Half Sigma

The Israeli Air Force

So here’s the answer to the question about whether Turkey’s F-16s pose a threat to Israel.

First of all, Israel has the best fighter pilots of any air force in the world. Better than the United States.

But wait, you may ask. Isn’t the U.S. the best at everything? The answer is that Israel does a much better job of recruiting and training fighter pilots for the following reasons.

1. In Israel, fighter pilots are the greatest national heroes. Every kid in Israel wants to be a fighter pilot in the way that a kid in the United States would want to be a professional football player or an investment banker. The U.S. may have a bigger population to recruit from, but only a very small percentage put themselves up for recruitment, whereas the IAF goes out to the high schools to find the kids who would be the best fighter pilots, and an opportunity to attend fighter pilot training is not an opportunity any Israeli would turn down (and three years of military service is mandatory anyway).

2. The USAF doesn’t train people to be pilots until they finish with officer training. In other words, you have to graduate college first and then start your pilot training when you are 22. The Israelis skip the unnecessary four years of college and start training pilots when they are 18. This means that an Israeli pilot of the same age has more experience than an American pilot, and that an Israeli pilot with the same experience as a U.S. pilot is younger with quicker reflexes. And this means that Israeli fighter pilots can serve longer.

3. The IAF only lets the best of the best become fighter pilots: less than 5% of those who start training. U.S. fighter pilot training is a lot less selective because there’s a limited pool of air force officers to train. It’s not that the USAF lets just anyone enter the air force academy, graduate, and then start pilot training, but unlike the U.S., Israel makes it an important national priority to make sure the very best of the best become fighter pilots, and this is simply not a U.S. priority. In fact, a secret of the upper classes in the U.S. is that the best of the best don’t go into the military at all, they go to Harvard and become investment bankers, lawyers, or management consultants.

4. And of course, everyone who reads this blog knows that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than gentile whites, and being a top fighter pilot probably requires a high IQ.

So this explains the Israeli edge in pilot training. Israel also has an edge in equipment. Even though Turkey and Israel both have “F-16s”, all of the Israeli F-16s have special upgraded made-in-Israel electronics that no other country has. Israel orders all of its fighter planes with a lot of the electronics missing, and then Israel installs its own.

Israel has the world’s most advanced F-16s, because there was a special order of 100 F-16Is delivered during the last decade, a recent model designed especially for the IAF with longer range, a second seat for a weapons specialist, and of course Israel’s own special electronics.

Furthermore, Israel manufactures its own missiles. The Derby medium range air-to-air missile, and the Python short range air-to-air missile.

It’s rather interesting that the Israelis manufacture their own missiles and their own aircraft electronics. It seems that Israel doesn’t entirely trust the United States. Perhaps they think that U.S. electronics and missiles might somehow stop working if the U.S. ever decided they didn’t want them to work? Also, it would seem that the Israelis are aware that a lot of “friendly” Islamic countries have F-16s and AIM-120 AMRAAM and Sidewinder missiles, and they have been preparing to fight against this U.S.-built equipment for a long time.

* * *

JP writes:

The US pool, of course, includes US Jews; there are roughly equal numbers of Ashkenazi Jews in the United States as there are in Israel.

But American Jews don’t join the Air Force. According to his article, in 2005 there were a total of 40 Jews at the U.S. Air Force Academy, so the USAF graduates approximately 10 Jewish officers each year, which is the pool of Jews available to enter fighter pilot training (plus any other Jews who happen to become Air Force officers through a ROTC program, which is probably a number you can count on the fingers of one hand).

The Turkey problem

Turkey used to be the good guys when they were run by a secular government and kept secular by the Turkish army. Except for their unlawful invasion and continuing occupation of northern Cyprus. But we were willing to overlook that because they bordered the Soviet bloc and weren’t communist. And then the Cold War ended but we were willing to overlook that out of habit, and because they were friendly with Israel and an example of a peaceful (except for that invasion of Cyprus) democracy in a majority Islamic country and thus a good example for other Islamic countries. We also overlooked their suppression of the Kurdish independence movement. And their refusal to acknowledge that Ottoman Turkey massacred 1.5 million Armenians in the first genocide of the 20th century.

But what is Turkey good for now that they have an Islamist government, and Erdogan is going around threatening to make war with Israel and trying to look like a hero of some kind to the Sunni Islamic Arab masses? Instead of radical Islamic countries becoming more like Turkey, Turkey is becoming more like radical Islamic countries.

And for those who buy into the bullshit that Turkey cares about the Palestinians because they are such humanitarians, think again. Israel hasn’t done anything to the Palestinians that Turkey hasn’t done worse to the Kurds or to Greek Cypriots. Do you think you can just deliver “aid” to the PKK without being shot at by the Turkish army? The reason why no Israelis have been killed trying to deliver aid to the PKK is because Israel respects its friendships and doesn’t try to destabilize Turkey by giving aid to its enemies.

More than four years ago I warned about the Islamization of Turkey. It’s too bad no one in power listens to me.

If Turkey tries to land warships in Gaza, I hope that Israel does the right thing and sinks them. The only thing that protects Israel from war is that Israel’s neighbors know they will lose, but they forget this unless Israel demonstrates every decade or so that their military is way more powerful than any Islamic country’s military. But Israel hasn’t made this point since they destroyed the Syrian air force in the 1980s, and it seems to me that the Islamic countries need to be reminded again.

* * *

Does anyone with any knowledge of aerial warfare know if Turkey knows how to use all of those F-16s we sold them?

Vaccines and Republicans

Yuval Levin writes at National Review:

[T]here is no excuse for Michelle Bachmann’s preposterously ill-informed assertion about the risks of the vaccine. After the debate, Bachmann told Fox News that “there’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

That is beyond ridiculous, and it is profoundly irresponsible. There is no evidence to support any link between this (or any) vaccine and mental retardation. None. Baseless assertions to the contrary about various vaccines have for years been piling needless guilt upon the parents of children with autism and other disorders, and driving other parents away from vaccinating their children against diseases that could do them great harm. A presidential candidate should not be engaging in such harmful nonsense.

I agree completely. As I previously said, Michele Bachmann isn’t smart enough to be president, and for that matter neither is Rick Perry.

It’s even weird that the HPV vaccine is an issue. Many states besides Texas require it, and vaccines are the only preventive medicine that really works. While it’s true that HPV could be avoided by not having sex outside of marriage, let’s be realistic: we live in a country where half the children are born outside of marriage, and we are unable to prevent NAMs and even prole whites from engaging in all sorts of self-destructive behavior.

What the "poverty rate" really means

I have to agree with this Heritage Foundation article that points out that nearly two-thirds of people officially living in “poverty” have cable television. (Hat tip Steve Sailer).

The term “poverty” implies homeless people or people starving for lack of food. But in fact, the “poverty rate” is a meaningless and arbitrary designation that just means a person is poor. And it’s not surprising that poor people have LCD televisions and videogames, because television and videogames are cheap entertainment for poor people. Rich people go on expensive vacations, play golf, and do other things to entertain themselves that poor people can’t afford.

I have no doubt that the high unemployment rate of the past three years has hurt some poor people quite a lot, but that's not very well captured by the official "poverty rate" statistic. Someone genuinely in poverty shouldn't be able to afford the recurring monthly fee for cable television.

What’s the truth about internet access in Idahao?

A NY Times article says that Idaho has slow internet download speeds.

But then I looked up what’s available in Coeur D’Alene, and Qwest offers7 Mbps for only $30/month. That’s less than I pay for much crappier internet access in Manhattan (where I seldom see anything download faster than 1.2 Mbps, and it often slows to a crawl in the evenings).

Big news: Jews vote Republican

In the special election in Brooklyn and Queens to replace Anthony Weiner, the Republican guy won, in a district that until this year no one would ever have thought would ever elect a Republican.

Not only are voters pissed about the bad economy, Jews in particular are pissed about Obama’s lack of support for Israel, the recent goings on in the Middle East during the last week in which Turkey is threatening war against Israel and Egyptians sacked and destroyed the Israeli embassy may have had something to do with it.

“I am a registered Democrat, I have always been a registered Democrat, I come from a family of Democrats — and I hate to say this, I voted Republican,” said Linda Goldberg, 61, after casting her ballot in Queens. “I need to send a message to the president that he’s not doing a very good job. Our economy is horrible. People are scared.”

The morons who keep us safe

F-16s launched, three innocent people treated like terrorists and taken off an airplane in handcuffs. All becauase, reading between the lines, one passenger on the plane had diarrhea and the two people sitting next to him had to keep getting up to let him go to the bathroom.

Jobs and status

anonmouse writes:

The "masses" mostly waste away in cubicles doing makework. The elite do things like install mosquito nets in sunny third world locales

I assume that anonmouse is referring to activities like the Peace Corps in which young people from well-off families do work in third world countries that would be considered menial low-wage low-status work if done in the United States.

This demonstrates two points.

(1) If people are convinced that a certain activity is high status or in some way “meaningful,” they will gladly do it no matter how objectively stupid it may be.

(2) We currently see jobs becoming a luxury for the rich. Only young people from well-off families can afford to “work” in the Peace Corps.

The future when people will play WoW for a living

I have to thank commenter “Drole Prole” for proving the link to this CNN commentary by Douglas Rushkoff about the theory of jobs.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

Rushkoff also points out:

America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

And then he asks:

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

And finally, Mr. Rushkoff seems to agree with my idea from last week that we pay people to play World of Warcraft:

As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

He makes it sound a lot better than it is. Most people lack the IQ to “write books” or “educate and inspire one another.” Of course, even the low IQ can solve problems, but the only problems they can solve seem trivial and ridiculously easy to those of higher IQs.

Anyway, there’s already slave labor in China making virtual gold playing World of Warcraft. So it’s not too much of a leap of imagination to think that one day, the U.S. government will pay its citizens to do pointless virtual activities (but which, through clever programming, seem meaningful to the participants).

Also, it’s humorous to note that the current mode of thinking is that poor people have to work and rich people live a life of leisure. But in the future, it’s likely that working at real jobs will be a luxury for the rich, and the masses will play computer games for a living.

Is the U.S. reverting to an agricultural economy?

When you hear about people growing their own food, you probably think of SWPLs afraid of toxins who think that growing their own food is healthier or is more sustainable. But as documented by the NY Times, poor people in rural areas are increasingly growing their own food because it’s less expensive than buying it at the supermarket.

[I]n rural America, consumers are opting for locally grown food — from their own gardens and neighboring farmers — largely because it is cheaper.

Rebecca Frazier, a teacher here, said she had cut her food bill in half by growing her own and preserving and by buying in bulk from local farmers. She recently paid $10 for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, a fraction of the store price.

“I’m getting twice the food for a whole lot less money,” she said.

Timothy Woods, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky who has studied the evolution of farmers’ markets in the state, said more rural residents were selling surplus out of their gardens for supplemental income, a pattern that has helped double the number of farmers’ markets in eastern Kentucky since 2004.

Those markets are geared to shoppers who want to buy in bulk at the lowest possible price in order to pickle, can, dry and freeze, Mr. Woods said — unlike urban markets, where customers pay double rural prices and typically eat what they buy right away.

“You won’t see certified organic products or any fancy marketing,” he said of rural markets. “It’s a very different world.”

Because all the jobs created by the industrial revolution are either moving to China and India, or are reserved for children of the rich, poor people are reverting to pre-industrial ways.

Logan's run and RENEW!

Last night I re-watched the beginning of Logan’s Run.

It begins with two Sandmen, Logan and Francis, walking into “Carrousel” which is the name of the “renewal” ceremony. The mob of people, all wearing either green or red robes (except for the Sandmen dressed in black with a gray horizontal stripe), sit down in a large circular auditorium. After the crowd is seated, the unfortunate participants in the ceremony walk into the center of the circle. They are wearing outfits with lightning stripes on them, and spooky white masks which hide their faces. They begin spinning around in a circle, and then start floating up into the air. And then, one by one, they begin exploding.

As this happens, the crowd works themselves into a frenzy, shouting “RENEW! RENEW! RENEW!’ Every time one of the figures explodes, they shout “RENEW!”

I would think this ceremony would get boring really fast. How many times can you watch people float up into the air and explode without getting bored by it? Of course, I think the same thing about going to religious ceremonies. How many times can you should “PRAISE JESUS!”?

We are supposed to believe that this Carrousel ceremony holds deep religious or spiritual significance to the residents of the domed city, and that they desire to see this ceremony and shout “RENEW” for the same reason that Southern Baptists will go to church and shout “JESUS!”

Today the word “renew” is one of the 3Rs of the environmental movement: renew, recycle, reuse. As I’ve said over and over again, the environmental movement is more religion than it is science. The only thing it needs to become a more formal religion is for the people to attend religious ceremonies. And what might they do at such a ceremony? They might very well shout “RENEW!” or “RECYCLE!” I really do think that Logan’s Run eerily predicted the future.

* * *

During the Carrousel ceremony, Logan receives a phone call (the movie predicted cell phones too) that there’s a “runner” outside of the stadium. A “runner” refers to someone who tries to avoid the near-certain death of the Carrousel ceremony, but it’s a pretty pointless thing to do. The central computer, which tracks everyone based on the chips implanted in their palms, knows that someone is running because of their suspicious movements, and then the Sandmen are sent to kill them. And of course the Sandmen have no problems tracking them down, because of the chip.

Francis asks Logan (or maybe it was the other way around), “why do they run and die when they could have been renewed in Carrousel?”

How can the government create jobs?

Quoted from Lawrence Auster’s blog:

NOTHING LIKE A FAILED AND DISASTROUS IDEA THAT WILL NEVER DIE

And not only does it never die, it keeps being expanded. Earlier this week Rep. Maxine Waters in a TV interview called for "a jobs program of a trillion dollars or more." Does she mean a trillion dollar jobs training program? Or a trillion dollar version of Porkulus? What differences does it make? The core belief of today's Democrats is that ever-increased government spending is the source of ever-increasing human happiness.

The jobs situation sort of puts Republicans into a contradictory situation. On the one hand they want to blame Obama for people being unemployed, but on the other hand they like to say stuff like “government doesn’t create jobs, private business creates jobs”. If government doesn’t create jobs, then why blame Obama for the lack of jobs?

Of course the fact is that the government does in fact create jobs. Lots of jobs. If you include people working in education, more than 20 million people work for government. I think if you include people working for private companies providing services for government (which is how I and millions of others worked for the government) and members of the military, this number might move up to 30 million.

There’s the legitimate argument that a lot of government workers do inefficient make-work that’s a waste of the taxpayer’s money. On the other hand, we do need teachers, cops, and soldiers, so not all of them are doing inefficient make-work.

If 30 million already work for government, why not make it 32 million and lower the unemployment rate by a bit? If you pay each of them $40,000/year, then this program would cost only $80 billion a year, which doesn’t actually seem that expensive compared to other wasteful government spending.

What would these extra 2 million workers do? We could have them dig ditches, and then fill them in again. This would give people the dignity of doing honest labor which is better than paying them welfare benefits. At least that’s what some people might argue. I don’t know if I’m one of them.

* * *

Nicolia Yezhov gets one of the points I was trying to make:

The private sector also creates make work jobs and destroys real work jobs.

The problem is too many people and more people than is required to produce enough for everyone.

Conservatives and liberals still think in terms of a pre-industrial economy which had very little surplus all of which went to aristocrats.

* * *

Anon E. Mouse writes:

Just the act of getting up every day and going somewhere and doing something is enormously positive and there are positive externalities to jobs. People of normal means spend the money they earn (which is exactly what is missing from the economy) and, by people seeing other people work, it helps spread that norm.

Mr. Mouse is of the opinion that it’s good for society if people go to work, even if their work is economically useless make-work. But is this opinion correct, or merely an outmoded way of thinking?

Maybe we could just pay people to play an MMORPG such as World of Warcraft. That way they would have the illusion of doing work and being rewarded for it, but it wouldn’t create unnecessary pollution and depletion of our non-renewable resources which is what happens when people drive to work at a business which manufactures McMansions or Gucci handbags or other useless stuff we don’t need to survive.

Disease and IQ

Steve Sailer already blogged about the “study” that claims that infection disease causes lower national IQ.

Obviously, the authors of the article have the cause and effect backwards. Smart people create societies that have safe food and water, and vaccination programs which prevent the spread of disease.

* * *

This article about AIDS in South Africa is especially revealing.

Before 1994, AIDS was rarely diagnosed among heterosexual black communities. In fact the ANC-regime spokesmen often were heard to describe it as 'the white man's disease'.

However, mainly because of this permeating culture of rape, fifteen years later, some 6,1-million mostly black young people are already dying of HIV/AIDS, and many thousands of new infections are notified each month.

After the end of apartheid, a culture of lawlessness emerged in which rape became commonplace and caused the spread of AIDS and other infectious diseases.

Immediately after apartheid ended in 1994, the country’s violent crime rate also jumped dramatically when the ANC-government replaced most of the previous (white but experienced) police force with inexperienced, new black recruits from the townships.

Thus we see compelling evidence of how a government run by people with low IQ leads to the spread of disease.

How Logan's Run predicted the future (now the present)

The movie may have a dumb plot and horribly bad special effects (despite winning an Academy Award for special effects), but it did an amazing job of predicting the future which is now the present.

Logan’s Run was filmed in a shopping mall. There weren’t too many shopping malls in 1976 but since then they became ubiquitous.

Logan’s Run has a scene filmed at a health club, showing people working out. Hardly anyone ever did this in 1976, but since then working out at a health club has become commonplace.

In Logan’s Run, people don’t get married. When they want to have sex, they go into their apartment, they use their computer to select a sex partner, and then if the other party is willing, they have casual sex. Society hasn’t gone this far yet, but we are a lot further in this direction than were in 1976. Today, the percent of people who get married is lower than it has ever been, and people do use Match.com and other online dating services to find members of the opposite sex.

In Logan’s Run, children aren’t raised by their natural parents. Today, an increasing number of children are only raised by their mother, so for a lot of children we are already halfway there. On the other hand, people got pissed at Newt Gingrich when he suggested that children should be raised in orphanages. So maybe we are not there yet.

In Logan’s Run, people have a device implanted on their palms which shows how old they are. We don’t do this yet, and clearly the palm location was done because it looked good in the movie and wouldn’t make any sense, but I do think we are nearing the day when all babies will be implanted with an identification chip when they are born.

In Logan’s Run, no one appears to work besides people with essential jobs such as cops (called Sandmen in the movie) and plastic surgeons. Until recently, the opposite appeared to be the case. The labor participation rate increased after the movie came out. But the recession has finally caused this trend to reverse. Surely in the future, most jobs won’t be necessary because they can be done by robots or by low wage people working in China, so most Americans won’t need to work.

And regarding the plastic surgery angle, since Logan’s Run was filmed, there has been a huge increase in the amount of plastic surgery. The movie got that right also.

In Logan’s Run, people lived in domes because of some unexplained environmental catastrophe that supposedly made the outside unlivable. There hasn’t been an environmental catastrophe, but more people than ever now believe that an environmental catastrophe is coming because of Global Warming, so I think the movie got this half right.

In Logan’s Run, people are executed when they turn 30 years old, in a quasi-religious ceremony which provides entertainment for the unemployed masses and in which the attendees express their belief that the people are not being killed, but rather that they are being “renewed”. The prediction about people being killed when they turn 30 hasn’t come true, but people are abandoning belief in Christianity in favor of what I often call Gaiaism, and using renewable resources is an important part of Gaiaism, so I think that even the most outrageous idea in the movie had some real predictive validity.

In the future, MMORPGs will be more popular

I believe that the popularity of playing MMORPGs (that’s an abbreviation for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, World of Warcraft for example) will increase in the future. It’s like with online dating. At first, there was a huge stigma associated with it, but nowadays normal people use online dating sites, and although there’s probably still a stigma, it’s a small one.

It’s worth wondering whether, in the future, society will collapse because people will be too busy playing online games to go to work, get married, have children, and do that that other boring mundane stuff that’s necessary for the continuation of civilization.

The MSM and Rick Perry

If the mainstream journalists had to pick one Republican currently running for the presidential nomination to be the next president of the United States, I am pretty sure that most would pick Mitt Romney, because he’s the smartest guy in the race.

However, a Republican nominating process in which Romney easily wins all of the primaries is boring. The MSM hopes for an exciting contest to give them something to report on. They want someone to challenge Romney and give them things to report about week after week.

Furthermore, although I said that most mainstream journalists would pick Romney over any other likely Republican, most mainstream journalists would also pick any likely Democrat over Romney. So the MSM couldn’t be more delighted than I if someone defeats Romney, but that person is so unelectable there’s no chance of him or her defeating Obama in the general election.

It would be even better if this unelectable person who defeats Romney is someone who epitomizes everything they think they hate about Republicans and makes them feel good and righteous for supporting Obama. Yes, the person they really want to win the Republican nomination is Sarah Palin. But alas, she doesn’t appear to be running. So they need to root for someone else.

That person might have been Michele Bachmann, because she seems rather Palin-like, and she’d certainly lose to Obama because of her lack of gravitas. But I think the MSM has decided they prefer Rick Perry as the anointed challenger to Romney, because Perry is really stupid . You surely have to be pretty stupid to get a 2.22 gpa while majoring in animal science. What the heck kind of major is animal science anyway? It sounds like the kind of major for people who aren’t smart enough to major in English or accounting, or God forbid a real science like Chemistry or Physics. In contrast, Michele Bachmann, even though she went to a pretty bogus-sounding law school, has an LLM and she passed the bar exam, so she has to be nearly equal in intellect to Joe Biden.

* * *

It’s too bad that the MSM is a lot better at unearthing embarrassing facts about Republicans then they are about Democrats. I’d really like to know what Obama scored on the SAT and the LSAT.

Popular sperm donors

According to an article in the NY Times, the most popular sperm donors spawn dozens of children, and there’s one sperm donor with 150 children.

Unfortunately, the article is about why this might be a problem, such as accidental incest. I was more curious to know why certain sperm donors become so popular, but unfortunately the article didn’t explain this.

* * *

Since I wrote this last night, I have had the following additional thoughts:

(1) Even if the popular sperm came with a warning that it was already used by hundreds of women, I don’t think it would deter very many from choosing it. Knowing how human nature works, women would want the popular sperm. It’s social proof that they are making the right choice.

(2) I think the chance of accidental incest is pretty small considering we’re a nation of 300 million people.

(3) Besides accidental incest, what exactly is the problem? I think this is only a problem for children born the normal way, because they have to compete against the artificially inseminated whose fathers are smarter, taller, and more athletic than their own fathers.

Magic the Gathering

I started doing some research after I wrote some blog posts about Jon Finkel, the former MTG world champion. Until two days ago, I never played this game (although I’ve seen other people playing once or twice).

If I were younger, it’s a game I probably would have played, because it seems like the game is pretty popular with the same types of kids who played D&D and other similar games. However, this game wasn’t released until I was in law school. And as hard as it is for some commenters here to believe, law students aren’t that nerdy, and as far as I know, no one at my law school played this game. The nerdiest thing we did was play ping pong. The law school had a ping pong table in the basement. I got pretty good at it. But I digress.

MTG is a card game with very complicated rules. To explain it as simply as possible, two players play against each other. Each draws from his own deck of cards. Each player starts with seven cards in his hand and draws one card per turn. Each turn a player may play one “land” card and as many “creature” and spell cards as he has “mana” for. The mana comes from the land cards. So the first turn, the player would put down one land card, then would have one mana for a spell card or a creature card. By turn six, the player may have six land cards on the table, and would have six mana available to play creatures and spells.

Each player starts the game with 20 hit points, and the players use their creatures and spells to attack the enemy player until the enemy player has zero hit points, and then you win because you’ve killed your opponent. After you figure out the rules, I think there is not a whole lot of strategy when you are actually playing the game; most of the plays seem pretty obvious. At least that was my initial impression playing a few games against the computer with preconstructed decks using the program Duels of the Planewsalkers 2012 which you can download and play a few games for free.

What made this game unique when it was introduced is that each player is supposed to create his own deck to play from beforehand. And here is how Wizards of the Coast has turned would should be a very inexpensive game, a card game, into something that costs a lot of money to play and they make a lot of profit from. WotC doesn’t simply sell a complete set of all the cards. Nope, you have to buy random assortments of cards, and some cards are “rare” cards so you might have to buy an extremely large number of packs of cards in order to obtain four of a particular rare card—for you see the rules allow you to have up to four of the same card in a deck (not including lands which you can have as many as you want). The hobby has developed an active secondary market for cards, so if you want to buy a particular card such as the Goblin of Death (just made up that name), instead of buying scores of “booster packs” hoping to find a Goblin of Death, it would be more efficient to just buy the card from a dealer, or on eBay.

According to online message boards, in order to construct a tournament-level deck, you have to expect to spend about $300 on cards. And I imagine that a lot of dedicated players have more than just one tournament-level deck, so I can imagine the seriously addicted spending a thousand dollars a year or more on this game.

If you look at the list of allowed decks for a “standard format” constructed deck, you will note that you are only allowed to use cards from sets published during the last two years. By rotating the allowed sets, WotC makes money by forcing people to buy new cards every year in order to have legal tournament decks. That’s quite a scam they have going.

But let’s put the cost of the game in perspective. While on the one hand it’s a rip-off considering it’s a card game, compared to a hobby such as golf, it’s probably not that expensive. People spend thousands of dollars a year just to be a member of a golf club. The difference is that golf is a respected hobby, so if you spend $5000 a year to be a member of a golf club, people think you are a successful person. But if you spend $5000/year on Magic cards, people think you are a sad and obsessed nerd addicted to a pointless game.

* * *

After the world saw how much money WotC was making from selling MTG, a lot of other people wanted to get in on the gravy train and create their own “collectible” trading card game. However, none of these copycat games ever reached the same level of success as Magic. This is the same first-mover advantage we see in all industries. Selling books online seems like it ought to be simple, but no one can beat Amazon.com at it. Many companies have tried to create clones of World of Warcraft, but none have been successful.

The big three balls (football, baseball, basketball) vs Magic the Gathering

I stick to my assertion in the previous post that games like Magic the Gathering are an enjoyable competitive pastime for young males who aren’t good at sports.

We know that society has a lot more approval for boys who play sports than boys who play in games. While it’s considered weird and obsessive to spend hours a day playing MTG, it’s considered perfectly normal to spend hours a day at football, basketball, or baseball practice.

There was a commenter who insisted that there was more to it than that, because anyone could compete at some sport even if they weren’t on the first string, so playing chess or MTG or D&D is a nerdy choice they make.

First of all, there is the general human trait that people enjoy doing what they are good at and they don’t enjoy doing what they aren’t good at. I expect that people in the bottom quartile of athletic ability would not find much enjoyment from sports.

Secondly, sports are harder to play if you’re not part of the school team, because they require a playing field and equipment, both of which are fairly expensive. I suppose the least expensive sport to play outside of the formal athletic structure would be basketball, which is why it became a popular ghetto sport. Even then, I don’t know what basketball-playing opportunities there are for unathletic kids who would not be welcome in pickup games if they showed up at the schoolyard. There’s no one out there organizing basketball leagues for the kids who suck at basketball.

Thirdly, games requiring analytical reasoning are inherently appealing to smart competitive people. Such games would probably be more popular were it not for the associated social stigma, and the strong social pressure to play physical sports.

After saying all this, however, there are probably some young males who are athletic enough to make some school team, but they choose to play games because they enjoy them more and they lack the social sophistication to understand that sports have much higher social approval. It’s this self-selection which taints all gamers, that combined with gamers being more likely to have unathletic bodies, a trait which society considers to be unattractive.

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We’ve previously discussed that one of the advantages of private schools is that they do a better job of finding athletic activities for all students to participate in, whereas at the typical public school, team sports are reserved for the more athletic students.

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I want to reiterate that gaming is something that some young males gravitate towards without any formal structure or adult involvement, while most athletic activity among young people is done under adult supervision and a formal structure set up by adults, such as the typical school sports program. Sports played outside of school usually require parental support, both in the form of money to buy equipment and pay for sports leagues, and also to drive the kids to the places where the sports are played.

Please stop calling nerds "aspies"

A reader writes:

Can people who've never met an actual Asperger's sufferer please stop talking about "aspies"?

I actually have Asperger's with severe social problems. I'm not a "nerd". I remember a clique of magic the gathering and dungeons and dragons players from high school and I wasn't a part of them. Why? I don't know how to be social and that stuff was simply the social circle of timid, unathletic nice guys who didn't binge drink and smoke ie "nerds". It was as unaccessible to me as any social circle: I just don't understand social relations well enough to enter one or even to make one friend there.

It doesn't matter if it's the social circle of timid nerds or druggies or whatever, an actual Asperger's guy is out for the same reason. "Nerds" as I remember them were plenty social and not the slightest bit Aspergery at all - it's just that they were too shy or immature to join some "cooler" clique.

Yes, the simplest explanation for young males playing MTG is that they want to enjoy competing at something, but they aren’t any good at sports. It doesn’t mean they have Asperger’s syndrome.

No new jobs

The business world is surprised the by today’s jobs report which shows zero jobs created during the month of August.

I don’t know why people keep being surprised by the low numbers. Don’t people get by now that this is the new normal?

I need to remind readers that the number of working-age people increases each month because of population growth, which predominately comes from immigration. So zero jobs created actually means there is a decrease in the percent of working-age people who are working. But the unemployment rate remains unchanged at 9.1%. This means that the percent of people who say they are either employed or looking for work has decreased. Otherwise the unemployment number would have increased.

The obvious way to reduce unemployment, if there’s no way to create new jobs, is to reduce the rate of increase in the working-age population, and this is something government could easily do by stopping all immigration until the unemployment situation improves. So why isn’t anyone even talking about this solution? Will anyone ever start talking about this solution? Or is talk about restricting immigration now considered so racist that it will never come up?

How did nerdy MTG player become rich hedge fund guy? Part 2

I took down the previous post, because I am pretty sure that Mark Finkel the venture capitalist is NOT the same Mark Finkel who is Jon Finkel's father.

Jon Finkel's father is a middle-class computer analyst.

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Apparently, Jon became successful honestly, by being really smart. This happens so rarely that it's always very surprising to discover it. This is probably why the girl didn't like him. He lacked the social graces of someone born to rich parents. Alyssa Bereznak comes from a more traditional upper middle class background. Her father is a patent attorney. Her mother also appears to have respectable white collar career.

An ironic story of status competition

Girl goes on date with guy. She discovers on the date that 11 years ago he was a world champion Magic the Gathering player. Then she writes a blog post mocking him for being a nerd.

The irony here is that the guy became a world champion Magic the Gathering based on the primal urge to increase one’s status. And although he’s high status within his social circle, the very fact that he achieved a high status among other Magic the Gathering players means he has an omega status among women, even 11 years later, and even though he apparently has a quite successful career in finance.

The value of a legal education

Law professor Paul Campos appears to have an even more negative view of law school than I do. He asks:

Here's a question: How many law graduates, especially recent law graduates, have a more positive view of law and the legal system than they did before they entered law school? I think it's fair to say that almost literally no one ever has this experience. If, as Carrington suggests, it's the law school's primary job to nurture rather than corrode faith in law and the legal system, then the law school is failing spectacularly.

I have to meekly raise my hand and say that I left law school with a more positive view of the law than when I entered. Of course, that viewpoint certainly wasn’t rewarded in the legal job market.

Then in his most recent post he mocks the idea that the study of law has any value outside of the practice of law. Here, I need to distinguish pecuniary value from humanist value. I do think there is value in studying the law, but it has absolutely no pecuniary value outside of the practice of law because those in our society who control who gets hired for jobs place no value on it. In fact, as I’ve discussed before, the law degree is definitely a negative in seeking employment in non-legal jobs. Everyone has an idea that the law degree is some wonderful credential that opens up doors to high paying jobs at law firms. So they can’t understand why someone with a law degree would want to do something else. Neither of the two obvious responses to why one isn’t practicing law sits well with employers.

(1) “I couldn’t find a job as a lawyer.” This makes the job applicant seem like a loser, and no one wants to hire a loser. Furthermore, it makes the applicant seem non-committed to the job being applied for and the person doing the hiring figures that as soon as the person finds a better job in law (which is not going to happen, but people outside of law just don’t get it) they are going to leave.

(2) “After law school, I decided that law just wasn’t for me.” This is better than answer number one, but for people who are bad actors, it’s hard to pull off. I have a really hard time discussing my law degree without being bitter about it. And in any event, people often don’t buy it, or still get a negative impression from it. “Who goes to law school for three years and then decides they don’t want to be a lawyer? What kind of moron does that?” some proleish interviewer kept asking me. Employers like to see people who are gung ho about their chosen career, and not people who are flighty and subject to sudden changes about what they want to do in life.

People who are able to spin their law degree into a big positive on non-legal job interviews probably could have just skipped law school and made a lot of money in sales.

In contrast to the law degree, everyone who does hiring seems to have a positive or at least a neutral impression of an MBA, even though people obtain MBAs from mediocre schools without learning anything at all. For example, a woman with an MBA once revealed that she had no idea what depreciation was. Huh? Didn’t she have to take an accounting class to get an MBA? You’d think that someone with an MBA would at least be able to read the most basic income statement and know what the terms mean.