Half Sigma

Halloween in Manhattan

Most popular costume (excluding zombies and vampires): Chilean miners.

Half Sigma's favorite costume: the guy dressed up as Jimmy McMillan. The rent is 2 damn high!

Most artsy costume: guy dressed up as Andy Warhol walking next to a guy dressed up as a can of Campbell's Soup.

David Pogue loves his camera

#10 on the NY Times most-emailed list is David Pogue’s love letter to his camera.

The camera he loves so much is the recently released Canon S-95, which is the new model which replaces the S-90. It’s the S-90 which I use to take most of the pictures I post on my blog, such as the series of Prospect Park photos.

David Pogue overstates how great these cameras are. Image quality is a little bit better than a typical point and shoot camera, but not as much as he makes it out to be. The primary selling point is that the camera has manual controls that nearly all other cameras that size lack. I also like that the lens does 28mm wide angle. 105mm on the long end is all that you need, because photos taken with more zoom than that lack any artistry.

I have no idea what Pogue is talking about when he says the camera can “blur the background.” Yes, I know about shallow depth of field, but you don’t get it with the S-90 or S-95.

But yes, I do enjoy using the S-90 a lot. The small size and light weight make it easy to take with. I always feel psychologically uncomfortable with a DSLR because it loudly states “LOOK AT THIS GUY WHO’S CARRYING AROUND A HUGE CAMERA!” With the S-90/95, you can take almost-as-good photos in daylight without that stigma.

One of the comments to my Prospect Park posts said that using an expensive digital camera made me SWPL.

Interstellar travel is fantasy

Steve Sailer links to an article by Geoffrey Miller hypothesizing that compelling entertainment like videogames have prevented extraterrestrial civilizations from surviving once they reached our level of technology.

First of all, video games aren’t all that great. It’s the future technologies of sexbots and holodecks which are likely to make living a fantasy preferable to the real world.

Interesting as that may be, my most likely explanation for why we haven’t encountered intelligent life is that interstellar travel is impossible, no matter how technologically advanced a civilization becomes. Yes, I know we see lot of interstellar travel taking place in movies and TV shows. That’s fantasy. If interstellar travel were possible, some other alien race would have already colonized the entire galaxy. Even interstellar communication is unlikely given the speed of light and the vast distances involved. Although for all I know, there could be a vast galaxy-wide consortium of intelligent species who communicate with each other; we're just not aware of it because our primitive technology is unable to detect it.

My alternate explanation, which I think is somewhat less likely but certainly within the realm of possibility, is that we are the first intelligent civilization to arise in the Milky Way galaxy, and intergalactic travel is impossible, no matter how technologically advanced a civilization becomes.

The least likely explanation is that all alien civilizations die off very quickly once they become technologically advanced, so they don’t have time to communicate or develop interstellar travel. I think it's unlikely that this is going to happen to our species, and even if it does, it’s unlikely that all intelligent species would behave exactly the way we do.

PC not new

The following comment was posted at Steve Sailer’s blog, in response to another comment (the first one being quoted at the beginning). It’s the most interesting thing I've read in the blogosphere this week:

"Of course, political correctness is equally rampant on the left and right. On the right, for example, any criticism of Christianity or its empirical or historical claims brings out the exact same sort of "victim /offense" complex as it does on the left. Relativism and sensitivity and victim posing is rampant all round. The same right wingers that tell others to get a backbone will immediately cry abotu being "attacked" if we dare question or exam their sacred cows using the same lame relativistic and "I'm offended!" protestations as the PC left does."

True, and I expect you'll get pilloried here by the Bible-thumping crowd, but true.

Arguably the older religious based "PC" had some positive evolutionary psychology behind it, while the current PC is negative in its effects (except for the small group of parasites at the top who benefit from modern PC).

That's arguable of course. But we've never had a society without these kinds of taboos and "crime think" shaping what people are allowed to say. Best we can hope for is to try to defeat the current negative PC and try to put something positive in its place. We're not likely to ever see a truly "rational" public discourse like some people imagine could exist, though. Human nature is a pretty hard thing to fight against; it would be better to use it to our advantage than to fight against it.

I think that the elites who founded the United States had the goal of creating an environment of rational public discourse. They managed to change attitudes towards religion such that all you had to do to avoid being branded an outcast was to accept the “fact” that God exists—but you didn’t have to subscribe to the tenets of any particular religion. This was a rather easy charade to keep, because you could pursue any area of rational thought you wished as long as you said “yes I believe in God.”

The modern-day elites have, unfortunately, created a new religion, which I’ve previously called post-Christian Mother Nature Worship, and then the Gaia Cult—I’m having trouble giving it a good name. A lot of SWPL behavior is influenced by it. The taboo against noticing that there are intelligence differences between races is part of this new religion. The punishment for noticing intelligence differences between races is now much more severe than saying that you don’t believe in God. The only adverse consequence of publicly being an atheist is that you can’t get elected to a political position. I'm sure Google wouldn't have banned my domain from AdSense if I just wrote about atheism and didn't write about the topics that are taboo in the new religion.

Christians may, at one time in the past, have been scarier because they could have people executed for being witches, but today the Gaia-SWPL religion is much scarier because they have the power, and they use it.

The point of this post is that the freedom of rational discourse requires elites who are committed to the freedom of rational discourse, otherwise humans regress to the instinctual behavior of punishing dissenting thought. The elites of today have abandoned the championship of rational discourse in favor of evangelizing for the new religion.

Google AdSense purge

It appears that several blogs, besides my own, have been purged from Google AdSense recently for having content that disagrees with the liberal political views of Google’s upper management.

The liberal meme of the 2010 election cycle: it's UNFAIR

The NY Times editorial, called “Secret Funding in Iowa,” is repeating the new liberal meme I wrote about yesterday, in which the Democrats would be ahead in the polls were in not for “secret” spending that ought to be illegal.

Bruce Braley, a Democrat from northeastern Iowa, has been a popular two-term congressman and seemed likely to have an easy re-election until the huge cash mudslide of 2010. The Republican Party had largely left him alone, but then a secretive group called the American Future Fund began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on distortion-heavy attack ads.

(1) If the ads are truly libelous, than Bruce Braley has adequate legal remedies. However, it would seem to be that the ads are completely true, they just present Mr. Braley in a way that’s unfavorable. I haven’t seen the ads, but I bet they aren’t as outrageous as the 1964 attack ad which implied that if you voted for the Republican, everyone would die in a nuclear holocaust. (In other words, attack ads aren't a new Republican invention; Democrats used outrageous attack ads before I was even born.)

(2) Voters don’t pay attention to who’s paying for ads. I think even if the ad said “paid for by Osama bin Laden,” no one would notice. So the lack of notice saying that they ad was paid for by some rich person no one has heard of has zero impact on the ad’s effectiveness.

(3) The group is not that secretive, they have a website which explains what they stand for and who’s on their board of directors. And the NY Times had no problem tracking down who donated money to the group, so even that part of the secret is no longer a secret.

(4) $574,000 is small change in American politics, and not anything to get excited about. The NY Times doesn’t seem concerned that liberal Democrat Andrew Cuomo raised $24.6 million for his campaign.

(5) Andrew Cuomo also received $2 million from Andrew Farkas, in a deal which looks to some people like a kickback scheme. Why isn’t the NY Times concerned about this?

(6) Billionaire George Soros donates huge amounts of money to liberal causes. According to the Wikipedia article, he spent $23,581,000 to defeat George Bush in the 2004 election. So we see, Democrats benefit from the same sort of “secret” spending that the NY Times editorial is complaining about.

(7) This Sepetember alone, the DNC received record-breaking $16 million of funding. It’s simply a lie that Democrats are behind in the polls because they don’t have enough money. The outside funding supporting Republican candidates just makes up for the advantage the Democrats have in receiving more inside funding.

(8) There exists a shadowy liberal group called The Democracy Alliance which appears to be better funded and more secretive than any conservative group mentioned in the NY Times editorial.

UPDATE

“Tino” posted this link which explains that Democrats have outraised Republicans in this election cycle:

The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries, based on figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

So the real story shows the opposite of the liberal meme. Republicans are way ahead in the polls despite the fact that rich people have donated more money to Democrats and aligned outside organizations.

SWPL and the ghetto meet at Prospect Park

A SWPL woman in the southeastern area of Prospect Park. Behind her, a boarded up building in the ghetto.

In order to appreciate her uber-SWPLness, I present a crop. Yes, that’s an iPhone she’s talking into.

* * *

DaveInHackensack writes: “That's also an ~$800 stroller she's got there.”

Christian Lander missed that one. Expensive baby strollers and baby carriages should have been on the list of stuff that white people like.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that "Expensive Strollers" is #135 in the book. Christian Lander didn't forget this, he just wants us to pay money to read his wisdom.

David Brooks' op-ed

CNBC’s Joe Kernen spoke highly of David Brooks’ op-ed this morning. I think that David Brooks wanders around too much with his thoughts and tries too hard to sound nuanced and thoughtful rather than just writing what he wants to say—or maybe he doesn’t want to say anything at all?

Brooks writes:

Democrats and their media enablers have paid lavish attention to Christine O’Donnell and Carl Paladino, even though these two Republican candidates have almost no chance of winning. That’s because it feels so delicious to feel superior to opponents you consider to be feeble-minded wackos.

I’m not so sure that Paladino’s campaign was doomed until after t he liberal media decided to do him in. Regarding Christine O’Donnell, I agree that the liberals like to say “look, the fact that Christine O’Donnell was nominated demonstrates how stupid Republican primary voters are,” yet they completely ignore the nomination of Alvin Greene who makes O’Donnell look like an accomplished genius in comparison. Brooks should have mentioned Alvin Greene.

As Nancy Pelosi put it at a $50,000-a-couple fund-raiser, “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in.”

That best demonstrates the cognitive dissonance of the liberal elite. They cannot possibly believe that voters might be turning against them because they don’t like them. The awakening of the Tea Party movement can only be explained by a mysterious cabal of rich reactionaries buying people’s opinions. Pelosi ironically stated this viewpoint at a $50,000-a-couple fund-raiser for Democrats. Who attends such a fund-raiser except for people who are extremely rich? (David Brooks deserves some credit for discovering this quote.) Furthermore, liberals conveniently ignore the fact that Wall Street donated twice as much money to Obama as to McCain. Maybe Obama’s election doesn’t represent the true desires of the voters? Maybe voters’ opinions were just purchased with all the money donated to support Obama in 2008?

I think that what’s happening is best explained by the snobbery of the elites for the average non-elite white. When elites look down with such disdain on the pastimes and habits of non-elite whites, how can they be surprised when these non-elite whites don’t want to vote for elites to govern them?

Another photo from Prospect Park

This scene was not that far away from the huddle of black men.

* * *

“Sheila Tone” writes:

Did you do something tricky with the color?

I applied a bit of a warming filter because I think that the auto white balance was off, and I jacked up the saturation just a bit (but I had the camera set to the lowest saturation level).

However, I agree that the colors seem a little bit weird and I blame the camera. I’ve always felt that the colors produced by the Canon S90 were slightly off. For some reason, oranges don’t come out right: they either veer off to the yellow or the red. This is not something I know how to fix using Photoshop.

My Olympus E-620 SLR produces colors which seem to me to be better and more natural. Unfortunately, I left the E-620 home for this trip to Prospect Park, because it’s a PITA to carry around, and it’s not a good idea to walk around the ghetto with a big camera around your neck because you don’t want to attract attention to yourself in the ghetto. No, this is not me being “racist,” it’s genuinely a bad idea for a white person to attract attention to himself in a black neighborhood (a possible exception being Oak Bluffs).

To be fair to Prospect Park, the park itself is not the ghetto, and there are white people walking around there with visible cameras. And Flatbush Avenue looked like its safe enough during the day, as long as you don’t attract attention to yourself.

Herbivores in Japan

There’s a new Washington Post article about the herbivore phenomenon:

According to a 2009 survey from market research firm M1 F1 Soken, almost half of Japanese men ages 20 to 34 identify themselves as herbivores. No matter their sexual preferences, herbivores tend to be less overtly sexual. Many say they do not prioritize physical relationships. They're more likely to buy gifts for their mothers than for their significant others.

Japan's herbivores bear some resemblance to the metrosexuals familiar in America. Like metrosexuals, they pay a lot of attention to how they look and how they dress - with a preference for flannel-patterned shirts, bought first-hand but made to look second-hand, and tight-fitting pants. But herbivores reflect a wider societal movement.

An amazing fact from the article is that the latest Japanese government statistics show that single women under 30 now earn more money than single men under 30.

Charles Murray and the elite

Charles Murray wrote an op-ed about the “elite” which was published in Sunday’s Washington Post.

The op-ed tends to jump around, and it’s hard to figure out what the point is, but merely because Murray understands the truth of HBD and is not afraid to acknowledge it in writing, whatever he writes is going to be more correct than 99% of what’s published.

Murray's Bell Curve co-author, Richard Herrnstein, wrote an essay in 1973 called “I.Q. in the Meritocracy” in which he explained that, because economic success is correlated with IQ, the new meritocracy would come to have a genetically higher IQ than the rest of the population. Herrnstein’s prediction has come to pass, and with it has come the paradox in which, because social mobility was opened up in the 1950s so that people from prole backgrounds with high IQs could move up to the meritocracy, the end result is less social mobility today.

For starters, the prole class has been culled of its smartest members, so today, a lower percentage of prole children have high-IQs than was the case sixty years ago. This creates the statistical illusion of less social mobility.

Additionally, I believe that we genuinely have less social mobility than existed 60 years ago. In other words, it was easier for a white child born to prole parents with an IQ of 125 to move up to the elite in 1960 than it is today.

(1) Moving up in the meritocracy is more credentials-based than it ever was.

(2) Access to the best credentials (Ivy League degrees) is, every year, based more on leadership traits than it is on raw intellect as demonstrated by a high score on the SAT. As I’ve explained before, the leadership-based admissions process is better gamed by parents who are currently members of the elite.

(3) Although the topmost schools have generous financial aid and need-blind admissions, for those children of proles not quite smart enough to get into the most elite schools (likely shut out because their application doesn’t demonstrate appropriate leadership activities), the fact that the cost of higher education has been increasing more than the rate of inflation for decades is a significant barrier to getting good credentials. Even state schools have become so expensive as to be unaffordable to people whose parents lack financial means.

(4) The burden of student loan debt doesn’t show up in income statistics, but in reality the kid from a prole family who graduates with $30,000 of debt is in worse financial shape than the kid from an upper middle class family who graduates debt-free.

(5) Statistics falsely equate that someone with a degree from a directional state school and who makes $75,000/year working in sales is of the same social class as someone with a degree from an Ivy who makes $75,000/year working for a non-profit.

Charles Murray then attempts to describe the new Elite. He should have just given readers a link to the SWPL blog. Murray has obviously seen the discussions of SWPLs on the internet, but he doesn’t give credit where credit is due. Instead, he prefers to cite journalist/authors like David Brooks.

Is SWPL the new elite? I think so, especially if you accept that there are two flavors of SWPL: preppy-SWPL and hipster-SWPL. Investment bankers are preppy-SWPL and people working for non-profits or in creative industries are hipster-SWPL, but both types of SWPL like sushi and degrees from Ivy League schools and neither type of SWPL would take a vacation to visit the heartland of America in an RV.

Now what creates the resentment of Tea Party people towards the SWPL elite is the fact that the SWPL elite disdain the “wrong kind of white people.” SWPLs feel like they belong to a different tribe than the non-SWPL whites. They are more interested in teaching English to monks in Sri Lanka and bringing solar power to remote parts of the Himalayas than they are in helping Americans living in the same country.

Why is anyone surprised that the people the elite look down on have come to resent the elite?

Blacks in Prospect Park

This picture was taken at the south eastern area of Prospect Park. Just outside the park is the ghetto. It looks like some of the ghetto residents have wandered into the park and are gathered together in some sort of huddle.

Normally, I feel that there’s no artistry in taking pictures with a telephoto lens, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea for a nerdy white guy like myself to walk up to these guys in order to get a more intimate photo.

I must point out that this is not the typical crowd that hangs out in Prospect Park. I estimate that only 15% of the people you see in Prospect Park are black, and of the 15%, one third are Oreos and another third are immigrant blacks from the Caribbean and Africa.

Marathons are unhealthy, even when they don't kill you

As reported by the New York Times:

Distance running, in particular, has a documented history of injury: a 2007 study published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine found rates of injury to the lower extremities were as high as 79 percent in long-distance runners.

Another study published in 2008 in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports found that 28 percent of 694 male runners polled sustained a lower-extremity injury while running in a marathon or in the month before it.

Why do SWPLs like marathons so much?

* * *

In other marathon news, two men died earlier this month from running in the Great Eastern Run half marathon in Peterborough, England.

A 25-year-old man died from running in the Kilomathon in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In September, a woman died from running in a half marathon in Tennessee.

Visit to Prospect Park (with HBD commentary)

I took the Q train to the Prospect Park station. This is on the bad side of the Park. Before heading into the park, I walked a bit down Flatbush Avenue, a commercial street which serves the mostly black residents of the area.

A large number of the stores were barbers, hair stylists, and nail salons. There is no white neighborhood with so many of these places. Black people obviously put a lot more time and effort into their appearance than white people. Who knew?

There were lots of places to buy greasy food like pizza and fried chicken. And many bodegas. Liberals like to complain that poor people are fat because of the “unhealthy” food sold in their neighborhoods. Well, there were loads of empty storefronts waiting to be rented (obviously, business isn’t booming along Flatbush Avenue). I challenge these liberal do-gooders to stop complaining and open up a store on Flatbush Avenue selling “healthy” food. Of course the store will go out of business, because black people don’t want to eat food that white people consider to be “healthy.”

On the other hand, such a store might be profitable because there are a few brave white people trying to gentrify the neighborhood. Amongst all of the stores catering to blacks were two SWPL places. One sold “fine art clothing,” and the other was a coffee house in which I could see white people sitting around with coffee and their laptop computers.

It looks like you’re in the country, but it’s Brooklyn

So then I walked into Prospect Park, and it was like I entered a whole different world. There were hardly any black people in Prospect Park, even though it borders a black neighborhood. Black people obviously don’t like trees. This probably explains why blacks always live in cities, and then when you wander off into the countryside, there are fewer black people.

This is not to say that Prospect Park was all SWPL. There were many ethnic and working class whites in Prospect Park. I even saw a Hispanic SWPL couple. They looked just like two white people dressed in a SWPL-hipster manner, except they were talking to each other in Spanish. This demonstrates how the word “Hispanic” covers such a wide variety of people. Black Puerto Ricans are Hispanic, but some of the very whitest people you’ll ever meet (such as the couple I saw in Prospect Park) are also Hispanic!

Paladino is right; Cuomo wrecked our economy

This is the most correct thing that Paladino ever said:

"The housing bubble occurred because of one man -- that was Andrew Cuomo," Paladino told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.

Paladino linked the bubble to policies carried out by Cuomo when he was housing and urban development secretary during Democratic President Bill Clinton's second term from 1997 to 2001.

It’s amazing that Andrew Cuomo is the favorite candidate for governor rather than someone retired and living in shame for his destruction of the U.S. economy.

Unfortunately, our liberal-controlled media loves Cuomo and hates Paladino. It’s journalists who control the vote and not rich people. This liberal op ed piece in the NY Times is so completely wrong. When Paladino loses in two weeks, it will be yet another example of how a rich person cannot buy himself an election when journalists have decided they don’t like him.

Google AdSense censorship update

There were some comments to my post two weeks ago suggesting that maybe Google banned my domain from AdSense because there was an automated determination by web-crawling robots that my post on why a career in computer programming sucks was duplicate content. That essay has, indeed, been copied at many other web pages.

So I decided to fill out the Google form, and wrote that I was the author of the essay. However, my submission was ignored until yesterday, when I received what looks like a form-email saying that my "site was found to be in violation of our program policies" without any explanation of what policy was violated.

In retrospect, I think it’s unlikely that Google would simply ban my website based on a computer-controlled determination. This domain was on-track to earn me about $1750 in AdSense revenues this year, before it was turned off. Google probably pays me less than half of what they make from the ads. No company is just going to throw away $2000/year without a human making a judgment call. [UPDATE: I underestimated the payout ratio, which is around 70%. Google is "only" losing $1000/year, maybe a bit less, from banning me.]

The logical conclusion is that someone complained to Google that my blog is “racist,” and some SWPL-human at Google agreed. Why else would Google send me a non-informative form letter? Being "racist" is the most evil thing in the world. If I had merely violated some other policy, Google would have probably told me what I did wrong so I could fix it, which would be a win-win situation for both me and Google.

Google seems to have a monopoly on context-sensitive pay-per-click ads for publishers with less than 10 million page views per month, and other types of ads haven't been very successful on my blog, so I guess I'm out $1750/year going forward.

No need to feel sorry for Juan

Fox News hired Mr. Williams for $2 million over the next three years. Getting fired by NPR was the best thing that ever happened to his finances.

Too bad there’s no way to turn my status as a semi-famous HBD blogger into profit.

Why NPR fires news analysts

When I heard that an NPR news analyst was fired because of statements he made about Muslims, I assumed he must have said something like Islam is a religion whose goal is to convert the whole world and which views violence as an appropriate method to reach that goal.

All he said was :

I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the Civil Rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Big deal? Apparently it’s a big deal to NPR who fired him for saying that.

Anne Applebaum demonstrates my point

Last month, in my blog post Democrats and the wealthy, I wrote: “Democrats believe that the wealthy have done a better job of doing the right things such as going to Harvard.”

Last week, as if trying to demonstrate my point, Anne Applebaum defending the “elite” against the Tea Party, wrote the following: “To study hard, to do well, to improve yourself -- isn't that the American dream?”

Blacks not so irrational

Chidike Okeem writes:

It is my contention that black people who diligently vote for Democrats are intellectual slaves to the liberal agenda…

And there’s a zillion words after that trying to demonstrate his point. But Mr. Okeem just doesn’t get it. The reason why blacks vote Democratic is really simple: Democrats give them stuff. Affirmative action, welfare benefits, etc. Despite the fact that a black activist will act all outraged when a white person says something that’s pro-HBD, blacks themselves behave as if they understand the implications of HBD, which is that they can’t compete with other races in a free market.

As I wrote before, blacks have a great deal of race-loyalty. Poor blacks consider it a victory for their team when well-off blacks are benefited by affirmative action. Well-off blacks consider it a victory for their team when wealth is transferred from rich whites to ghetto blacks.

So Okeem is completely wrong. Blacks are rationally voting in favor of their interests when they vote Democratic.

Elite studies

I have stated before that academics spend far too much time studying the poor and far too little time (if any at all) studying the rich. Therefore, this NY Times article, about a group of Ivy League college professors studying the “the elite,” bespeaks a good trend.

* * *

the biggest determining factor of whether someone moved into the elite was an early career opportunity

This demonstrates the truth of my tracks theory of labor market outcomes.

The end of the Age of Enlightenment

As I’ve written before, people believe what they believe for social reasons and not because they actually know a lot about a topic in question and have done a lot of independent thinking and investigations.

Beliefs differ by social and intellectual class. People in the higher social classes believe what other people of the higher social classes believe. Smart people believe what other smart people believe.

During the Age of Enlightenment, the smart people always had the correct beliefs, because the smart valued reason, intellect, and scientific inquiry.

This probably was not the case before the Age of Enlightenment, which I’ll call the Age of Catholicism. During this pre-Enlightenment Age, the smart people believed the teachings of the Catholic Church. In those days, the Bible was not available in languages other than Latin, and literacy wasn’t even widespread in people’s native languages, so only the learned could read Latin and know what was in the Bible.

Sometime during the 20th Century, the Age of Enlightenment ended and the Age of Political Correctness began. In the current age, the smart people no longer value reason and scientific inquiry, therefore what the smart people believe (man is causing global warming, blacks are just as intelligent as whites, eating cholesterol is the worst thing for your health, Islam is a religion of peace) is no longer a guide to the truth.

Greg Mankiw's sob story

Greg Mankiw was on CNBC this morning defending his last week’s NY Times column in which he complained that there’s no point in him bothering to do extra paid speaking engagements because taxes are so high that he doesn’t get to keep any of the money.

First of all he claims that a $1,000 payment would only yield him $523 of net income after a 39.6% federal income tax plus FICA taxes and Massachusetts state taxes. This is probably correct. But then he makes a lot of dubious assumptions in order to claim that his marginal tax rate is 90%, and part of this assumption involves knowing what the estate tax will be when he dies. He must be psychic or something.

I assume he’s already giving his kids the maximum gifts per year to avoid estate taxation, which means that if he’s married, he can currently give each of his kids $26,000 per year, gift tax free. Wow, who knew that being a Harvard professor was so profitable? My parents give me bubkes each year; I obviously did a bad job of choosing my parents.

Is the economy really hurt if Greg Mankiw turns down a paid speaking opportunity? Paid speaking is a value transference activity. Mankiw’s speeches are only valued because he’s a famous economist, and making money from speaking is a winner-take-all activity. There are a lot of economics professors making five figures who would love the opportunity to be paid to make a speech, and maybe if Mankiw turns down a speech, someone who needs the money more will have the opportunity to make some extra income and build up his resume to make more money in the future. This is why I call this a value transference activity: Mankiw’s loss is someone else’s direct gain. There is no value destroyed because Mankiw decides not to make a speech.

Where the stimulus is going

From a NY Times article:

[F]oreign investors are moving money to emerging markets in part to take advantage of a growing gap between near-zero interest rates in the United States and Japan, and rising rates in India, Brazil and elsewhere. A key benchmark rate set by the Reserve Bank of India stands at 6 percent, up 1.25 percent since March. As the difference between rates grow, traders can make more money by borrowing cheaply in dollars and yen and investing that money in higher yielding stocks and bonds in developing economies.

The Institute of International Finance, an association of financial firms, estimates that emerging markets will receive $825 billion in private capital flows this year, up from $581 billion in 2009.

$825 billion in a single year is a huge amount of money. It’s as I’ve been writing for a while: the stimulus is stimulating China and India instead of the United States and other Western countries.

Global warming scam: the greatest pseudoscientific fraud of our generation

Columnist James Delingpole publishes the letter of resignation which Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara sent to the American Physical Society. He quit because he can’t stand the society’s involvement in the global warming scam. Here’s the best paragraph:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Humans in five hundred years

Inspired by a post at Marginal Revolution, How recognizable will humans be in five hundred years?.

(1) For most people, having children is something that just happens. This is evidenced by all of the children being born out of wedlock.

(2) Even for people who plan for children, many have the belief that they shouldn’t mess with nature.

(3) Initially, technology to improve one’s offspring’s genes will be very expensive.

(4) Current society believe that it’s evil to try to improve the genes of other people’s children. On the other hand, rich people commonly practice personal eugenics by being selective in who they marry and have sex with.

(5) The end result of this will be that technologies which improve your children will be adopted only by the secular elite, creating even more inequality than already exists. Eventually, it will be as if the elite is an entirely different species than regular humans, who will be relegated to the role of serfs in the new class structure.

If anyone disagrees with this analysis, explain why it is wrong.

Well, it’s possible that a society which doesn’t share our values, such as China, will mandate the use of genetic technology on all births, and create a country of superhumans who will subjugate the rest of the world.

Paladino’s Rabbi

I was surprised as anyone to discover that Paladino’s anti-gay speech was written by ultra-Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Brooklyn.

Rabbi Levin's goal is to create an Orthodox Jewish Tea Party.

I love Levin’s statement a few months ago about Elena Kagan:

It is clear from Ms. Kagan's record on issues such as abortion-on-demand, partial-birth-abortion, the radical homosexual and lesbian agenda, the 'supremacy' of the anti-family panoply over religious liberties of biblical adherents, et. al., that she will function as a flame-throwing radical, hastening society's already steep decline into Sodom and Gomorrah.

Republicans and the stock market

I’ve been seeing a lot of commentary on CNBC which says that the stock market has been going up recently because people are factoring in a Republican win, and Republicans are good for the stock market.

This is bad analysis. As I keep pointing out the wealthiest Americans voted for Obama over McCain by 50% to 48%. I fail to see why the wealthiest Americans would be less optimistic about the investing climate if their favorite team (if only by a tiny margin) is going to take a beating in November. Even the world’s richest investor, Warren Buffett, is a Democrat.

A more likely explanation for the recently rising stock market is that Democrats have been using their behind-the-scenes control of the government to stimulate the economy as much as possible prior to the election, because they know that the worse the economy is, the bigger the beating they will take in November.

Or it could just be a coincidence.

Who's the real Italian?

I found the NY Times article about the Italian identities of the two NY gubernatorial candidates, Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino, an interesting read.

Staten Island was mentioned several times in the article. Staten Island is a topic previously blogged about: Don’t move to Staten Island, A Staten Island story.

I have to agree with Carl Paladino in that he’s the only gubernatorial candidate who has an authentic Italian vibe, although that’s not really such an admirable trait. Mario Cuomo had a little bit of an Italian vibe about him, but the son has adopted himself into the upper class elite, and members of the elite don’t behave like guidos.

Is it racist to point out that a visible plurality of southern Italians living in the New York area behave in an extremely low class manner? Well, how do we expect people to improve their behavior if everyone is afraid to point out that they are misbehaving in the first place?

In a comment to one of those Staten Island blog posts, David Alexander wrote:

The guido men suck, but their women are attractive in a skanky and trashy sort of way…

* * *

Carl Paladino doesn’t like gays:

"I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don't want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option," he said. "It isn't."

. . .

Paladino's prepared text for the campaign event included this line, "There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual. That is not how God created us." Paladino omitted the passage when he spoke to the crowd, but it was widely reported.

Working class Italians don’t have a very high opinion of homosexuality, especially from Carl Paladino’s generation. Having grown up in Staten Island, I suppose this viewpoint has infected me. If I grew up in Scarsdale, I’d probably be pro-gay marriage.

* * *

Check out this picture of Carl Paladino with his ultra-Orthodox Jewish supporters. The Jews who are the most Jewish are strongly Republican.

Mayor Bloomberg and food stamps

Mayor Bloomberg proposes that people shouldn’t be allowed to buy soda with food stamps.

I agree. Soda is an unnecessary luxury good. Water is free. The problem with this proposal is that it doesn’t go far enough. Food stamps shouldn’t be allowed to buy any luxury food items at all. In fact, the only thing you should be able to buy with them is Soylent Green.

Mayor Bloomberg's proposal only enforces SWPL ideas of what poor people should be eating. Soda is out, but you can used the food stamps to buy some overpriced SWPL drink like pomegranate fruit punch which is just as unhealthy as the soda.