGLAW despite graduating in the top 10% of the class.

Response to comments on programming sucks

When I wrote my post on why computer programming sucks, I thought it might be of interest to a broader web audience than my typical blog post, but I am quite amazed that people are reading it at the rate of over 1000 hits per hour. Somehow, my post has made it to the top of a bunch of news aggregator services. I have no idea how that happened

When citizens lack papers

What happens when you lose all of your identity papers? As someone with an above average IQ and a suitable amount of future time orientation, I would understand the importance of getting them replaced right away and would be able to figure out how to do it.

But it's easy to see how people with below average IQs, without internet access, and who are reluctant to pay the administrative fees needed to get a new birth certificate issued because they're poor, could wind up not being able to prove they are a U.S. citizen and be unable to get the free medical care (or other government benefits) which they are entitled to.

The problem I have with this New York Times article is that some reading it might get the idea that requiring proof of citizenship to receive Medicaid is a bad policy, supported with quotes like, "the law is hurting U.S. citizens, throwing up roadblocks to people who need care."

People who are in this country illegally should not be allowed to get free medical care. They should be deported.

The law is helping U.S. citizens by discouraging illegals from staying here. That said, we do need to do more to quickly and accurately identify people who belong here and people who don't. It shouldn't take 78 days to figure out if someone is a U.S. citizen.

Why a career in computer programming sucks

Finally, the highly anticipated essay on why computer programming sucks.

A Chinese immigrant writes about the prestige of science and engineering

I found this comment, written by a Chinese immigrant, to be especially interesting:

That's a great comment. I'm a Chinese guy, but US citizen now. All my cousins (all female) are still in China though. The way I look at it, it's a cultural thing. There is a HUGE difference in the fundamental career outlooks of Chinese people and Americans. The fact is, CS (and science / tech in general) doesn't get any respect in the US. I'm a CS major, graduating 2006. I've got a job offer for 85k next year. I'm not doing too bad for myself. But whatever your position is, as a CS person, you are socially classified as a geek. At my school, University of Virginia, being a rich frat boy and having a future in investment banking or law gets you a lot further status-wise even though you may not necessarily be paid more. It's just the way Western societies have been largely static for centuries now--people idolize artists, entertainers, businessmen. Rapid technological progress and the careers associated with it is a new phenomenon, and the Western mind hasn't really adjusted to that yet as far as I can tell. So CS people are relegated to nerd status.

The difference in China is that as a new society (not in the sense that China is new, but in that the current Chinese society is the result of extreme social revolution) -- Chinese people are very much in tune with what is practical for getting ahead, both as a country and individually. There is a combination of old Confucian elements and government direction stemming from revolutionary ideology here. In China, there is no such thing as a 'nerd.' There can't be, because science and technology is considered the career path of choice, much like law school is in the states. In China, it's in fact the 'arts' majors who are looked down on.

Look at where the politicians from the US and China come from. American politicians are mostly law school graduates who studied history or english or god knows what in undergrad. The top leaders of the communist party in China are almost all engineering graduates.

So basically yes, the parent is right-on. Chinese girls are in fact much more inclined to study science and tech because that's what's expected of them. And in my opinion, if this trend continues, we will see the consequences a few decades down the line in the form of a growing East-West technology gap. A society which respects litigation and playing the stock market more than science and technology won't stay ahead too long.

Sometimes a foreigner is better able to understand aspects of our own society than people born here. Of course the part about Western societies being static for centuries is dead wrong.

I'm not sure the conclusion in the last sentence is correct. Business people with investment capital capital earn profits from the work of the scientists and engineers who are paid a salary based on the supply and demand of people with science and engineering skills. This can continue for a long time.

Violent crime increasing: is it a black thing?

There's a NY Times article about a report by the Police Executive Research Forum documenting how violent crime, specifically homicide and aggravated assault, has been recently increasing. This reverses a long term in which crime of all sorts has been declining.

There were 32,840 murders in the U.S. in the two years of 2004 to 2005. If that many soldiers died in Iraq everyone would be outraged, but somehow we accept this much more deadly war occuring in our own country.

The article doesn't tell us what races have been committing the crimes. But somehow I get the impression that this is specifically a black issue. I'm guessing that the spread of the "gangsta culture" is causing this problem.

The PDF linked from the article mentions that Newark reported the highest number of murders ever. Looking at the U.S. Census info, we see that Newark is 53.5% black.

Some people may also want to finger the increasing percentage of the population that's Hispanic. That nation is currently 14.4% Hispanic and only 12.8% black, however a quick survey of the places mentioned in the report as having notable increases in violence, such as Orlando, Florida, Boston, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut, all have a much higher ratio of black to Hispanic residents.

“We seem to be dealing with an awful lot of people who have zero conflict-resolution skills,” Chief Magnus said.

Conflict resolution is probably a g-loaded skill, so dysgenic breeding is finally having an effect on crime.

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I'm working on my blog post on why computer programming sucks, but it's taking a long time. Check the blog this weekend.

Rudy moving up in the online predictions markets

At a well known online futures market (or gambling site), Rudy has no moved up to being considered the most likely candidate to win the Republican nomination.

Back when I first predicted that Rudy would be the next president, McCain was way ahead of Rudy at the online futures market.

If only I had invested in Rudy instead of Edge Petroleum (NASDAQ: EPEX).

The sarcastically humorous personal statement