Half Sigma

Half Sigma visits the Genius Bar

After owning my iPad for a few days (that's iPad and not the iPod Touch I previously wrote about), I realized that there was something wrong with the touchscreen. It had a dead spot extending horizontally across the screen that was completely insensitive to touch. There goes the theory that Apple makes quality products. Even though the iPad is more expensive than a comparable Android tablet, the quality control still sucks

Apple is the only company that requires you to make an appointment if you bought a broken product. So I went to the Apple Store on the Upper West Side to keep my “Genius Bar” appointment. The name reminds me so much of the Nerd Herd at the fictional Buy More in the TV show Chuck. (If you’ve never watched Chuck, I highly recommend at least the first season.) I was half expecting Jeff and Lester to greet me. Instead, some small darkly complected geeky girl with an iPad directs me to sit at the bar. So I sat down and waited.

The nerds—I mean geniuses—were 90% male, and of the males, 80% had a beard. There was one guy with a big beard who looked just like Patrick Crouch. Remember him?

Finally after a five minute wait, a nerd genius comes to help me. “I’m sorry to hear about this, you must feel really bad that your new iPad has this problem.” Check off a box for showing empathy for customer. I strongly suspect it’s fake empathy, and it’s how Apple trains its employees.

After I convinced the nerd genius that the iPad was defective, and after running a few diagnostic tests, he had a salesperson (a cute girl) give me a brand new replacement iPad.

Where are the posts?

I feel like I've let down my readers, but I've been on a business trip and I've been busy with other stuff.

Republicans are liberals on race and immigration issues

Bernie writes:

Republicans run from all racial issues, never mentioned affirmative action, never called for reduced legal immigration and never appealed to white voters in any way shape or form.

When Obama took sides (his side) in the Trayvon Martin and Skip Gates cases the GOP stayed completely silent.

The only time the GOP mentioned race in the primaries was when Ron Paul said the justice system is "racist" against blacks in terms of the war on drugs and the death penalty. Not one Republican corrected him.

The GOP does nothing for white people and always panders to non-whites

Indeed, the Republican party gets called “racist” even though they have pretty much adopted 100% all of the politically correct positions on race. The Republicans say “vote for us because we will make abortion illegal and we will make sure that the Democrats don’t raise taxes on rich people.” They don’t say “vote for us because we will stop the immigration that’s taking away your jobs, we will stop the affirmative action that’s taking away slots in colleges and career tracks that should go to people who’ve earned them based merit rather than the color of their skin.”

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In the first comment responding, Jay writes:

There is a fact, like it or not, that open, aggressive "appeals to white voters" of the sort many in the alt-right scene are always demanding, are actually an incredible turn-off to white voters. Maybe it's because they've been programmed to be self-loathing race traitors or whatever, but it's a reality.

Actually, Jay, I do NOT think this is a reality. Polling shows that a very strong majority are against immigration and against affirmative action. Republicans are afraid to speak to these issues because they are cowed by the liberal-controlled media, or maybe just because they’ve internalized the politically correct views not held by the majority of voters.

Charles Murray agrees with me

Why don’t Asians vote Republican? According to Charles Murray:

Something has happened to define conservatism in the minds of Asians as deeply unattractive, despite all the reasons that should naturally lead them to vote for a party that is identified with liberty, opportunity to get ahead, and economic growth. I propose that the explanation is simple. Those are not the themes that define the Republican Party in the public mind. Republicans are seen by Asians—as they are by Latinos, blacks, and some large proportion of whites—as the party of Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists. Factually, that’s ludicrously inaccurate. In the public mind, except among Republicans, that image is taken for reality.

As I’ve been writing since the elections, Republicans need to drop the creationism and anti-abortion crap if they want to win over the voters whom they should be winning over. These issues are toxic to many voters who would otherwise vote Republican.

Republicans will never win over those Hispanics who will vote Democratic because Democrats give them affirmative action and welfare benefits, and they don't care if gringos are aborting their babies; fewer white babies equals more political power for Hispanics. But Republicans can win over Asians and a higher percentage of whites, if only they stop being the Christian party.

And Murray is wrong in the last sentence, because many Republicans do see themselves that way. Like the creationist Marco Rubio.

Android owners are frugal

According to IBM, 24% of Black Friday online shoppers used a mobile device, and the vast majority of those used were iOS.

This is despite the fact that the majority of smartphones are Android and even 41% of tablets are Android.

While there are probably a few techheads who buy Androids for geeky reasons, I suspect the that majority of people who buy Android devices really want Apple devices but are too frugal to buy them. And frugal people don’t buy a lot of stuff.

Apple is so successful because they have won the hearts and minds of spendthrift consumers, who are the most profitable customers to have.

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And I have to admit that I appreciate Apple's packaging. The spartan white boxes look so much more high class than the busy and loud boxes of all other brands.

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If I had use the words "cheap" and "cheapskate" instead of "frugal," would it have changed your interpretation of the post?

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Kurtosis writes:

this apple bashing is just getting out of hand. apple stuff works like it's supposed to, has an ergonomic UI, is relatively bug and virus free, and is well designed and manufactured with quality materials. why is it so shocking and offensive that they can charge a premium for this?

But destructure writes:

I want the product that will fulfill my needs with the least amount of headaches. And I want the best bang for my buck. Android fits that bill. I couldn't care less what everyone else has.

One of these guys is right and one of them is wrong.

And I don’t think I was “bashing” Apple products. I respect that they’ve been able to make massive profits by selling the eliteness of their brand.

And I have to say that after playing with both an iPad and a Nook, the Nook sucks in comparison.

Orthodox Jews vote 90% for Romney

As reported by the NY Times:

Mr. Obama’s worst precincts were in Orthodox Jewish areas like Ocean Parkway and Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Kew Gardens Hills in Queens. In a few precincts in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Mr. Romney won more than 90 percent of the vote.

There was even one precinct in Gravesend Brooklyn, home to Sephardic Jews, where Romney won by an incredible 97%.

You should definitely click the link, because there's a cool map showing which areas of NYC went which way. You can see a swath of red in Brooklyn which represents the Jewish parts of Brooklyn (Hasidic in Borough Park, Modern Orthodox and Conservative in Midwood, and less-religious Russian Jews in Brighton Beach).

But unfortunately, the elite Jews of the Upper West Side look like they went as strongly for Obama as the prole Jews of Brooklyn went for Romney.

Fish with Attitude

Fish with Attitude is one of those in-app purchase scam games which I mentioned in a previous blog post. I think this game is aimed at kids, but probably some prole adult women are also playing it. It’s aimed more at girls than boys, because there’s no competition, either against other humans or against the computer AI. Rather, the goal is to collect as many fish as possible, and all you can do is watch the fish swimming around in your fish tank.

I experimented with this game because it’s one of the top-grossing games in the App Store, and because the 2D graphics don’t look all that sophisticated; probably something I could learn to program myself, and you can find freelance unemployed digital artists who will work cheap at sites like deviantart.com to create the animated fish sprites, and some guy in India from a site like freelance.com to help with the programming. There have been stories of people who created apps without knowing anything about programming at all, but it seems unwise to me to place that much trust in some guy in India, because I’ve been very unimpressed by the quality of Indian programmers in the corporate billing and account management systems area which I am more familiar with. Actually, now that I think about it, I’d rather pay an extra $5/hour for a programmer in Eastern Europe.

Fish with Attitude begins with a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game. The tutorial gets you in the habit of using “pearls” to speed up the process of breeding, hatching, and growing your fish. After you’ve successfully bred and hatched your first fish, but the fish into the fish tank, and grown him to adult size, then you are left on your own. And after that, it’s not long before the game incessantly tries to get you to buy more pearls to speed up your fish breeding, or “coins” so you can buy more fish tanks.

The game also keeps trying to get you to link with Facebook, by offering you twenty free pearls, and then every time you accomplish something in the game, like grow a new fish or get some cool object for your fish tank, you are encouraged to automatically post a picture to you Facebook page. This Facebook synchronization is obviously a key part of the marketing scam, because it creates links to this game on Facebook, and the developers hope this will cause the game to go “viral,” which it did. I will have to create a fake Facebook account to see how this works. I certainly don’t want a bunch of fish pictures from a children’s game posted to my real Facebook page.

If you’re a parent, you want to make sure you don’t let your kids play with any game that has in-app purchases of currency. Of course, developers do have to make money, so I think it’s fair if a game is offered for “free” to allow you to play for a while and try it out, but then has an in-app purchase to unlock more of the game. It’s the fact that a game allows purchases of currency, with names such as “gems,” “coins,” “gold,” etc., that alerts you to the fact that it’s a scam game.

White people are colonizing Detroit

Some commenters referred me to this article about how out-of-towners, including but not limited to “farmers, intellectuals and artists of various types” are moving into Detroit.

And there’s this profile of a farmer in Detroit, worth clicking on because of the picture of him.

The conclusion here is that white people are colonizing Detroit, just like white people once colonized South Africa and Rhodesia.

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As cheap as it is to buy real estate in Detroit, it still doesn't make sense. Why not buy real estate that's almost-as-cheap in a small town in the middle-of-nowhere that isn't invested with the lumpenproletariat?

Is Greece reverting to an agricultural economy?

In a post which asked is the U.S. reverting to an agricultural economy, I wrote:

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.

This seems to definitely be happening in Greece. As reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Greeks who have lost their industrial jobs are returning to the land:

For decades, Panagiotis Triantafyllopoulos worked in Athens as a printer and graphic designer, most recently making slick packaging for multinational drug companies.

Now the 54-year-old spends his days gathering firewood, tending chickens and preparing for the olive harvest in this hillside village in southwestern Greece.

Unable to find a job more than two years after he was laid off, Mr. Triantafyllopoulos felt he had little choice but to return to his birthplace here this past summer and try to survive on what he can glean from his family's small plot of land.

It’s an excellent article, I recommend reading it. This could be the future of the United States. And a warning: don't assume that there will always be a job for you.

NY Times must be reading Steve Sailer

I remember reading about using Google autofill to see what celebrities people think are gay Steve Sailer's blog. And now, there's a NY Times article about that.

Don't shop on Thanksgiving

It's very prole.

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In case it wasn't clear, I was talking about retail stores that open at 8 PM or even earlier on Thanksgiving. This is disgusting.

Of course there's nothing wrong with shopping online. Ordering something online doesn't mean that people have to be at work. The order just gets saved to a database, and some prole worker will fulfill the order on Friday. Without Thanksgiving web surfing, there wouldn't be this blog post and there wouldn't be any comments.

Shopping on Black Friday also seems sort of prole, as the extreme glorification of materialism is always low class, but Thursday evening shopping is that much worse.

Adults who spend thousands of dollars on iOS games

I’ve gotten a lot of great comments to my previous brief post on in-app purchases. Including a link to this recently published Wired article about adults who spend thousands of dollars playing iOS games.

Lee — who asked that we not share his full name, or any specific details about his line of work — is a single, 42-year-old businessman from California. He says that his annual income is “in the six figures.”

Lee says that spending money on games like Clash of Clans is actually saving him money in the long-run: Before he started gaming, he says he and a small group of friends would go out drinking, sometimes spending as much as $6,000 in a single night between them.

Lee stopped spending money on drinking roughly around the same time that he began playing Happy Kingdom, a Facebook game, with some friends. It was the first videogame he’d ever liked, and he became enraptured. He wound up spending nearly $5,000 in that game before trading it for Clash of Clans, but says that’s far less than what he would have otherwise spent on alcohol.

“I actually save money playing these games instead of going out and drinking,” he said.

You may never have heard of Clash of Clans, but it’s one of the highest-grossing games on the App Store thanks to players like Lee. …

Yep, I only first heard of Clash of Clans yesterday, because I discovered that it was the top-grossing game at the App Store, and I mentioned that in the previous blog post.

In addition to reading the Wired article, I also read through the comment thread, and the comments generally fall into two categories.

Category 1: People are crazy or addicted to be spending so much money on virtual crap.

Category 2: Spending a few thousand dollars playing an online game is no different than spending a few thousand dollars to go on a golf vacation. In fact, people will spend half a million dollars to join an exclusive private golf club, so how can we say that the guy spending $5,000 to play video games is addicted but that it’s perfectly sane for someone to spend $500,000 on golf?

But none of the comments anyone wrote were in my own third category. That is that our entire society and our entire economic system is based around people buying crap that they don’t need, but we are so used to it that we consider it normal and don’t even question it. There are loads of women in Manhattan who have closets full of $300 shoes, and this would seem like insane behavior to a woman in a poor country who can barely afford to feed her children, but it’s considered completely normal here.

It’s only when we see some guy dropping thousands of dollars on virtual soldiers that we begin to question the whole thing, and it’s only because he’s spending money for something that’s confusing to us. But I predict that this will be considered completely normal in another decade. If you remember back to the 1990s, people who spent hours a day surfing the web were considered to have an addiction problem, but today everyone spends hours a day surfing the web and it’s considered completely normal.

But should spending money on crap you don’t need be considered normal? I respect groups like the Amish who reject the materialism of modern society.

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When someone spends a thousand dollars on virtual soldiers, it's a commercial transaction so it gets measured as a thousand dollar increase in GDP. But is a purchase like this really making our country wealthier?

If GDP were to measure stuff like quality time spent with family and ignore purchases of positional status-whoring goods, we might not be the world's richest country.

The in-app purchase scam

So I wanted to know how people make money selling these so-called “apps.” The iTunes App Store is kind enough to display the 200 top-grossing apps. What I discovered is that nearly all of these top-grossing apps are games, and that nearly all of the games have in-app purchases. This means that after you install the app for free, something compels you to buy a “Chest of Gems” for $99.99, a real virtual item for sale in the top-grossing game Clash of Clans.

I also learned that within 15 minutes of entering your password to install the “free” app, you will not be requested to provide a password for any subsequent in-app purchase. There have been stories of parents who installed a “free” game for their kid to play, and then discovered a credit card bill exceeding a thousand dollars. The kids didn’t even know what they were doing.

The list of top-grossing apps seems to be dominated by a small number of companies, each with multiple games based around a similar business model of in-app purchases.

There doesn’t seem to be much room here for an independent solo developer. And the idea of making money by tricking little kids into purchasing in-game crap within 15 minutes of the game being installed seems really icky to me. That’s value transference, not value creation.

Now that I know about this, I turned off in-app purchases, as well as the 15-minute thing, by going into Settings – General – Restrictions. I sure don’t want to accidentally purchase hundreds of dollars of virtual crap.

iPod Touch, crappiest mp3 player ever

This thing doesn't have a pause button. You have to double-click the "home" button (why not a single-click? too easy?) and then find the pause icon on the touchscreen.

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Because "iPod" is synonymous with mp3 players, and the iPod Touch 5G is the most expensive iPod, it follows that this device would be a really really good mp3 player. But it's actually a crappy mp3 player. As a pocket computer it has its charms, but it's a crappy mp3 player.

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A commenter supplies a link to a Slate article complaining about the exact same thing, but in much more detail.

Marco Rubio, creationist, not very smart

Per a GQ interview:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

And this is why Mitt Romney, who publicly states his belief in evolution, was such a great Republican nominee. After his loss, Republicans are reverting to the party of stupid.

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There are some commenters who say that Rubio is only pretending to be stupid so that more Republicans in Iowa fill vote for him. This spin certainly doesn’t disprove the assertion that the Republican Party is the party of stupid.

If the spin is even true. Romney won the Republican nomination being on the record as believing in evolution. They guys who believed in creationism lost. You’d think Rubio would imitate the winner and not the losers.

So at best, Rubio is cravenly following polls of Iowa caucus voters instead of being an intelligent leader. At worst, Rubio believes the creationism stuff.

Muscle mania

As reported by the NY Times, 90% of boys in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area “said they exercised at least occasionally to add muscle”

And also, “a majority of girls in the Minnesota study said they, too, had changed eating or exercise habits to build muscle, with 21 percent using protein supplements and nearly 5 percent using steroids.”

Things have changed a lot. I don't recall the majority of girls trying to build muscle when I was a kid.

Tablets in the NY Times

Yet another article in the NY Times related to iPads. The NY Times says that there are so many tablets to choose from, customers are confused.

As you know, iPads have been a huge success for Apple (which I predicted. But with success comes imitators. Everyone else wants a piece of the action.

I have to recommend the iPad based on the 2048 x 1536 Retina screen. Even though I still hate Apple, none of the zillion Android tablets has that kind of screen [EXCEPT for the Google Nexus 10 which has an even higher resolution 2560 x 1600 screen !]. Plus there are more established apps for the Apple products.

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So thanks everyone for pointing out that the Nexus has a higher res screen. The crappy NY Times article didn't mention that.

iOS apps in the NY Times and Half Sigma’s new iPod Touch 5G

I think it's an interesting coincidence that there’s an article in today’s NY Times about the difficulties of being an independent app developer. It’s interesting because I read the article on an iPod Touch 5G which I bought on Friday.

Why did I buy this thing? Because it’s nearly identical to an iPhone but without the telephone, and it’s a lot less expensive way to find out what the iPhone fuss is all about without buying an iPhone which I don’t need (because I have a free Blackberry).

So naturally I couldn’t help but think, wouldn’t it be cool if I can write some highly desirable app and become super-rich? Didn’t those Instagram guys make a billion dollars? (Why that app is worth so much money if they give it away for free?)

But of course the reality is that hundreds of thousands of people have at least dabbled in iOS development, and hardly any have made any money at it. The NY Times article tells the story of married couple who gave up their jobs to be full-time app developers. And they made practically no money from their apps. And lost a lot of money from not having jobs and buying far more Apple devices than they needed to develop apps for pre-schoolers. Although you do need at least one Mac, because you can’t run “XCode,” the iOS development tool, on a PC. And Macs are really expensive. For example, you can buy a cheap Windows 7 laptop for less than $500, and maybe even less than $400, but the least expensive Mac laptop, the MacAir, is $999. Admittedly it’s a nicer computer than the $400 PC, but with Mac you don’t have a cheap option. Maybe it’s that exclusivity which makes SWPLs like them so much. And you can’t even play most good games on a Mac (although World of Warcraft and Starcraft II are available in Mac versions).

So going back to problem of making money as an app developer, the problem is that there are zillions of other people doing the same thing. Why do you think your pre-schooler app is gong to be any better than the numerous other such apps out there? Computer software is a winner-take-all activity. People only need either the best program or the program that everyone else is using

I, for one, really can’t think of anything I could program for an iPhone or iPod Touch that might make me six-figures of income. The most likely way to make money would be to start a company that sells iOS development services to big corporations. But Indians have a big advantage with these types of companies because they know how to hire cheap Indians both in the U.S. and in India where they outsource most of their development.

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And about the iPod Touch 5G. It has a beautiful screen and touch-interface. I can see why this beats out the Blackberry. I even like the touch-keyboard better than the little tiny physical keys on the Blackberry.

But is it worth $300? Not as an mp3 player. It's too big and kludgy to be an mp3 player. The $110 Sony with 16GB is a better mp3 player because it's smaller and lighter and has physical controls for controlling your music. To skip a song on the iPod Touch, you have to use the touchscreen, while with the Sony you can just reach into your pocket and click the button without even looking at it. Sometimes you can find the Sonys on sale for even less; I think I paid less than $80 for mine.

Do you want to watch movies on this? Only if you have really good vision and maybe are slightly nearsighted. Not good for people who are middle-aged.

As a computer, even though it's as powerful as a desktop computer from a few years back, it's just too small and there's no keyboard.

As a camera, the lens is surprisingly good (but very sensitive to flare) if you don't mind that it doesn't zoom. But the quality of the 5MP sensor is really bad; even at the lowest ISO (32) the photos are full of noise and detail-reducing noise filtering. Dynamic range is also very poor. It's also very hard to hold steady because the iPod Touch is just not shaped right to be a camera. You can buy a better camera for less money, although the iPod is probably good enough for many people. Looking at the photos on the tiny iPod screen, most viewers won't realize the photos are flawed and they might even like the contrasty images that are a result of the poor DR.

So mostly, it's just something you can be amazed at for having so much cutting-edge technology in such a tiny package.

NY Times says to legalize all of the illegal immigrants

The NY Times editors say that now Obama has been re-elected, it’s time to legalize everyone in the country illegally.

What the Times calls for is, essentially, open borders with no restrictions, because once we legalize the 11 million or more who are here now, the rest of the world will hear about it and move here, and either we deport those new illegals, which according to the Times is an evil and despicable thing, or legalize them too.

Prior to the election, commenters kept insisting there would be no difference in outcomes between President Obama and President Romney. But we see that is wrong. The post-election momentum appears to be in favor of enough Republicans joining with Democrats to legalize all of illegal immigrants currently in the country.

The concept of value transference is spreading outside my blog

Tim O’Reilly, the guy from the company that makes those books for computer nerds, has discovered the concept of value transference, except he calls it “value capture.”

He writes:

[I]t is important to realize that even in the world of discovery and intellectual innovation, there are those who create value, and those who merely extract it.

Consider this: when John von Neumann and his team at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton developed the fundamental architectural approach of modern computing, they put their work into the public domain. When Paul Baran developed the fundamental concepts of packet networking that underlie the internet, he did the same thing. So too did Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn with the TCP/IP protocol, and Tim Berners-Lee with HTTP and HTML, the technologies that underly the World Wide Web.

These pioneers created enormous value, yet they didn't capture very much of it for themselves. That was left for others who built on what they gave to the world for free.

On the other side of the ledger, consider the Wall Street mavens who created new instruments to suck value out of the financial system while damaging the economy as a whole, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis that the world is so painfully digging itself out of today.

Consider the patent trolls who invent nothing, but file patents in legal language so broad that they constitute a drift net in which real inventors who later come up with actual new inventions successfully put into practice can conveniently be caught and shaken down.

Either he has been reading my blog, or he discovered the concept himself. Either is possible.

General John Allen's daughter is hot

Link to article with pictures.

Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. University of Michigan

Just a few days ago, I warned you all about liberal judges.

Yesterday there was an en banc decision of the Sixth Circuit, Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. University of Michigan, in which the court ruled that a law, passed by initiative, to ban affirmative action in Michigan public universities, was unconstitutional.

This is an example of how liberal judges will ignore legal precedent in order to advance the liberal agenda, even against the wishes of the majority of voters.

In Bakke, the Supreme Court held that although strict scrutiny is applied to any sort of racial discrimination, even against whites, universities were allowed to consider racial diversity because it was a compelling government interest. But it was pretty clear from the decision that diversity wasn’t something that universities were forced to consider, it was optional, something they might consider. (However, it’s interesting that practically zero universities have elected not to consider it—this is an example of how Universities are controlled by the far left, because even among moderately liberal regular people, affirmative action in university admissions is not supported, as evidenced by the overwhelming 58% to 42% support for the Michigan voter initiative in question.)

In this Michigan case, we see federal judges making up a new rule, ignoring the precedent, in order to protect a policy supported by the far left. I warned you in my previous post that a liberal Supreme Court would result in “racial quotas for all desirable jobs, based on loose interpretation of existing civil rights statutes,“ and I guess that also includes mandatory racial quotes for university admissions as well based on even looser interpretation of the Constitution. We see the courts moving in this direction in this case. It will probably be overturned by the Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision, but one more liberal Supreme Court Justice means that mandatory affirmative action eventually leading to mandatory racial quotas becomes the law of the United States.

Tax advice for Republicans

Obama says:

With respect to the tax rates, I just want to emphasize: I am open to new ideas. If the Republican counterparts or some Democrats have a great idea for us to raise revenue, maintain progressivity, make sure the middle class isn't getting hit, reduces our deficit, encourages growth, I'm not going to just slam the door in their face

Republicans should take him up on this to raise revenue by closing loopholes and eliminating personal deductions, especially on the rich.

Loopholes are: ability to classify income as low-taxed capital gains, losses from pass-through entities (often aided by accelerated depreciation). Capital gains differential + pass-through entity = carried interest loophole.

The big-three personal deductions: state taxes, home mortgage interest, charity.

The states with highest taxes are blue states like New York and California, so removing the deduction for state taxes would punish high-tax blue states.

While poor people give charity to their church, rich people give charity to liberal-controlled organizations like universities and foundations.

And rich people don’t need a special tax break to subsidize their big-ass mansion. The mortgage deduction should be limited to modestly-priced residences.

The generals are scum

Sheila Tone asks, "Not a word of analysis about the cheating husbands, eh?"

My analysis is that these generals are scum.

HBD and the Petraeus affair

HBD can tell us some valuable information about Jill Kelley, because she has an identical twin sister Natalie Khawam. From the Tampa Bay Times:

In late September, a U.S. Marine Corps four-star general and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency sent letters to a court in Washington, D.C., testifying that a single mom in Tampa named Natalie Khawam was fit to parent her 4-year-old son.

. . . The court had a different opinion.

"Ms. Khawam appears to lack any appreciation or respect for the importance of honesty and integrity in her interactions with her family, employers, and others with whom she comes in contact," a judge wrote after a litany of hearings and psychological evaluations. "The court fully expects that Ms. Khawam's pattern of misrepresentations about virtually everything, including the most important aspects of her life, will continue indefinitely."

She was more than $3 million in debt, records show. She had blown through four jobs in five years and sued a former employer for sex harassment. She had had three failed engagements, left her new husband and moved in with her sister where she quickly began hobnobbing with military brass and others in Tampa's elite circles.

Jill Kelley surely shares the same genes for bad judgment and low future-time orientation. And Natalie probably shares Jill’s genes for being an attention whore. And Jill also seems to be on a path of spending her doctor husband into the poorhouse. Lawrence Auster is wrong for defending her.

Also, a warning for any of my readers who become wealthy doctors and then attract the attention of low-class gold-digging bimbos like the Khawam sisters. DON’T marry them. And as a corollary warning, stay away from any woman who looks like she might be selected to appear on a Real Housewives reality show. Per my previous good advice, marry nice “non-slutty upper-middle-class girls.” The Khawam sisters are definitely slutty, and I suspect that their Lebanese immigrant parents raised them in a prole neighborhood in the Philadelphia area.

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And while we are on this topic, Paula Broadwell’s radiologist husband also could have avoided marrying a cheating wife if he followed my advice. She may be smart and educated, but her father, Paul Kranz, is a high school basketball coach from Bismark, ND, and that’s definitely not upper-middle class. Although I’ve said that a school teacher is the quintessential middle-class job, I think that being a basketball coach rather than teaching actual academic subjects borders on high prole.

Smart Americans are pro-choice

This table, like the previous ones, encompasses the years 2006-2010 and shows the respondants who say yes that a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if "the woman wants it for any reason." As I point out again, the wording of this question makes Americans seem less pro-choice than they really are because repondants who think that abortion should generally be legal for most reasons (but not any) get grouped with the "no" respondants.

The Wordsum score is the number of answers the respondant gets correct on a 10-question vocabulary test and it has a good correlation with IQ.

As we see, there is a strong correlation between being smart and being pro-choice. Republicans, by being anti-abortion, are marking themselves as the party of stupid. Because smart people control the media, this is a bad place for Republicans.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		ABANY
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	13.6 1.8	86.4 11.4	100.0 13.2
	1	32.3 9.2	67.7 19.2	100.0 28.4
	2	26.5 17.9	73.5 49.7	100.0 67.6
	3	29.5 30.8	70.5 73.5	100.0 104.3
	4	29.4 56.0	70.6 134.7	100.0 190.7
	5	35.0 126.2	65.0 234.7	100.0 360.8
	6	39.6 195.7	60.4 298.4	100.0 494.0
	7	41.5 159.5	58.5 224.5	100.0 384.1
	8	42.7 101.5	57.3 136.3	100.0 237.7
	9	53.2 80.7	46.8 71.1	100.0 151.8
	10	58.1 36.8	41.9 26.5	100.0 63.3
	COL TOTAL	38.9 816.1	61.1 1,279.9	100.0 2,096.0

Educated Americans are pro-choice

This table, like the previous one, encompasses the years 2006-2010 and shows the respondants who say yes that a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if "the woman wants it for any reason." As I point out again, the wording of this question makes Americans seem less pro-choice than they really are because repondants who think that abortion should generally be legal for most reasons (but not any) get grouped with the "no" respondants.

The correlation between education and pro-choice is even stronger than the correlation between income and pro-choice.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		ABANY
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
DEGREE	0: LT HIGH SCHOOL	24.8 161.6	75.2 488.9	100.0 650.6
	1: HIGH SCHOOL	38.4 876.3	61.6 1,404.9	100.0 2,281.3
	2: JUNIOR COLLEGE	41.0 148.2	59.0 213.1	100.0 361.3
	3: BACHELOR	50.7 385.1	49.3 374.1	100.0 759.3
	4: GRADUATE	60.3 255.8	39.7 168.5	100.0 424.3
	COL TOTAL	40.8 1,827.1	59.2 2,649.6	100.0 4,476.7

Rich people are pro-choice

Responses for ALL GSS respondents to the question of whether they think abortion should be legal for any reason. (And as I pointed out before, the wording of this question makes Americans appear to be less pro-choice than they really are.)

This shows the very strong correlation between family income and views on abortion. Wealthy Americans are pro-choice. Which is a big problem for Republicans, because poor people will vote Democratic for the government benefits, and rich people will vote Democratic because they find the abortion issue toxic. (This may have gone in the opposite direction in the days of Reagan, but the Republican strategy is no longer working in presidential elections.)

What I think is weird is the very sharp increase in pro-choice responses when the family income passes above $75K. What's so significant about $75K?

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		ABANY
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
INCOME06	1: UNDER $1 000	44.7 19.1	55.3 23.6	100.0 42.7
	2: $1 000 TO 2 999	42.1 16.2	57.9 22.2	100.0 38.3
	3: $3 000 TO 3 999	33.9 13.0	66.1 25.4	100.0 38.3
	4: $4 000 TO 4 999	30.6 5.4	69.4 12.2	100.0 17.5
	5: $5 000 TO 5 999	28.4 9.1	71.6 23.0	100.0 32.1
	6: $6 000 TO 6 999	41.7 9.3	58.3 13.0	100.0 22.2
	7: $7 000 TO 7 999	26.2 12.2	73.8 34.5	100.0 46.7
	8: $8 000 TO 9 999	50.6 31.0	49.4 30.2	100.0 61.2
	9: $10000 TO 12499	26.8 30.5	73.2 83.6	100.0 114.1
	10: $12500 TO 14999	35.2 35.6	64.8 65.5	100.0 101.1
	11: $15000 TO 17499	37.9 48.6	62.1 79.5	100.0 128.1
	12: $17500 TO 19999	28.7 22.9	71.3 56.8	100.0 79.7
	13: $20000 TO 22499	28.5 37.6	71.5 94.6	100.0 132.2
	14: $22500 TO 24999	29.0 36.1	71.0 88.4	100.0 124.5
	15: $25000 TO 29999	35.5 63.7	64.5 115.5	100.0 179.2
	16: $30000 TO 34999	41.9 80.9	58.1 112.0	100.0 192.9
	17: $35000 TO 39999	34.3 67.6	65.7 129.1	100.0 196.7
	18: $40000 TO 49999	38.8 131.8	61.2 208.2	100.0 340.0
	19: $50000 TO 59999	38.2 127.9	61.8 206.5	100.0 334.4
	20: $60000 TO 74999	39.9 165.5	60.1 249.5	100.0 415.0
	21: $75000 TO $89999	50.2 156.9	49.8 155.4	100.0 312.3
	22: $90000 TO $109999	44.1 134.3	55.9 170.5	100.0 304.8
	23: $110000 TO $129999	48.5 103.4	51.5 109.7	100.0 213.1
	24: $130000 TO $149999	61.4 71.8	38.6 45.1	100.0 116.9
	25: $150000 OR OVER	57.2 164.4	42.8 123.1	100.0 287.6
	COL TOTAL	41.2 1,594.7	58.8 2,276.9	100.0 3,871.6

Hispanics and abortion

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		ABANY
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
INCOME06	1: Up to $49999	25.3 93.7	74.7 277.0	100.0 370.7
	2: $50000 to 74999	31.4 21.8	68.6 47.6	100.0 69.4
	3: greater than 75000	48.7 43.5	51.3 45.9	100.0 89.4
	COL TOTAL	30.0 159.0	70.0 370.5	100.0 529.5

Text for 'ABANY' 206. Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if: g. The woman wants it for any reason?

The table above shows data from the GSS for Hispanic respondents for the years 2006-2010, and compares views on abortion to family income.

Because the of the way this question is worded, it creates the impression that Americans are more pro-life than they actually are. For non-Hispanic respondents during the same time period, 42.5% said they that a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion for any reason.

This table shows us that the Hispanics who are most likely to be Republican based on being financially successful, they are more pro-choice than the average American.

Thus the Hispanics who are pro-life are the poor Hispanics who will vote Democratic because they need government assistance. And rich Hispanics will vote Democratic because they are pro-choice.

Rand Paul pro-amnesty

Rand Paul, son of Ron, has joined the Republican pro-amnesty chorus.