Half Sigma

Condoleezza Rice

I watched enough of her speech to come to the conclusion that she’s a really crappy public speaker, although she seemed smart and competently knowledgeable about international relations.

There’s obviously a double standard. If a white man were a crappy speaker, then he would not be giving a big speech in front of the Republican Convention. Rice is a rock star among Republicans because of her race. Republicans hate feeling that they might be racist, so seeing a black Republican (who is a mulatto Oreo, heavily into classical music, and acts more white than even Obama does) makes them feel better about themselves, and allows them to say “ha you liberals, look, we have important black people on our side, we’re not racist” for which liberals will never give them the least bit of credit anyway. All the liberals are thinking what that guy from Yahoo News accidentally said into a live mike.

I wish I could simply judge Rice based on who she is as a person and not her race, but unfortunately it’s not possible because everyone else is judging her and treating her differently based on her race, and it becomes impossible to disentangle her race from her true character. It’s so rare to see a smart black person that when one shows up, she’s celebrated by everyone.

It’s also worth nothing that both white Democrats and white Republicans secretly wish that all blacks would behave like Obama or Rice. But if they want that to happen, then it would be more likely to happen if they would just publicly and openly state that as their goal.

No benefits to calorie-restricted diet

There has been this theory floating around that severe calorie restriction could lead to improved life expectancy.

As reported in the New York Times, a 25-year-long experiment on monkeys shows that this is not the case.

[T]he bottom line was that the monkeys that ate less did not live any longer than those that ate normally.

I would also like to mention, once again, the studies on humans which shows that overweight people live longer.

And relating this to my previous post, after fifty years of medical research, there’s no better recommendations for what people should be eating today than there were in 1962.

Robots and the singularity

People keep asking me about the singluarity. They say, “Half Sigma, why don’t you ever write about the singularity? All the really smart people write about the singularity? Aren’t you smart? Why don’t you write about it.” (Although did mention it two years ago.)

What’s the singularity? People use it to mean some future technological advancement in the biological sciences that will change everything. Make us immortal and increase our IQs to 200 and stuff like that.

I think this stuff is pretty farfetched and is not very likely to happen in my lifetime, which is why I don’t have much to say. Sometimes, scientific progress takes place a lot slower than people imagine. Fifty years ago, they thought by the year 2012 we’d have space travel to other planets, flying cars, humanoid robots whom you can have a conversation with. Where is this stuff?

Despite the discovery of DNA, medical science isn’t really moving forward that quickly. The two blockbuster medical advances responsible for dramatically increasing our life expectancy were antibiotics and vaccines, and they were a long time ago. We may even be falling backwards in the antibiotics arena because antibiotic-resistant bacteria are beginning to evolve.

Nowadays, it takes drug companies twenty years to develop a better drug for getting erections. They aren’t spending any real money developing science-fiction stuff like nanites. I think the time when the government puts nanites and gene-replacement viruses into the food and water supply is at least a century away, so I won’t be alive to see it, so there’s not much point in writing about it. Assuming that nanites aren’t just an imaginary fantasy technology like interstellar space travel. As I mentioned before, the singularity is Jesus for smart people.

The one thing I do predict is that whenever these new-fangled medical technologies become available, they will first be used by the upper classes to give advantages to their own children, and therefore instead of making the world a better place, they will likely only make it better for the rich as the world returns to feudalism.

What does this have to do with robots? I wrote a lot of posts about robots recently. Unlike the singularity stuff, robots are real. They don’t look like C3PO from Star Wars, but from ATM machines to the “robotic” factory featured in the NY Times article, machines are indeed replacing human labor, and the technology can only improve. I can guarantee that there will be better labor-saving machines in the near future, even though I have no idea when or if we will ever be able to manufacture something like C3PO.

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And once again, I’d like to mention the difficulty of building a tunnel under the Hudson River for trains. Governor Chris Christie had to cancel the project because New Jersey couldn’t afford it. Yet somehow, we were able to afford to build a tunnel in 1908, which was 104 years ago. Civil engineering is obviously a technology that has stalled and is not advancing. In another decade, we may see the end of Moore’s law and computer chips may be like civil engineering, not improving much for over a century.

And construction technology peaked in 1934 with the completion of the Empire State Building in only 410 days for a cost of $372.8 million in 2012 dollars (and $24.7 million in 1930s dollars). It's still the tallest building in Manhattan. Today, it would cost billions of dollars and take many years to build a similar building.

To succeed in journalism, have rich parents

A reader informed me of a great essay which everyone should read: How to Succeed in Journalism when You Can't Afford an Internship. The author, Alexandra Kimball, is a journalist from a lower-middle class background who made the mistake of trying to get into journalism, a career which I have pointed out before is only for people with rich parents.

Now although I have pointed this out before, as far as I know I am the only person in the entire world who has publicly written about this, until now. Why hasn’t it been written about before?

Well, it was strangely enough a revelation for me when I discovered that nearly all of the younger journalists working at the New York Times and other publications came from elite backgrounds and had financially successful parents. I think that most young people from the middle-class don’t understand how disadvantaged they are because young people from wealthier backgrounds don’t talk about their wealth or the help they’ve received from their parents. It’s kind of a taboo topic. It’s a combination of people wanting to present the impression to others and even to themselves that they’ve succeeded on their own, and an upper-class value that one should never talk about money. People from the middle-class might even cluelessly think that trust-funders don’t have to work, when the reality today is that it’s now considered very low class not to work—that’s for welfare people—and having a career demonstrates your superiority over the lower classes.

Kimball explains how it’s not just about the money needed to afford to work at unpaid internships while still living in an expensive city like Toronto, but about having the right attitude towards that work, which someone raised with middle-class values and who has student loan payments just cannot muster.

Kimball explains how she was only able to succeed in journalism after she inherited money from a relative, and somehow relieved of the burden of having to earn a living, she was finally able to establish a career. Kimball, therefore, is in the rare position of having been on both sides of the class divide, and maybe she now uniquely understands the psychological benefits of having money that few other people understand because they have only known one side of the divide.

Once again, this is a must-read essay. If there is one link you must click on, it’s the link to Kimball’s essay.

Diesel cars

In my post yesterday about unrealistic MPG standards, some readers reminded me about diesel.

Yes, they are right. Diesel engines are up to 30% more efficient than gasoline engines, and it's possible to build a small car with a high-tech diesel engine that can actually meat those fuel standards.

So how come no one is talking about diesel? Environmentalists dream of pie-in-the-sky technologies like electric battery-operated cars which will completel replace fossil-fuel-powered cars, even though these technologies have not been demonstrated to ever be practical. Meanwhile, the proven technology of diesel is so under-the-radar that hardly anyone even knows about its fuel economy advantages.

New York City Republican map

If you are familiar with neighborhoods in New York City, you’ll find this NYC Republican map fascinating.

The least Republican areas are the NAM areas which are all less than 10% Republican. The SWPL/gentrified areas of Williamsburg are less than 7% Republican.

In the middle of NAM Brookly there are few little spots of areas that are a bit more than 10% Republican. Those are Hasidic Jews. They probably vote Republican today to a greater extent than they are registered as Republican.

In Manhattan, the most Republican area is the traditional old-money area of the Upper East Side along Fifth Avenue. But this area is still less than 30% Republican, so I would hardly call it a bastion of Republicanism. This demonstrates how rich people in Finance and other New York City industries that make people rich enough to afford to live in the prestigious east Upper East Side are predominately Democrats.

The most Republican parts of the city are prole white areas, which are in Staten Island and Belt Parkway Brooklyn. This map demonstrates perfectly how rich whites and poor NAMs are Democrats, while Republicans are the working-class whites. It also shows the SWPL divide. Williamsburg-type SWPLS vote as Democratic as blacks, but Upper-East-Side-type SWPLs are slightly more conservative.

Strangely, I’ve never been to the far northeast part of Queens, so I am really not that sure about the neighborhood. I think it’s a good neighborhood, the most surburban-feeling part of New York City, less prole and more expensive than Staten Island, but also less Republican than Staten Island.

The most Republican Election District in New York City is Todt Hill in Staten Island, which is the most expensive neighborhood in Staten Island. Doctors who work in Staten Island and people who own successful businesses on Staten Island tend to live there. High-level mafia people also live there.

I advise you to ignore that purple district in the middle of Manhattan where Macy’s is located. There aren’t any residential buildings in those three blocks as far as I know, which is why there are only 8 registered voters who live there; so it’s just a statistical anomaly caused by lack of data.

Robotic airports

There may not be any showy robots like C3PO from Star Wars hanging out at the airport, but as reported by the WSJ we can see the beginnings of robot technology at work:

Airlines are laying the groundwork for the next big step in the increasingly automated airport experience: a trip from the curb to the plane without interacting with a single airline employee.

Unions understand what is happening:

Airline-employee unions, however, say the machines are a way for carriers to cut staff by outsourcing preboarding tasks to fliers. "Clearly it's not something passengers are clamoring for," said Frank Larkin, spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. "More technology, fewer people? I don't think so."

I’m generally happy with self-service. You don’t have to tip machines, and if they build enough of them, there’s no waiting in line. Airports always seem to have lines for everything. I really hate lines.

New Jersey is the most annoying place to buy gasoline because a featherbedding law requires the gas to be pumped by employees of the gas station. This usually means sitting in your car and waiting for the guy to come over, and then sitting in the car and waiting again for the guy to come back after the gas automatically stops pumping.

Rich people probably like being serviced because it feeds their oversized egos and makes them feel like bigshots, and as I point out, in the future a lot of middle-class jobs will be about performing unnecessary services for rich people so they can have that feeling of superiority over the masses.

Are fuel standards the next No Child Left Behind?

Just as it was impossible to make all children proficient in reading and writing just by saying it's going to happen, it’s also impossible to make the average car and truck get 54.5 mile per gallon by 2025 (unless we are talking about only making electric cars).

How close will we get to this train wreck? Probably not very far if Romney is elected president, because he will hopefully have the common sense to reverse these rules which were set by executive decision and not by any statutes passed by Congress.

“Thirteen major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have endorsed the new standards.” They figure they are an oligopoly so they will make money no matter what happens, as long as they stand together.

These are the genes of the future

From an article at the Daily Mail that Camlost mentioned in a comment:

Desmond Hatchett, 33, of Knoxville, has 30 children by 11 different women. He asked for his child support payments to be reduced - even though his paycheck stretched to just $1.49 per child per month. He is currently in jail for aggravated assault.

This demonstrates my point that in a world of non-marital sex and childbearing, children are disproportionately fathered by alphas, and in this case a super-alpha. These are not the genes we want in the future generation, but they are the genes we are going to get. People are not prepared for how bad things are going to be in another twenty years. The beta-male genes which are the fundamental building blocks of advanced civilization are rapidly being replaced by alpha-male genes.

The last sentence of the article reads:

Attorney Warren Campbell told Action News 5 if a person does not pay child support, the state ends up paying and there is no legal way to stop people from having children.

That’s true in the United States, but the Chinese have a lot more common sense than we do.

* * *

Regarding the article’s slant that men like Hatchett are irresponsible for not paying for their children, it’s pretty stupid to expect that someone like Hatchett can afford to even pay for one child let alone [30] of them, and the women who gave birth to these children chose to have sex with him, chose not to use birth control, and chose not to have abortions.

Dystopian robotic future part 4: runaway population growth

The conventional wisdom is that Malthus has been proven wrong and that population growth is slowing anyway.

The problem however is that humans have an infinite ability to reproduce, and most major religions encourage this. Only the Chinese have the wisdom to see the problem of runaway popuation growth and they have put a kibosh on it. The United States, dominated by Christians and whiny liberals, will never take the hard measures needed to curb runaway population growth. Not now, and probably not in a hundred years. (But who can see the future with 100% certainty?)

Although population growth appears to be slowing, or even going the other way (declining population) in many modern country, but the problem is that every woman doesn’t have exactly 2.1, or 1.8, or 1.5 children. A birthrate of 2.0 often means that one woman has no children at all while another woman has four. This means that the genes which cause fecundity will be much more prominent in future generations. I also suspect that genes correlated with fecundity are also correlated with other bad characteristics like low future-time orientation and low IQ, or the tendency to superstitiously cling to religions which encourage extreme childbearing like ultra-Orthodox Judaism. While much is made of high Jewish IQ, it is almost always secular Jews who have the high IQs and not the extreme ultra-Orthodox who tend to be rather prole. Even in Israel, they are starting to see the ultra-Orthodox as leeches who don’t contribute to the economy and don’t serve in the military.

So in the future, we will see increased fecundity of people with undesirable traits, while the upper classes continue to have few children because it takes so many resources to give children the human capital they need to remain upper class.

The next question is, what about genetic engineering? Well, for starters, it’s a science fiction technology, so who knows when, or if, that will ever be available? But when it does start to become something that can be used on humans, it will be the Chinese and not Americans who develop it first, because the Chinese don’t have all those Christian religious and bleeding-heart liberal attitudes to stop them. The Chinese will be using genetic engineering to create an obedient slave race of ape-human hybrids while we are still debating stem cell research. If such a thing is possible, of course. Or maybe, with robots, there won’t be a need for an obedient slave race, so that won’t happen.

I never see the U.S. or other Western governments mandating the use of genetic engineering because it sounds too much like Hitler, so if it’s legal, it will be used by people who have a lot of future-time orientation and want to have better offspring. In other words, the upper classes will use it to improve their own children, and the lower classes, where women already just give birth out-of-wedlock to the spawn of drug dealers and the like are not going to invest in genetic engineering.

Dystopian robotic future part 3: resource scarcity

In the not so distant past, people viewed the planet has having infinite resources, and the only thing that prevented us from having ample amounts of physical goods was labor and know-how. As I like to keep pointing out, in the early days of the United States both the federal government and state governments gave away land for free to anyone willing to farm it.

But things have changed since then. There has been a huge increase in world population, and there has also been a huge increase in the amount or productivity per human. In the future, when there is robot mining, robot agriculture, self-driving trucks, robot factories manufacturing robots for other factories, lack of labor will no longer be an issue with respect to the manufacture and distribution of physical goods. Resources will be the bottleneck that prevents infinite manufacturing.

This means that there will be even more devaluation of human labor. There won’t be enough resources available to employ even a small percentage of humans in manufacturing and other related blue-collar jobs given how few human workers will be needed in the future production chain.

Robot manufacturing will also have greater economies of scale than human-based manufacturing because it will probably take some human ingenuity to set up the factory, but once the factory is set up it cranks out merchandise twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with minimal human labor requirements. Therefore, it would be much more efficient to set up a single robot manufacturing process than to set up robot manufacturing processes for hundreds of small independent companies. In the future, the economy will be even more winner-take-all than it is today.

In the future we will see much less class mobility, because capital (robot factories, resources) are much more important than labor. If your born to a family with capital, then you will stay in the upper class, but if you are born to a family without capital, you will not be able to work your way up to a higher class because there will be such little demand for labor. Most people will work at government jobs which can’t be roboticized such as teaching, social work, law enforcement, and the military—jobs that are necessary to support and control the ever-growing lumpenproletariat. Or they will work in jobs where they serve rich people, because rich people like to lord it over the common folk so they prefer being served by humans rather than by robots. The upper class themselves will work in winner-take-all value transference jobs; fields in which those not born to money won’t be able to compete because they require so many years or costly education followed by non-remunerative work. There will be a small middle-class of engineers who program robots and computers and design new goods and industrial processes. They will be mostly Asian.

How do you profit from this robotic future? The answer is to invest in commodities because they will become more expensive. Because of peak oil, oil will be one of the first commodities to go up in value, so investing in companies with in-the-ground oil reserves is a good investment opportunity to profit from the dystopian robotic future.

And the other thing you need to do is to get in the upper class, because the future won’t have much of a place for those who just want to settle for just being middle class.

* * *

Don’t believe this vision of the future? Just look around and you will see that everything I predict for the future is already happening. These trends will just continue in the same direction, and in fact accelerate sharply in the near future when robots suddenly become commonplace rather than science fiction.

Muscularity of tennis players

Steve Sailer, who is an expert on sports, writes about the muscularity of tennis players:

And, again, here's that article in the New York Times Magazine trying to figure out why tennis fans have never really taken to the Williams Sisters. Is it their race?

Tennis fans are SWPLs, and SWPLs would LOVE to love black female tennis players who are like young female Barack Obamas—well behaved Oreo princesses—regardless of how buff they are. The Williams Sisters aren’t liked that much because they speak and behave like low-class ghetto blacks. Mystery solved.

The Williams sisters aren’t any worse looking than Martina Navratilova or Billie Jean King, neither of whom were great beauties; of course the princessy Chris Evert was more popular.

* * *

Carly Rae Jepson would be a really popular tennis player.

* * *

While she may not be the most ghetto of blacks, her low-prole outbursts at tennis matches are unappreciated. Tennis is a sport in which decorum is still appreciated. Arthur Ashe didn't do that stuff.

Darwin award, Afghanistan style

It’s really stupid to go to a dance party in areas controlled by the Taliban.

Why are houses so cheap in Boise, ID?

$89,900 for BRAND NEW unlived-in home with three bedrooms, two baths. Wow, that’s cheap. What’s the catch?

Maybe the catch is that it’s sort of a townhome [technically a condo, but when I think of a condo I think of an apartment building, and these are set up like townhomes], so you might get stuck with a prole neighbor who blasts heavy metal music, owns a pitbull, and generally makes your life miserable.

According to the NY Times Census map, this house is in a Census tract that is 83% white, 9% Hispanic, and only 1% black.

James Holmes really was a genius

I must have missed this story from August 10th which answers a lot of questions:

Holmes' application reveals his grade-point average from the University of California at Riverside was 3.94 on a 4.0 scale, that he was Phi Betta Kappa member and his GRE verbal score [710] was in the 98th percentile and quantitative score [800] was in the 94 percentile. His analytical writing score was in the 45 percentile.

I looked at my last GMAT score, which was 740 (the first one was 750, I lost g as I grew older), and I scored 97% verbal and 93% quantitative. So if the GRE percentiles mean the same as the GMAT percentiles, then James Holmes is smart enough to just make the Triple Nine society. His intelligence is in the top 0.1% of the population.

So it’s really just as I suspected. That Holmes was at a crappy college which was way beneath his abilities, and where he was able to get a nearly perfect GPA without having to do any work, and then he wasn’t prepared for a graduate program where actual effort was required and where he couldn't play World of Warcraft all day instead of studying, and that’s why he failed out.

As I previously wrote :

I interpret some new stories as evidence that Holmes drifted through his education without actually doing much studying, which he was able to do at a bogus college like UC Riverside. But he didn’t like doing actual boring work, he preferred playing video games.

It looks like I was 100% right about that.

It’s also easy to see why he was bitter about his career opportunities given how smart he was. Because he went to a crappy college instead of an elite college, he was unable to find any employment except in fast food. Had his parents sent him to a better school, he probably wouldn't have spiraled downhill into beta-male rage.

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In response to certain commenters who think that Holme’s only average score on the writing section indicates some lack of ability, here is from the big article in today’s NY Times:

In a grant-writing class, where students were required to grade each other’s proposals, Mr. Holmes wrote thoughtful and detailed comments, one student recalled, giving each paper he was assigned to review a generous grade.

“This was the only time I saw an assignment of James’s,” the student said. “Frankly, I was very impressed. I thought his comments were much better than anyone else’s.”

As I responded in the comments, he probably didn’t bother to study for the GRE, and the essay section requires you to know the trick of what the graders are looking for.

In that article, you can also read about the girl he liked at the graduate program, but was too shy to do anything about it:

A student with whom Mr. Holmes had flirted clumsily — he once sent her a text message after a class asking “Why are you distracting me with those shorts?” — said that two messages she received from him, one in June and the other in July, were particularly puzzling.

Their electronic exchanges had begun abruptly in February or March, when she was out with stomach flu.

“You still sick, girl?” she remembers Mr. Holmes asking.

“Who is this?” she shot back.

“Jimmy James from neuroscience,” he replied.

After that, she said, he sent her messages sporadically — once he asked her if she would like to go hiking — though he would sometimes walk right past her in the hallway, making no eye contact.

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Regarding the crapiness of UC Riverside, the SAT profile is similar of that to the CUNY schools, and the latter are open admissions schools for NAMs and guidos.

Jeff Johnson, bird watcher

Read about his pursuit of hawks in Central Park in great detail before the posts disappear. It's interesting that he was doing this just the day before he went to kill his former co-worker.

The photographs are pretty lousy for someone who, based on his job, you would think would know how to use Photoshop. I think this guy is pretty talentless actually. Based on his t-shirt art and his photography, he was probably fired because his clothing designs sucked.

The blog in question is run by someone else, but Jeff appears to be the primary contributor. I guess he had lots of free time to wander around Central Park looking for hawks given that he didn't have a job to go to. Clearly his super was wrong about him spending all his time alone in his apartment. He was often about Central Park taking pictures of birds.

At this news article, you can see a photo of Jeff Johnson out in Central Park with his birding gear. You can see that he’s wearing his signature khaki suit. He doesn’t look as nerdy in this outfit as I thought he would, but it’s definitely not what I would wear in June in Central Park.

Beta-male rage in Manhattan

The picture above is an example of shooter Jeffrey Johnson’s artwork from his website (yet another J. Johnson who does art).

From the Associated Press:

Even after he was laid off, Johnson would leave left his Upper East Side apartment building each morning in a suit, and often returned about a half hour later after going to get breakfast at McDonald's, his neighbors said.

"He was always alone," said Gisela Casella, who lived a few floors above him. "I always felt bad. I said `Doesn't he have a girlfriend?' I never saw him with anybody."

His superintendent, Guillermo Suarez, said he lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment that he was subletting from someone else. He called him a "very likable guy," who always wore a suit.

The New York Times says more about his McDonalds habit:

Mr. Johnson lived on the third floor of a six-story walk-up on East 82nd Street for about 18 months, said Guillermo Suarez, 72, the super of the building.

Every morning he had the same routine. He would leave the apartment between 7:30 and 8 a.m., say good morning and head to the McDonald’s on Third Avenue and 84th Street. After about 20 minutes, he would come back carrying a McDonald’s bag. He would nearly always wear the same thing — a tannish brown suit, sometimes with a tie. Then he would generally stay in the apartment the rest of the day.

This guy is obviously a nerdy beta-male, too socially clueless to be aware that McDonalds is low class and that you’re not supposed to wear a suit to go there. Maybe he was somewhat mentally disturbed, in denial about being fired.

I thought he might be gay because he designed women’s accessories, but from the description above he sounds like a beta-male. There’s no mention of any gay boyfriends. The guy’s artwork, featuring women and not hunky gay men, is another sign that he’s a lonely heterosexual.

So this shooting is another case of beta-male rage. In the typical beta-male rage incident, the perpetrator is a nice guy, without a girlfriend or wife, who never bothers anyone until one day he commits a violent premeditated act.

It should be noted that the shooter only intended to kill his former boss co-worker (apparently, the victim acted like Johnson's boss, but wasn’t, which is why Johnson hated him so much) and then run away. All of the bystanders who were wounded appear to have been shot by the police who fired 16 bullets at Johnson.

* * *

Happa beta-male rage.

Johnson seems like this weird quiet guy, who the owners kept around because he was a hard worker even though he was weird, and Ercolino acted like an asshole to him.

* * *

Commenter superdestroyer writes, "I will be the first one to point out that Ercolino appears to be a Guido. From New Jersey, spiked hair, tan, salesmen, and bully."

Mass shooting in Manhattan

Beta-male rage? Islamic terrorism? NAM violence? No one knows.

* * *

Reading between the lines at the NY Post, it’s NAM violence.

* * *

My guess is that this is what happened:

A construction worker got into an argument with one of his co-workers. The construction worker, most likely a NAM carrying an illegal concealed gun, got outraged, shot the co-worker, then started shooting at random people.

Perhaps the contracting company will be sued up the wazoo for negligent hiring.

* * *

Ooops, looks like I was wrong again. According to NBC:

Three sources said the gunman was a disgruntled employee who was fired Thursday from his job inside the building. A source on the scene said the shooter may have been targeting a coworker, who is believed to have been killed, before opening fire on bystanders.

At least nine people were hurt, but not all of them are shooting victims, an emergency official at the scene tells NBC 4 New York. Witnesses described the shooter as a tall man in a gray suit.

I don’t think a NAM would wear a gray suit. But it still sounds more like alpha-male rage rather than beta-male rage.

* * *

Looks like the shooter may have only shot at his boss and all of the injured were caused by the police who unloaded 14 bullets at the suspect.

Also, the shooter was a “women's accessories designer.” I wonder if he’s gay?

Prediction: nothing is going to change about student loans

One of my favorite bloggers, Gucci Little Piggy, has another link to student loan article. Yes, the notion of a bursting student loan bubble is popular in the conservative blogosphere, but m y prediction is that nothing about student loans is going to change much during the next ten years.

Forbes lists five reasons for why there’s not going to be a student loan crisis the way there was a mortgage crisis.

Furthermore, student loans, while a big problem for some people who owe a lot of money, are not a problem for the majority of Americans. According to the NASFAA, even among people under the age of 30, only 40.1% have any student loan debt at all. Only 7.4% of people over the age of 40 have student loan debt. Thus only a tiny percent of the demographic group that votes most heavily has any student loans. Now it’s true that some of them are parents and may be concerned about their children, but that’s only going to be a problem for 40% of parents. Politicians care about two major constituencies: the majority (who can vote them out of office), and people who donate money to them. People with student loans are a minority and they are too poor to be significant political donors. On the other hand, politicians receive a lot of donations from banks, for-profit colleges, and other beneficiaries of the status quo.

Let’s examine who benefits from student loans:

* Banks
* For-profit schools
* Faculty and other stakeholders of universities, who are an extremely influential bloc within the liberal elite.
* Rich people, because student loans prevent people in the middle class from catching up with their own kids.
* Poor people, because they don’t go to college and their children don’t go to college. Student loans make poor people better off because a middle class person with a job and student loans to pay off may actually not have any more spending power than an uneducated poor person collecting government benefits.

Who is hurt by the student loan status quo:

* The middle class.

The Half Sigma solution for the problem of student loans is to just get rid of them. (More accurately, the government would stop guaranteeing them, and they would become dischargeable in bankruptcy like regular debt, so there would no longer be any such loans available because no one would lend to students at those terms). Colleges would have to respond by cutting costs and making the education more affordable. The end result would be fewer people going to college, but the people who go would be paying lower tuition and graduating free of debt or with very little debt.

The Half Sigma solution goes against the liberal mantra that EVERYONE must go to college. No one would ever endorse a plan that would result in fewer people enrolled at college. Even Republicans wouldn’t endorse this plan because a Republican politician today has the same beliefs as a liberal from thirty years ago; Republicans also buy into the idea that everyone must go to college.

Meanwhile, as pointed out above, there are powerful constituencies in favor of the status quo, while the middle class hurt by the status quo don’t fully understand how the system is even screwing them over.

The debate is never going to be framed as anything else except liberals who says that the government should give away more money to colleges, and Republicans who say we should give away less money, and they compromise by funding the educational-industrial complex through student loans.

Raise your children to be overconfident if you want them to be successful

In my January 2011 critique of Amy Chua’s bad parenting advice, I wrote:

Americans parents understand that self-esteem is more important than actual results, because if you are convinced that you are great, you will fool most people, and therefore receive more credit for your work and be more likely to be promoted. Self-esteem is important for value transference activities, which are the highest paying activities. Especially for sales; sales requires super-high self-esteem. The low self-esteem Chinese will make great low-paid value-creating engineers and the whites with high self esteem will make more money selling the stuff that the Chinese engineers design.

A recent Wall Street Journal blog post demonstrates the truth of what I wrote:

Overconfident people are perceived as having more social status. In one of several related experiments, researchers had people take a geography quiz —first alone, then in pairs. The task involved placing cities on a map of North America unmarked by state or national borders. The participants rated themselves on their own abilities and rated each other, secretly, on a number of qualities.

As expected, most people rated their own geographic knowledge far higher than actual performance would justify. In the interesting new twist, however, the people most prone to overrate themselves got higher marks from their partners on whether they “deserved respect and admiration, had influence over the decisions, led the decision-making process, and contributed to the decisions.”

Dystopian robotic future, part 2: poor people

In the first part, we touched on the problem of poor people.

Liberals insist that poverty is all about money, and if there are any differences between poor people and rich people, it’s only because rich parents are able to buy stuff for their children which turns them into better people.

But liberals are completely wrong. Poverty is about low IQ, low future-time orientation, and bad values. The first item on the list is all about genes: people are born with low IQ and there’s not much you can do about it. I suspect that low future-time orientation also has a large genetic component, but I think it’s possible that it can be raised with proper training. Values are, by definition, learned attitudes and behaviors.

The Half Sigma approach to eliminate poverty is a two-pronged attack which I guarantee would achieve good results if it were ever implemented. (1) we need to reduce the number of people with poor-people genes from being born with eugenic policies; and (2) we should focus on teaching middle-class values to poor children. The first half of the Half Sigma approach is not likely to be implemented in my lifetime because eugenics is considered to be the most evil thing in the world. There’s a possibility that we might come around to acknowledging the importance of values, but even that’s not very likely because it touches too close to the truth of HBD. Suggesting that poor people need better values tends to outrage liberals, who say that you are blaming poor people for their poverty when liberals know that poverty is caused by Republicans who are too cheap to spend the money needed to end it.

The robotic future will make a lot of things cheaper while eliminating the need for low-IQ human labor. But poverty is caused by bad behavior and not lack of the things that money can buy. Poor people are able to destroy value. The government built really nice housing projects for poor people, and the poor people turned them into hellholes. Now they say it was a mistake to concentrate the poor together into big buildings, so the latest trend is to stick them into small structures in many neighborhoods, which is just going to make things worse for the middle class who won’t be able to get away from them unless they can afford to move to a rich neighborhood. And since neighborhood quality is entirely a relative thing which is unrelated to productivity, only a minority of people will ever be rich. The devaluation of labor means that people will be less able to work their way up to the next class and people will tend to be more stuck in the class they are born to.

Even today, poor people no longer need to work in order to not die in the streets. The government “safety net” ensures this. But poor people’s behavior doesn’t improve when their ability to survive is delinked from work. The need to work in order to survived enforced a certain amount of discipline and middle-class values on the poor, and that is being taken away.

Even though poor, the need for status competition still exists among poor people, and status competition among the underclass males often turns to criminal behavior. Unemployed and unemployable young men will seek meaning in life by joining gangs and trying to rise to a higher level within the gang. I even forsee a time in the future when poor neighborhoods become so dangerous that even the police fear going there.

The delinking of work from survival has also changed the breeding habits of the poor. In the past, poor women needed to find a husband to help support their children. But now, with state support, poor women have sex with alpha males and give out-of-wedlock birth to their alpha-male spawn. As I previously wrote, “without the institution of marriage, alpha males have a disproportionate share of children, which means each subsequent generation becomes significantly more alpha than the previous one, and in just a few generations we will completely wipe out centuries of breeding for beta qualities, and it's the beta qualities which are necessary for civilization.”

This dysgenic breeding caused by end of the institution of marriage can by observed in that NY Times article about the unmarried white mother, and you can observer that all of her children are half black. Because blacks are the most alpha race, in a world of race-mixing and non-marital births, black genes become more prevalent in the future generation. You see a lot of unmarried white women with half-black children, but you never see any unmarried black women with half-white children.

As we see, the robotic future will not mean the end of poverty, but will cause the opposite to happen. Robotic productivity plus continuing denial by liberals about HBD will lead to poor neighborhoods becoming more violent and horrible to live in, and more middle-class neighborhoods will become poor neighborhoods.

To be continued ...

The MSFT of robotics?

People who invested in Microsoft in the early 1980s made a huge killing.

If only there was a similar company to invest in now to take advantage of the coming robot economy.

White flight from Asian Schools

A blogger called Education Realist (who I found from Steve Sailer’s blog) wrote the following:

If you read of a school that’s suddenly moved to elite status or seen a dramatic rise in test scores (e.g., AIPCS), or heard that a test prep process has gotten out of control, it’s a sure thing that it’s become “an Asian school”, as we call them in my area. Once a school “goes Asian”, hitting a tipping point of about 40%, it’s a short step to 60-80%. Check out the top-scoring comprehensive high schools by SAT average, and the highest ones will be “Asian schools”. They end up Asian because of white flight. It’s not that whites don’t like Asians, but their kids will lose access to AP/honors courses and get lower GPAs—not because they have lower abilities, but because the white parents haven’t managed to convince their kids that the world will end of they don’t get straight As.

I love learning stuff like this from bloggers. Until now, I never really thought about how there’s an Asian tipping point in public schools. But of course, it makes perfect sense.

* * *

BrunoBrazil writes:

Sigma, what the heck do you have against asians that have their noses to the grindstone, work hard, grind to tests, become betas with average families and suceed in situations where people from other ethnicities fail? As far as I can see, it is at least a culture that doesn´t promote eliteness, but makes socially adjusted individuals who are much better off than whites or blacks in the same context.

I don’t have anything against. Asians. I enjoy calling out SWPLs for their racist and hypocritical behavior.

But as I previously explained, Asians are acting against their children’s interests with their Asian parenting style:

The Chinese parenting style will no doubt produce workers who are good value creators, and their corporate employers will love them, and they will be paid far less money than the value they create, the excess value being transferred to white people who got into better colleges because their curricula vitae had more leadership and sports activities, and with those more prestigious educational credentials they got into higher paying value transference career tracks like investment banking and upper level management, and now enjoy the value created by those Chinese cubicle employees who are doing the real work and the real value creation.

Apple has biggest market cap ever

Saw it in the news today.

Who would ever have guessed, ten or twenty years ago, that Apple would be worth more than Microsoft and IBM combined?

The secret to Apple’s success is value transference. In order to create software for an iPhone or iPad, you have to sell it on the App Store, where Apple gets 30% of the profits, thus transferring money from the value-creating computer programmers to Apple.

The dystopian robotic future, part 1

Rather than try to write one long awesome post, I think I will need to split this up. So here is part one.

* * *

Yesterday I wrote about robot factories, and pointed out what should be obvious to anyone familiar with the march of technology: if a robot factory is viable today, it will be even more viable in 2022 and more again in 2032. Robots that cost $250,000 each today might only cost $100,000 in ten years, and they will be more capable.

If robots can replace human workers, this leads some people to think that in the future, mankind will live lives of leisure, freed from the need to go to work. But people who think that are wrong. It’s not going to work out that way.

In the 1930s, the U.S. government created the 40-hour workweek. Since then, there have been massive increases in productivity. If a 40-hour workweek was long enough in the 1930s, one might think that today we’d have 20-hour workweeks. But that’s not the way it turned out. In fact, the opposite has happened. Whereas it was common for women to stay home and raise children and keep house, today the norm is for mothers to work (unless they qualify for welfare). If increased productivity hasn’t led to less work from the 1930s to the present, it’s pretty stupid to think that continued increases in productivity are going to have a different effect.

Increased productivity hasn’t changed basic human nature. Once we have enough basic necessities to live on, such as food, shelter, and minimal clothing, what we want is status. Of course, outside of my blog, very few people will use the word “status” to describe why they do what they do. They will frame it in terms of “getting ahead” or living in a “good neighborhood” or being able to send their children to “good schools.” Or perhaps, even more than people are concerned with increasing their status, they are concerned with not perceiving themselves to be a loser.

Despite the increases in productivity, or perhaps even because of them, being poor sucks more than ever. One of the benefits of having money is that you don’t have to live next to poor people, and the behavior of poor people has gotten a lot worse since the 1930s. No amount of productivity increases will make it more affordable to live in a "good" neighborhood. You need to make more money than poor people to afford not to live next to them, so the bar just keeps getting higher.

We make a big deal about the falling crime rate of the last two decades, but that ignores the massive increase in crime which began during the 1960s. The chart here shows that the crime rate for aggravated assault increased from 86.1 (per 100,000 people) in 1960 to 252.3 in 2010, with a peak of 441.8 in 1992. The rate for robbery increased from 60.1 to 119. Thus in 1960 we had half the violent crime of the present with much less spending on prisons and police, and with much less sophisticated police investigations techniques. The incarceration rate today is about four times greater than it was prior to the 1980s. In the past, we had one-half the crime with only one-quarter the incarceration rate.

An interesting exception to the general trend of increased crime is the murder rate, which has remained fairly steady over the last century. Modern emergency care is mostly responsible for this. Wounds which would have led to someone dying, and thus a murder, are no longer fatal, and the crime gets classified as an aggravated assault instead of a murder.

(By the way, a good future career for people not smart to become doctors would be law enforcement. I don’t see police officers being replaced by robots anytime soon [despite the example of the movie Robocop], and for reasons to be explained later, I predict that crime will increase in the future.)

To be continued ...

Catholic school survives by going SWPL

The goal of Catholic schools is to serve poor people, but there’s no profit in that. St. Stephen of Hungary on the Upper East Side changed its model to be more like elite private schools, offering French for 3-year-olds, violin for fourth and fifth graders, and iPads for sixth to eighth graders. Now the school is attracting white parents, and there are fewer NAMs:

Three years ago, 46 percent of the students received free or reduced lunch, in keeping with the Catholic Church’s mission of tending to the poorest; this year the number is down to 17 percent.

Enrollment of African-American students has dropped 15 percent; for Hispanic students, it has dropped 33 percent. And the school, which runs through the eighth grade, is noticeably whiter in its lower grades.

Better robots mean less need for human workers

There’s an excellent article in the NY Times:

At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.

At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.

One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.

All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.

While it has taken longer for robot technology to be developed than many had thought twenty or thirty years ago, the technology is progressing, and if it robot factories are viable in 2012, they will only be that much better in 2022 and that much better gain in 2032.

This brings up the existential question of what low-IQ people are good for if robots can do manual labor just as well. If robots can manufacture electronic gadgets, and move stuff around a warehouse (the two main uses of robots discussed in the article), soon they will also be able to cook food at restaurants, do janitorial work, work in construction. Maybe we won’t need truck drivers in another ten or twenty years, because trucks will drive themselves?

The robot tipping point is probably being delayed because our best and brightest are going into finance and other value transference fields instead of working on developing better robot technology.

Jon Corzine's new hedge fund and value transference

Commenters have brought to my attention that Jon Corzine might be starting a new hedge fund:

Mr. Corzine, in a bid to rebuild his image and engage his passion for trading, is weighing whether to start a hedge fund, according to people with knowledge of his plans. He is currently trading with his family’s wealth.

If he is successful as a hedge fund manager, it would be the latest career comeback for a man who was ousted from both the top seat at Goldman Sachs and the New Jersey governor’s mansion.

Commenter “JP” writes:

Anyone who gives their money to Corzine has failed both a sanity and an IQ test. The guy has proven that (depending on your interpretation) he will either steal your money, or lose your money through "chaos and porous risk controls" -- and he'll get away with it! You might as well throw your money down the toilet as give it to him.

You really do have to wonder why someone would invest in a Corzine mutual fund; the worst case is that he does to your money what he did to MF Global. The best case is that he takes 20% of the profits and a 2% management fee. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to just buy an ETF that tracks some index?

But sadly, I predict that people WILL invest in Corzine’s fund, and he will make a lot of money regardless of whether or not the fund beats the S&P 500. There’s a lesson here in value transference.

Rob Portman’s article on regulations

Rob Portman wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning of upcoming regulation. How does this stack up against my theory of value transference, which is that we should regulate value transference activities but not value creation activities?

The Labor Department, for example, is working on a regulation that would increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers, to "protect" them from investment help. This regulation, known as the Fiduciary Rule, would tighten restrictions and increase litigation risks for businesses that offer investment guidance on a commission basis, rather than the more expensive fee-for-service model.

Commissioned people in the financial services industry offering investment “advice” are the world’s worst scum, and any regulation is appropriate. The worst that could happen is that people find working these jobs to be unprofitable, and they decide to do something more useful with their lives such as work in engineering where they can develop real products that improve people's lives, creating real value.

Then there is the mega-rule on the shelf at the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) that could block business expansion in many areas of the country. Proposed in 2010, the Ozone Rule would impose a limit on ozone (which creates haze from emissions from cars, power plants and factories) so strict that up to 85% of U.S. counties monitored by the EPA would be in violation.

Nearly every activity that creates pollution also creates value, so yes, we don’t want to over-regulate here.

Also on the Obama EPA's to-do list for 2013 is a new rule that its regulators admit could increase costs for energy consumers and others by as much as $4.5 billion per year, depending on how it's implemented. The rule targets equipment that power plants and manufacturing facilities use to draw in water to prevent overheating, even though those intake systems are not harmful to human health or water quality.

Electricity generation is a value-creating business, so we don’t want to over-regulate that.

Consumers can also look forward to a new Department of Transportation rule that will increase the costs of new cars and trucks by mandating expensive new technology. First proposed in 2010, the Rear-View Camera Rule would require that all cars and trucks be equipped with a rear-view camera and video display on the dashboard, at a cost of some $2.7 billion to auto makers and car buyers.

Manufacture of automobiles is a value-creating industry, so we don’t want to over-regulate that.

Next year will bring not only new rules but new regulators. The Independent Payment Advisory Board—a bureaucracy created by the president's health-care law—has vast authority over patient care and health markets, yet it is immune from the usual public input and review requirements that apply to other regulators.

As the American Medical Association and others have pointed out, the board is charged with the contradictory mandate of cutting Medicare reimbursement rates to health-care providers, without reducing benefits or finding new ways to increase value. The result will be a technocratic body with almost unchecked power to limit access to care for Medicare patients.

This doesn’t sound like a regulation on BUSINESS, but rather common-sense rules to prevent the government from getting ripped off. Just as the company you work for has rules about what expenses you are allowed to get reimbursed for when you travel on business, the government is operating a health insurance business and needs similar rules to prevent wasting money, which is your tax money.

What happened to the War Nerd?

He has no new columns since last year. Did he die? Retire? Find a better-paying job?