Half Sigma

Mitt leads in the polls

The latest Gallup poll shows that Mitt Romney has the most support for the 2012 Republican nomination. I guess my T-Paw prediction from June 2009 is not bearing any fruit.

Notable quotes from the Gallup release:

“In addition to the 12 named candidates, 1% of respondents volunteered the name of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.”

“Historically, Republicans have generally nominated the early front-runner as the party's presidential candidate. The notable exception came in the last presidential election, when Rudy Giuliani led in most of the early nomination polls.”

My conclusion is that T-Paw is just too boring for the current election cycle. Unfortunately, this helps Sarah Palin. Chris Christie, however, is exciting. I think if he got into the race, he might pull ahead.

College is easy

According to the chart at this NY Times blog post, the average “full-time” college student spends 3.6 hours on an average weekday during the school year doing “educational activities.”

Civ 5 sucks

A week ago I wrote about Civilization V being released last week.

Well, I played the game, and it sucks. Incredibly boring. I never got past the ridiculously unresponsive gameplay (it takes the computer far too long to think about each move) and the annoyingly cluttered interface where you have to keep clicking messages. People who've played the game longer have complained about the really bad AI and the the lack of complex strategies which made Civ 4 so enjoyable.

I highly recommend Civ 4 over Civ 5, and the fact that Amazon.com is selling a version of Civ 4 complete with the Beyond the Sword (BTS) expansion for only $10.49, that’s a huge bargain compared to $50 for Civ 5.

If you take my advice on Civ 4, you also need install the BTS 3.19 patch and the Better BTS AI mod to make the game perfect. (There’s a forum discussing the Better BTS AI project.) My advice is also to play with "Small" maps because the Standard and larger maps make the game take too long, and to play with technology trading turned off (which you can get to in the custom game options menu) because technology trading adds too much diplomatic micromanagement to the game and forces you to game the AI in order to survive (if you don't participate in the technology-trading game, the AI civs will trade with each other and leave you in the dust).

Blind faith

The LA Times report:

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist.

Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term "blind faith."

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn't identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the meaning of their church's central ritual, incorrectly saying that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion are intended to merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, not actually become them.

I didn’t know the answer to that Catholic question either. But Martin Luther? I learned about him in high school history class. Don’t Protestant people go to high school? They should be ashamed of themselves.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that people believe in what they believe for social reasons and not because they actually know anything about what they believe. And the same applies to belief in global warming.

How did Carl Paladino become rich?

Carl Paladino grew up in a lower middle class family. But he had the good fortune to marry a rich girl, and then her father conveniently died shortly after they got married, allowing him to inherit his father-in-law’s real estate business. To his credit, he ran with the business and became even richer. But if he had married a poor girl, I doubt he'd be worth $150 million today.

In contrast Andrew Cuomo inherited his political wealth from his father. He also married into the rich Kennedy family.

Marrying above one's station is a common theme among politicians. John Kerry married into money.

I have no idea how Al Gore got to be worth $100 million. Politics is supposed to be about “public service,” but it appears to make people rich.

Psychic Half Sigma?

Did my post from June 2006 predict the Tea Party movement?

Asian IQ

The Asian of Reason writes:

Many of the white people who inhabit the Steveosphere insist on bringing Flynn's studies on this issue into the discussion , even when it is likely that these same white people will discredit Flynn's ideas about the closing of the B/W IQ gap and instead bring up studies by people like Rushton and Jensen, who both think that average Asian IQ is higher than white IQ by around 5-7 points and the W/EA gap is largely due to genetics. This shows that a lot people who like HBD aren't interested in the truth, but are only interested in justifying the supremacy of the white race. These people also like to point out that there are more great white thinkers and inventors, as if trying to show that whiteness had something to do with their success, so that they can take partial-credit for belonging to a superior group.

So what do I think causes the over-representation of Asians at the NSMF level and additionally, at elite universities (even with virtual quotas)? I believe it is a combination of hard work and higher average IQ. To make it clear, my evaluation of the evidence has led to me conclude that East Asians score about 1/3 of a standard deviation higher than whites and that the gap is mainly due to genetics …

I am in general agreement with this: about both the higher average IQ of Asians as well as some whites in the “Stevosphere” having racist motivations.

It needs to be pointed out that Asia is a very large place, and saying that all Asians have the same average IQ is like saying Mexicans and Canadians have the same average IQ because they live on the same continent.

Filipinos and other Pacific Islanders would appear have to lower IQs less than the average white. The high IQ Asians are from Japan, China, and Korea. I would guess that Vietnamese are in between. In Malaysia and Singapore which are racially diverse countries, the Chinese dominate the lower-IQ southeastern Asians.

Religion is correlated with low IQ, and it should be noted that southeastern Asians are a lot more religious than the Chinese or the Japanese. Filipinos are heavily into Christianity, and Islam is big in Malaysia. There is a mystery with respect to why Koreans seem to like Christianity, but Japan, the most economically successful Asian country with a large population, is also the least religious Asian country.

Indians are also considered to be “Asian,” yet they are more closely related to white Europeans than they are to the Japanese. India appears to be a below-average-IQ country, but one where the population is so huge that there are millions of Indians with IQs on par or higher than the typical American college graduate, and those are the Indians who mostly immigrate to the United States.

Because all these Asian races are grouped together in U.S. statistical data, the truth is obscured.

There is also the fact that East Asian immigrants in the United States are much harder workers than white Americans. This extends to Japanese living in Japan who are famous for working really long hours. Higher average IQ (for some groups of Asians) combined with a better work ethic results in Asians getting much higher grades in high school and college than white Americans. But this advantage didn’t extend to NYU Law school, where I noticed that Asian surnames were curiously underrepresented in the list of JD students with top 10% grades. I think that a certain type of logical thinking that Asians excel at is actually counterproductive to acing law school essay exams.

It’s not clear to me if the Asian work ethic is cultural, or partly due to a genetically inherited conscientiousness personality factor. I’ve known some lazy American-born Japanese people.

Carl Paladino moving up in the polls!

Andrew Cuomo leads Paladino by only six percentage points.

If a hardcore conservative like Paladino is able to win the gubernatorial election in a liberal state like New York where, supposedly, only moderate RINO Republicans have a chance of winning any elections, this truly demonstrates something different about the current political climate.

This also demonstrates how Lazio and the New York State Republican establishment were so dead wrong when they said that “If Carl Paladino wins this thing [referring to the primary election], it will cause severe damage — it could be for decades — to the Republican Party of New York State.” Will Rick Lazio and Mike Long apologize for their statements? Doubtful. I hope they get kicked out.

Paladino is basically where Lazio would have been in the polls right now, except that Paladino’s supporters are a lot more likely to come out and vote in November, meaning that Paladino has a good chance of winning this.

Andrew Cuomo pot calling the kettle black

The Daily News quotes Andrew Cuomo saying “I'm not going to run a campaign that engages in gutter politics,” implying that Carl Paladino is doing that.

However, Andrew Cuomo is believed to be behind the slogan “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo” used during his father’s primary campaign against former New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

Talk about a hypocrite.

This is feminism?

I am befuddled by the title of a year-old Slate.com article, Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy.

A brief background: Etsy.com allows people to sell handmade items through the Etsy website, and they charge a pretty modest fee of 3.5% plus 20 cents. Ninety-six percent of the sellers are women, and the spin of the article is that it’s a “feminist fantasy” because women think they can stay home with their kids, but still earn a living doing stuff they are interested in like knitting or making jewelry.

Of course this is a fantasy because the vast majority of sellers are going to make a miniscule amount of money. If it were easy to make a good living doing stuff you liked to do, no one would go to work at boring cubicle jobs. Duh!

What I don’t get is the “feminist” part. I thought feminists wanted to go out into the man’s world. The profile of the Etsy seller sounds exactly like my grandmother. My grandfather worked, and my grandmother stayed home with her kids and knitted stuff. The only difference is that she didn’t sell her stuff on the internet; she gave the sweaters and blankets away to friends and family. Considering that Etsy sellers make so little money it’s almost as if they are giving their stuff away, it’s not really a significant distinction.

If there's any lesson from Etsy.com, it's that women are rejecting feminism and going back to the life my grandmother had.

OMG! She “dabbled” in witchcraft!

The latest Christine O’Donnell news is that she “dabbled” in witchcraft when she was 18. OMG!

Why is anyone supposed to care about this? A lot of 18-year-olds do stupid stuff. It’s not like she accidentally killed someone (unlike Ted Kennedy). And stuff like Wicca is so commonplace that it’s almost mainstream. Maybe this is supposed to mean that she fails some sort of Christian Right purity test? Well if the Christian Right didn’t care about Palin’s kid being an unwed pregnant teenager, they’re not going to care about what Christine O’Donnell did when she was 18. Nobody else cares about this either. A lot of people seem really desperate to discredit her for silly reasons.

And yes, I’ve already stated zillions of times that I’m not a fan of the Christian-Right and I wish that the Tea Party had anointed a secular conservative (who would have played better in Delaware anyway), but I would gladly vote for her if I lived in Delaware. Her opponent is a hardcore leftist and, as I wrote before, it’s not as if she will be next in line to be President.

News for nerds: new computer games!

Tomorrow sees the release of two important new computer games,

CIVILIZATION V

Civilization IV with the Beyond the Sword add-on was the best computer strategy game ever made. It has pretty much been the only computer strategy game I’ve played since it came out. Will Civilization V be even better? Possibly not, but one can always hope.

There are very few turn-based strategy games released for computers these days. What happened? This may be an example of a winner-take-all market. The Civilization series is so good that (1) no one else wants to compete against it; and (2) people are still playing it so they don’t need to try any competing games.

FINAL FANTASY XIV

Do you feel that you have no hope of ever being the most powerful character in World of Warcraft (WoW)? Turned off by those six-year-old cartoony graphics? In that case, Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) may be just what you are looking for. This release, by Square Enix, has the best chance of being a successful competitor to WoW. Note that the special edition, which costs an extra $25, is what is released tomorrow; the regular game is not released until September 30th. Is it worth an extra $25 to get a one-week head start on everyone else? If you are a hardcore nerd, then it might be. I think I will wait until next week.

Will FFXIV be the WoW killer? I doubt that it will supplant WoW as the dominant MMORPG, but it has pretty good chance of being number two in the European and American markets. Its predecessor, FFXI, was pretty successful, so if Square Enix can do what they did right with FFXI, add in better graphics, make the interface easier to use, eliminate the Chinese gold farming problem, and do away with the nearly impossible quests that you were required to complete in order to advance in the game, I think it has a shot. But the key for FFXIV is that it has to be an improved version of FFXI and not a copy of WoW. I think that the primary difference between FFXI and WoW is that WoW is a solo game until you reach maximum level, while FFXI is a game where you must group with people in order to advance in the game. I hope that FFXIV maintains this distinction.

NEW COMPUTER FOR NEW GAMES?

One of the advantages of playing older games is that you don’t need the latest computer hardware. If you purchased a computer in 2006 or later, and at the time of purchase it was a decent computer with a decent video card, it should do a fine job playing older games like Civ IV, WoW, or FFXI. FFXIV definitely has more intense hardware requirements. Civ V I’m not sure about, but when Civ IV came out, there were a lot of complaints about it not running well on older computers, which is why many of the earliest reviews for Civ IV were quite negative. With a patch to fix the bugs and a newer computer, Civ IV became a great game.

I just bought a new computer with an i7-860 processor, 8 GB of DDR3 memory, and an ATI 5750 graphics card. It was only $1100. It’s a Gateway, and I have to give credit to Gateway (or maybe the credit goes to Acer) for making the computer very quiet. I hate noisy computers.

No, I didn’t buy this computer because new games were coming out. It just happened that I had a hard disk failure, and I figured that it’s such a huge pain in the ass to reinstall all of my software onto a new hard disk, I might as well use the opportunity to upgrade my computer.

So far, the new computer is great! It takes a fraction of the time to boot up compare to the older computer (which was a Core 2 Duo from 2006). I can finally play Civ IV with the BTS expansion on a Huge map without it taking a ridiculous amount of time for the computer to think about its moves.

But I hate the new Windows 7 interface. Does anyone know how to make the Windows 7 interface look and behave just like Windows XP?

HBD gets some love in the Australian MSM

From an article in The Australian (dated today):

SCIENTISTS have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren.

Those schoolchildren possessing the "right" combinations achieved significantly better results in numeracy, literacy and science.

The finding emerged from a study of more than 4000 British children to pinpoint the genes and genetic combinations that influence reasoning skills and general intelligence.

One of its main conclusions is that intelligence is controlled by a network of thousands of genes with each making just a small contribution to overall intelligence, rather than the handful of powerful genes that scientists once predicted.

The researchers believe their work could eventually lead to genetic tests to predict babies' academic potential.

And once these genetic tests exist, we will be able to prove the genetic basis for the black-white IQ gap.

Christine O'Donnell

She reminds me a little of Sarah Palin, which is obviously a bad thing. Similaritiies:

(1) Young attractive woman who’s just a little too cute to be taken seriously.
(2) Graduated from bogus college, with some difficulty.
(3) Evangelical Christian.

However, there are also some differences working in O’Donnell’s favor.

(1) O’Donnell doesn’t have a pregnant teenage daughter.

(2) O’Donnell has some actual passion about the issues. Unlike Palin, who seems to only be in politics because she likes fame, power, and money (and quit her job as governor when she figured she could have more fame and money as a – well whatever she is now), O’Donnell is motivated by making a difference. She has spent her life working in conservative issues advocacy, and founded the Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth to advocate for sexual abstinence. This is a sign that she's smarter than Palin, because a desire to make a difference is seldom found in people with below average IQs. And founding your own advocacy group is a cognitively more demanding task than getting elected mayor of a small town in Alaska (which is nothing but a popularity contest). There is also a history of O'Donnell actually writing things by herself, unlike Palin. If Palin has an IQ of 100, O'Donnell probably has an IQ of 115.

(3) Her opponents have made fun of her for not having made much money, but if a liberal were running for office who never made much money, other liberals would be praising her for devoting herself to helping others and lambasting her opponent for being a rich fat cat out of touch with average Americans. (I can’t find out much information about her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, but despite being a “Marxist” he appears to have come from a wealthy family and had a high-paying career as a corporate attorney.)

CONCLUSION

I support O’Donnell’s candidacy, even though I would prefer that the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement disassociate itself from the Christian Right (which brought us George W Bush, a liberal pretending to be a conservative on most non-Christian, non-military issues). But if elected, she wouldn’t be the only Christian-right senator, and I find her views about masturbation to be refreshingly honest and outside-the-mainstream. As only one of 100 Senators, her presence in the Senate will do more good than harm. It's not like she's next in line to be President, so no one has to worry about whether she's ready to take over leadership of the country during a national emergency.

Advice for Republicans: stop being the "party of the rich"

This is a comment written by JP:

"Today, Democrats love rich people."

That is true, but it is also true that the Democrats love to insist that the Republicans - and only the Republicans - are the "party of the rich."

This is like Clinton carrying his Bible around. The people in the know knew it was all an act and that Clinton just carried around his Bible in order to pick up the votes of some of those working class whites who “cling” to their religion (to paraphrase Obama).

In the same manner, those rich people who vote Democratic know that the Democrats really aren’t against the rich, but that it’s a great slogan to win over the votes of the working class and the middle class.

And this is why the Republicans need to stop it with supporting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. These are tax cuts the wealthiest Americans obviously don’t want based on their support for Obama. Why are Republicans ruining their chances of picking the votes of the bottom 98% of the electorate in order to give stuff away to the top 2% who don’t enthusiastically vote Republican or support Republicans anyway? It’s just too easy for Democrats to call Republicans the “party of the rich” when Republicans are, in fact, trying to give away money to rich people.

I call on the Tea Party movement to stop supporting tax cuts for the rich. The Tea Party should represent a break from the business-as-usual Republicans who collaborated with the liberals to get us into this financial mess in the first place. The Tea Party should support simplifying the tax code, closing loopholes, favor lower marginal rates with fewer deductions, and eliminating double taxation for corporations (rich people nowadays use limited partnerships). Rich people who are patriotic will still vote Republican, and those who aren’t are probably voting already voting for Democrats.

Democrats and the wealthy

A comment written by “Linda” (who is most likely a man using a female pseudonym):

"Furthermore, the highest income group makes most of its money from value transference rather than value creation."

Why are you even a republican if you believe that. This is a left-wing ideology you repeatedly advocate

First of all, if it’s true, then it should be neither left-wing nor right-wing, just the truth. HBD ought to fall under the same rubric.

Secondly, is there a single prominent Democrat that anyone who can point to who agrees with my take on value creation vs. value transference? There are none that I know of.

Thirdly, there doesn’t exist a political party in the United States today that is anti-rich. Maybe back in the 1930s. Today, Democrats love rich people. As I keep pointing out, rich people voted for Obama over McCain in the last election. Nearly all major Democratic politicians are rich people. Democratic politicians often are people who made millions of dollars in BIGLAW, Wall Street, and real estate. When a non-rich guy, like David Paterson, by some miracle becomes the governor of New York (because the previous super-rich governor, Eliot Spitzer, had to step down in disgrace), the Democrats can’t wait to replace him with the multi-millionaire Andrew Cuomo. (Normally, you’d expect Democrats to be behind a blind black guy, but I guess that affirmative action stuff is only for private industry and academia.)

To the extent that Democrats believe in value creation at all, they believe that value is created by evil deeds such as enslaving black Africans, stealing land from the American Indians, and desecrating the planet in order to extract resources. Democrats believe that people become wealthy by going to Harvard, and therefore wealthy people have earned their wealth. Democrats believe in high taxes not to punish the wealthy, but because they strongly believe in noblesse oblige, that rich people should use their money for good, and there’s no greater force for good in the world than the government. Democrats see themselves as doing rich people a favor by raising their taxes, because they are making them better people.

What Democrats don’t believe is that rich people are transferring value while the middle class are creating value. The difference between Republicans (of the libertarian economist type) and Democrats is that Republicans believe a person’s wealth is nearly exactly equal to the value they created, while Democrats believe that no one’s wealth is related to the value they created. Republicans believe that the wealthy have done a better job of creating value while the Democrats believe that the wealthy have done a better job of doing the right things such as going to Harvard. Thus Democrats and Republicans alike believe that the wealthy are more deserving of being wealthy than the middle class.

Half Sigma votes for the winners

Carl Paladino didn't merely win, he totally crushed Rick Lazio. Ryan Brumberg, the Republican Anthony Weiner, is also crushing the opposition.

Gambling at Aqueduct, part II

As reported today by the Wall Street Journal:

After close to 10 years of often-tortuous planning, New York City's first casino cleared its final hurdle Monday as state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli approved a contract with one of Asia's largest gaming companies to develop a gambling parlor at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens.

Within six months, if all goes according to plan, Genting Bhd., of Malaysia, will open the doors of a facility that initially will include 1,600 video slot machines and other electronic games. Within 18 months, the casino, which will be known as Resorts World New York, will have 4,525 machines, two restaurants and a skybridge connecting it to the A train's stop at the Aqueduct.

Genting has promised to invest up to $1.3 billion, including a $380 million upfront payment to the state…

Good news for New York, bad news for Genting which is getting monumentally ripped off. As I blogged before, there won’t be any high-end clientele in Queens. This slot-machine casino will just attract a lot of poor people. Yes, they will reliably lose money on slot machines, but not enough money to make up the cost of the casino.

This is a great example of international value transference. Asians have all this money to invest, but when it comes to investing it in the United States, they are stupid.

* * *

Maybe if they had poker tables, I would go there (although it’s a really long A-train ride from Manhattan), but this casino is only going to have slot machines.

* * *

How do I feel about legalized gambling? The old libertarian in me would say it’s not the government’s business to tell people how they should spend their money. But now that I know more about HBD, I know that there are lots of people who are biologically incapable of being intelligent and wise about spending their money. Perhaps, the old laws against gambling are the result of long-acquired societal wisdom that people are unable to control their gambling impulses because of low future time orientation?

On the other hand, our society already has so many different ways to gamble. Lottery tickets are sold at every bodega, and just about every Indian reservation has a casino. Yet society hasn’t disintegrated. I have to conclude that gambling is the least of our nation’s problems, and really isn’t that big of a deal. Therefore, I think we should legalize more gambling. Especially poker.

Republicans should give this one to Obama

It’s pretty rare that I agree with a NY Times editorial, but with respect to raising taxes on the wealthiest 2% while keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rest of the electorate, Republicans should get on board with that.

The key factor for me (unmentioned by the NY Times editorial) is that Obama’s strongest support comes from households with $250K or more of income. If those people want their taxes raised, then I say let them be raised! Republicans who insist on sacrificing tax cuts for regular people in order to support a class of people who support Obama are being chumps of the highest magnitude.

Furthermore, the highest income group makes most of its money from value transference rather than value creation. They’re the chief beneficiaries of the immigration and outsourcing which are hurting the regular people. Let them pay up.

Carl Paladino for Governor

His website says:

(1) CUT INCOME TAXES BY 10% BY JUNE 2O11: New Yorkers are taxed way too much. Carl won't cap taxes, he'll cut taxes. Capping is gutless; cutting takes courage.

2) CUT THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT BY 20% BY DECEMBER 2011: New York State government is far too big and spends too much. He'll cut by eliminating entire agencies and departments and trimming unnecessary staff across the government.

3) CUT MEDICAID BY $20 BILLION IN HIS FIRST BUDGET: New York offers more gold-plated Medicaid optional benefits than any other state and this is killing our taxpayers. Carl will cut these optional benefits back to California levels - still the second most expensive Medicaid state in America - saving New Yorkers $10 Billion in taxes.

4) CUT BUSINESS TAXES TO ENCOURAGE JOB RETENTION AND GROWTH: Carl will give New York's existing manufacturers, farmers and other businesses a tax holiday if they reinvest this money to keep or create jobs.

5) REFORM NEW YORK STATE GOVERNMENT AND TAKE BACK OUR STATE: Carl will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate evidence of crime and conflicts of interest. He'll work to pass an ethics law with real teeth and eight-year term limits on elected officials.

Well point 5 sounds kind of vague, but points 1-4 rock. No more RINOs.

It's smart of Paladino to stick to economic issues on the front page and leave his anti-abortion position buried more deeply in his website. But the anti-abortion position is going to hurt him in November.

(Note: even though I may in some cases support higher taxes at a federal level, at the state level, high taxes are harmful because it’s a lot easier to changes states than it is to change countries. If the tax cuts can be paid for by a $20 billion cut in gold-plated Medicaid benefits, then it’s like free money for everyone who’s not on Medicaid.)

Paladino is also going to take action against illegal immigrants:

I am completely opposed to any form of amnesty or other political solution aimed to absorb illegal immigrants into the fabric of America. These people took advantage of the United States; they broke our laws and many jumped on New York's Medicaid and social welfare systems the day they arrived.

Countless New Yorkers have told me that when concerned citizens call local authorities to inform of them of illegal immigrants and their activities in the community, their complaints fall on deaf ears. That is just flat wrong. Local policing agencies and elected officials must enforce the law. As Governor, I would make this happen.

Carl Paladino has my vote tomorrow despite his anti-abortion position. (Most abortions are had by poor women, and the last thing New York needs is more poor babies.)

I will also be voting for Ryan Brumberg for Congress. This is really weird: this is the first time in my life that I've felt that I can make a difference by voting in a Republican primary in a non-Presidential election year.

Cougar scamsters

A commenter told me to read this intriguing New York Times Wealth Matters column:

Mr. Falkenberg said a new scam illustrated this problem. It starts with an attractive, older woman pretending to fall in love with a wealthy male student in the hope of getting pregnant, if not married, and laying claim to his family’s money.

“They’re dweebishly nerdy kids, and the story is always the same,” he said. “It’s really hard because you have to tell the kid this is not the love of his life.”

What’s interesting is that this is a new scam and not something women figured out years ago. What has changed?

(1) Girls their own age used to be attracted to wealth kids so they weren’t susceptible to being so easily manipulated by older women. But today, girls their own age only into the hot guys.

(2) Women used to be so turned off by younger men they’d never consider it, but cougarism has been popularized by the mainstream media and is now semi-acceptable.

(3) There is no longer such a huge stigma to unmarried pregnancy, but the legal system has not yet caught up to this. The legal system seems to assume that no woman would ever voluntarily get pregnant, so it must be the man’s fault, so he must pay up.

No Korans will burn tomorrow

Burning books of any kind is a low prole kind of a thing to do. But have you seen photos of that “pastor” from Florida? It has been discussed here many times previously that weird facial hair is a marker of low proleness, and that pastor’s facial hair is pretty weird.

But books get burned all the time. Bibles are burned all the time and no one makes a big deal out of it. If Muslims are pissed off, then too bad. Why has this one planned holy book burning by a low prole nobody from Florida who no one has ever heard of before become national news?

I kind of enjoy seeing Muslims pissed off, so I was rooting for the pastor (in the manner that you might root for your favorite character from the Jersey Shore). But alas, the pastor has apparently caved into the pressure and called off the Koran burning.

Burn baby, burn

I have to thank the Florida pastor who’s going to burn a bunch of Korans, because it puts Obama’s hypocrisy on full display. Obama goes out of his way to defend the religious freedoms of Muslims who want to build a mosque where one has no business being built, but now goes out of his way to condemn this publicity stunt. If they were burning American flags instead of Korans, Obama would be silent. As he should be.

Don't mock smart toilets

Steve Sailer may mock smart toilets, but I think that one of the best trends of the last decade has been urinals which automatically flush when you’re finished with them.

In the past, people would refuse to flush the urinals after using them, resulting in men’s rooms smelling from urine. At one place where I worked, I tried to fix the problem by putting signs above the urinals reading “Please FLUSH so that the men’s room doesn’t smell,” but it didn’t work.

Obama's dividend tax increase

It has come to my attention that the “Bush tax cuts,” which Obama is gung ho about letting expire, includes taxing dividends at 15% instead of treating them as ordinary income.

A dividend tax increase would be bad economic policy. Even under the current rules, dividends are taxed too high because corporations can’t deduct dividends from their income as they are allowed to do for interest payments. Furthermore, interest payments to foreigners aren’t taxed at all, allowing such payouts to completely escape income taxation.

Allowing the dividend tax to increase will cause corporations to change their behavior, and encourage debt financing over equity financing; this increases corporate leverage which exacerbates the effect of the business cycle which leads to mass bankruptcies when the economy tanks and bubbles when the economy is doing well. Also, given that we allow business entities to choose their form of taxation, the harsh corporate tax rules discourage corporations from being formed in the first place. Investing in shares of publicly traded corporations is becoming the investment vehicle of small-time chumps, while the super-wealthy elite are investing in limited partnerships.

Probably, Wall Street is happy about the coming increase in the dividend tax. Investment bankers would rather that corporations use their income to do deals on which investment bankers rake huge fees, rather than “waste” the money by giving it back to investors.

Obama clearly prefers irresponsible tax policy in which marginal rates are really high, but there are lots of loopholes for the elite to avoid paying them.

Obama's latest tax break idea sucks

When I read about Obama’s proposal to allow the immediate deduction for certain expenditures which would normally be capitalized and depreciated, my first thought was that it will be a huge giveaway to the tax shelter industry. I see that other people agree.

If anything, we already have too much accelerated depreciation. This makes me appreciate Ryan Brumberg’s “smart policies”, which I recently blogged about, where he calls for revenue-neutral tax reform in which tax rates are lowered and loopholes are closed. Obama has the opposite tax policy of higher tax rates but more loopholes.

Furthermore, Obama claims the tax break will only cost the treasury $30 billion because it will be made up in the future when taxpayers don’t benefit from the depreciation. If the true value of the tax break is only $30 billion, then it won’t do much to stimulate the economy, because business investment decisions are made based on long-term expectations. However, I’m sure it will cost a lot more than $30 billion, because it ignores the fact that income always moves to the lowest tax bracket; taxpayers will change their behavior in ways that don’t benefit the economy.

Furthermore, I don’t think we need any more government stimulus. Unemployment is high because of structural changes to the global economy and not because there isn’t enough stimulus. No amount of stimulus will change the fact that people in India and China will work for a fraction of what U.S. workers expect to get paid, or that there are millions of immigrants every year taking jobs which would have otherwise gone to Americans. The way to fix the economy is to (1) cut off all new immigration; and (2) figure out how to discourage outsourcing by taxing it.

No shortage of U.S. engineers

This is from a year-old article from Business Week:

U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and engineers as ever, according to a study released on Oct. 28 by a group of academics. But that finding comes with a big caveat: Many of the highest-performing students are choosing careers in other fields. The study by professors at Rutgers and Georgetown suggests that since the late 1990s, many of the top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting.

"Despite decades of complaints that the United States does not have enough scientists and engineers, the data show our high schools and colleges are providing an ample supply of graduates," said study co-author Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. "It is now up to science and technology firms to attract the best and the brightest graduates to come work for them."

The onus for improving the stock of scientists and mathematicians thus falls more on employers than students, the report's authors say. "If a 12th grader asks us for advice about whether to pursue a career in physics, math, or engineering, what would our advice be?" says co-author Lindsay Lowell, a professor at Georgetown University. "It's difficult to say. There is such a surplus of talent."

So we see, there’s no shortage of American engineers, it’s just that companies aren’t interested in hiring them. It’s more lucrative for the engineers with the best credentials to seek non-engineering jobs in value-transference industries.

The concept of a shortage of American engineers is a fiction created by companies that want more immigration so they can get cheaper foreign labor.

The marketing economy is becoming a reality

This is what I wrote in January, 2004 about the marketing economy:

The economic boom we experienced during the 1990s was driven by the information economy. The computer chips and software that the rest of the world uses were designed here in the United States.

But now we see a new trend in the move to overseas sourcing. It’s not just manufacturing that’s moving overseas, the information jobs are moving there also! Thanks to the internet and inexpensive long distance phone service, the barriers to doing business with someone on the other side of the world have mostly been eliminated. Already we see call centers moving all over the world. When you call up customer service or technical support, you may very well be connected to someone in the Philippines or in India. And the biggest new trend in software development is using computer programmers in India who work for one third the salary of American programmers.

There is no reason to think that this trend will not continue. Any type of job that could be done overseas will be done there. There are 1.3 billion people in China and one billion in India, and they are willing to work for a fraction of what Americans get paid. They may not speak English in China, but that is not a barrier. With more information jobs being exported from the United States, the people in other countries will discover that if they learn English they will enjoy a huge salary increase. Money talks. People will learn English if it means that they can double their salary.

What happens when all the information jobs move overseas? What we will have left is what I call the marketing economy. Nearly all jobs that involve creating actual value, such as manufacturing, computer programming, engineering, or just answering the phone at a call center, will be moved overseas. The only jobs left in the United States will be marketing jobs.

. . .

It is still worthwhile to ask how long can the United States be the world’s richest nation if we no longer contribute anything of real value to the rest of the world? I think it can be quite a long time. Decades, not years. But eventually our failure to contribute anything of real value to the rest of the world will catch up with us. The next world superpower will probably be China with its 1.3 billion people.

And here is what appeared in the NY Times article from yesterday:

Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas.

. . .

“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work, that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

“That hierarchy has been upset, to say the least,” he said. “More and more of the innovation is coming out of the emerging markets, as part of this bottom-up push.”

I predicted this more than six and a half years ago; the MSM is finally catching up to me.

JerseyGuy's comment on the declining U.S. computer software industry

“JerseyGuy” left a comment:

I have seen this transition with my father's computer systems programming and software development company here in Northern NJ. The company consists of around 100 employees located in Northern NJ and Southeastern Pennsylvania. I'm only 26 years old but I remember as recently as 1998 that the company was virtually 100% native born American. However, in the early to mid 2000s, this has completely changed. Now my dad says that at least 60% of the company is foreign born, mostly Indian, as well as a few East Asians and Eastern Europeans. He did confirm to me that the wages for the programmers and systems analysts have pretty much stagnated for the last decade, even as the company has grown. In addition, the American workforce has stagnated as programmers are being used from India, China and Eastern Europe. These people all work remotely from their home countries. The quality of the foreign born workforce? He says that they are pretty much average. Certainly smart. Certainly competent. But by no means MIT or Carnegie Mellon level computer scientists. They are pretty much the quality that you would get from an above average U.S. state school.

Again, my father has worked at this company for about 30 years. The first 20 had virtually a 100% American workforce. Now in the last 10, it has gone to 60% foreign born. My dad isn't concerned about his job but he is concerned about the next generation of American programmers. If all of the labor force can be imported at lower wages, or done by a foreign work force working remotely in other countries, where does this all end?

We were told that we could offshore our manufacturing and still rely on "higher valued added" services. Now what do we do?

Tech jobs moving overseas

The article in yesterday’s NY Times about how the tech sec tor is slow to hire echoes what I wrote three and a half years ago (has it been that long?) about why a career in computer programming sucks.

Highlights from the NY Times article:

* The unemployment rate for “computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers” is “significantly higher” than for other “white collar” professions.

* The value of skills of software engineers “start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off.”

* A 49-year-old software engineer who lost her job when her office was closed, replaced by an office in China. Now she can’t find a new job. It is unmentioned in the article, but I bet that lots of H-1Bs were hired.

“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work, that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

“That hierarchy has been upset, to say the least,” he said. “More and more of the innovation is coming out of the emerging markets, as part of this bottom-up push.”

I hope the above quote disabuses people of the notion that America is so special – China is full of smart people, who work harder than Americans and who create value rather than just transferring it around.

Furthermore, the article avoids the whole immigration problem. Does it matter that much when a job actually is created in the United States if the recipient of the job is an immigrant? That's the reality of what I think is actually the majority of computer programming jobs in the New York City area. What about jobs for Americans?

Instead, some economists and policy makers are looking to health care to lead an employment surge. They point to the field’s growing demand for new services, the need for physical proximity for many patient procedures, and a bureaucracy that entails layer upon layer of jobs.

I agree that healthcare is the best career for people starting out today, but one has to wonder about the country’s long-term prospects when all the manufacturing and R&D is done in China and all Americans do is care for the health of other Americans.