I really wish journalists had to pass an introductory statistics course in order to "practice" their trade. One of the biggest bloopers that seems to come up over and over again in mainstream media, at least in the English-speaking press, are assertions that marriage makes men healthier, and makes them wealthier, and so on.
Of course, that gets the direction of causality exactly wrong. Higher income and net worth is almost perfectly correlated with levels of health (Dutch study nailed this pretty well) and as any guy in a UK or American city will tell you, money is to marriage-crazed females what honey is to bees.
But the MSM can't take the necessary 45 seconds to think through correlation and causality. This statistical illiteracy in media has been a huge practical joke waiting to happen and I'm glad someone finally put out the plant. This should be awesome to watch unfold:)
Women don't like hard work. Good article on this:
on
Women Dropping Out of IT
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The steady state economic model of Herman E. Daly is the only economic theory that appears to make sense in the long haul. China and India and everyone else will just become more and more water stressed, and "everything stressed", until an SSE approach is adopted.
I highly recommend checking out steadystate.org , they explain this very well.
That's a good question you raise, and it made me think. I believe (just instinct, not data here):
1) Under the National Socialist regime, Germans had been whipped up into an emotional frenzy for so long, their appetite for emotional extremism was exhausted by summer 1945.
2) The idea of hard work as penance for your sins is deeply rooted in the Protestant German psyche, so hard work as penance, plus abundant technical skills, meant a population doing things that fit the needs of a successful occupation and recovery like a hand fits a glove. I would say that for many Germans, it's accurate to say that a guiding principle for life has been "if in doubt, work harder". That is less true for my generation, but it does help as a guide.
3) There was the threat of worse...although the western Allies took out a bit of understandable anger, blowing up large factories and so on after the ceasefire, there were nods of humanitarian gestures, such as the Marshall Plan. Whereas western Germans knew that not far away the Soviets were ready to take over if the western area didn't work out.
Perhaps #3 was decisive. It would be interesting to know, what would have happened in the American South after 1865, if there was good reason to believe that if the Union army got fed up with Southern behavior, the hammer would really come down?
If you stop to think about what the U.S. would be like without the former members of the Conderacy..what a fine place it would be! Given demographics from the 19th century etc. you'd have something that was a cross between Great Britain and Scandinavia. The U.S. today would likely be like Denmark on a massive scale, a social democracy that works and everyone is happy.
As a German I've wondered why Germany was able to move on, more or less, from devastating defeat to become a modern country. Whereas the states of the former Confederacy seem mired in the past, even though the American South was also devastated in losing their war. And both National Socialist Germany and the Confederacy could point to impressive military achievements (Rommel the Desert Fox, General Lee, etc). As an outsider I see these differences though:
1) In the American South, the former slaves (the raisin d'etre of the US Civil War) were present and part of life after the war. Whereas the countries Germany tired to conquer were far away from the lives of average Germans. It is probably an unfortunate part of human nature that when you have been oppressing someone, and that person is now free and you see him every day, that constant reminder brings guilt, which brings unhappiness, and eventually anger and resentment. Rather than contrition
2) Germany was actually lucky to not have a slave-based economy (despite the best efforts of the National Socialist regime and Albert Speer). The German blue and white collar workforce was able to easily build things that the world wanted. So, for Germans the war's end meant: keep working that drill press, keep making those precision optics. Whereas I think for the whites in the American South, they did not have many skills to fall back on when the black slaves were freed. If you have been primarily a slave watcher, when the workers are gone, you are pretty much hosed.
Longer term, for the American South to move on to modernity, I suspect a big part of the answer will be for Southerners to acquire a new identity to be proud about. Today I think only New Orleans has a culture that is desired and liked. I think many parts of the South have tried to rely on American football as an outlet for a drive for excellence, but that is really not enough. The American South really needs something about its culture, or something about the work they do, that would be "world class" enough to let them cut their ties with the baggage of hate and resentment from the Confederacy.
Either that or the former Confederacy will prove to have been indigestible by the United States, and the U.S. will turn away from science, and it will indeed cease to be a great power. Which would be a travesty! The U.S. has so much potential, if only the crazy haters in the geographical basement could be reset somehow.
As someone who has worked in the U.S., the U.K. and continental Europe, I have to say that both public and private sectors in the UK have an unparalleled blind allegiance to Microsoft. It's like nothing I've ever seen.
I recall seeing a timeline of the Internet's development at a display in London, and the first two dots were the 1973 launch of DARPAnet and then, incredibly, the founding of Microsoft in 1979. There was no dot for anything from Britain's own Tim Berners-Lee, for the development of DNS by Mockapetris, or other real milestones.
Honestly, it's sad to see what has happened to the land of Francis Bacon, Newton, Babbage and Turing. The UK today seems run by men without an original thought in their entire being, who slavishly follow fads from American business schools and figure one is always right if you tie your fortunes to those of Microsoft. This doesn't bode well for the future of that island nation, is all I can say. You can't rely forever on frothy financial instruments to fund purchases of food, energy and all technology from someone else.
These peasants are going to get used to looking at data and making decisions, and then what? It's a slippery slope to scientific habits and secularism. We'd best send in the Marines to set things right before it gets too far. Nicaraguans need to accept their place: illiterate, undernourished, and working obediently and QUIETLY for American business.
Geologists have 2 questions for the pollyanas who say Gee, there is still a lot of oil like stuff out there:
1) What are the flow rates for new sources? (compare to the 80 million bbl. per day needed currently)
2) When could those flow rates be realized, best case?
That is all. Just get data to answer those 2 questions, and you'll understand the magnitude of the Peak Oil problem.
This smacks of some (not all) women just wanting special perks, attention, and "the rules bend for me" type treatment. Or, could this be a nice little campaign from our friends in Redmond, to distract and delay? Per Occam's Razor, the Redmond angle is the most convincing to me.
Fact is, with the nature of FOSS development, evangelism and practical application, you could be a purple alien with two heads and enjoy respect and success.
Next topic please!
The large battery packs for cars need not be built monolithically. There can be a standard created, where the smallest size battery using the new tech is (for example) 0.5 cm x 5cm x 4cm. That would be good for small devices.
Then, maybe 10 of these together in a tray make a brick suitable for power tools etc. Keep building composite batteries this way until you get a car size unit that would be composed of hundreds of the original small standard size, but still easy to slide in / out of a car at a swap station. Swap stations would charge for the convenience of fully charged packs, of course.
Getting away from devices that work with only one type of stored energy (gasoline) and instead tap a source-agnostic energy bus will be a big step forward. Whether the electricity comes from nuclear, wind or whatever, the energy infrastructure can evolve and get better and cleaner, without breaking standards dependencies by end consumption devices.
I'm surprised that more economists haven't questioned the paradigm of endless material growth, now that we know the world is finite. I recall reading years ago that there is not enough energy from all sources in the earth's crust to lift even 1% of the human population to the moon or beyond. Therefore it's clear that we have to manage our affairs, for the foreseeable future (centuries) within the limits of this one planet.
I suppose we have a choice: keep breeding and consuming our petri until our log growth curve hits the maxima (8 billion people? 11 billion? Something like that). And then enjoy the corrective measures that thermodynamics and mathematics will apply to our species within our closed system.
Or we can plan ahead and and live within our means, as if we were an intelligent species, able to grasp the meaning of large numbers and apply that meaning to the physical world we live in.
About the only place I've seen that is thinking this through completely is the Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economics, over at steadystate.org .
One sees this a lot in work settings. A lot of women have been told (or have read repeatedly) that they are sooooo clever and great at multitasking, while the dullard men can only do one thing at a time, and badly at that.
But -- in real life , as time goes on, it's always the men who become the "go to" employees for getting things done, in every workplace I've been in. The confident, empowered, do-it-all women are eventually seen as not much use, to be worked around and bypassed. Harsh but that's the way it is.
All this could have been avoided if the poor bastard had just NOT MADE THE BIGGEST MISTAKE A MAN CAN MAKE -- MARRIAGE.
Guys, if you have not yet done so, take 10 minutes to Google for the problems of marriage for men. Or cut to the chase and skim nomarriage.com, either way. Educate yourself on the realities of marriage, please.
I think you're right. The point about IE enthusiasts strikes me as correct, and also jarring at the same time.
I suppose somewhere in our world there must be fervent gatherings of IE enthusiasts, afficionadoes of starched woolen condoms, and so on. I hope those gatherings are far from here.
The phenomenon you describe (split, then the new becomes not so new anymore, split again) is something everyone should understand.
The key is to not get locked into a 24/7 situation at all. People need space.
The BBC article is mostly interesting for how closely chimp behavior is to human behavior--who knew chimps were so much like us, socially?
For us humans, the key thing (at least for males) is to avoid the marriage trap. Outside of marriage, the resources-for-nookie exchange holds true at market rates. Imbalances are corrected by the laws of microeconomics.
But once locked in a marriage contract, a human male MUST provide resources under penalty of law, while the female is not obligated to do...anything. The predictable result is the epidemic of sexless marriages in the U.S. and other developed countries.
So, just beware the marriage trap. It's like signing an oil futures contract where you're required to deliver oil at $12 a barrel, indefinitely. You'd be a fool to sign either a $12/bbl oil contract, or a marriage contract.
Whether n = 1, 2, or 20, *marriage* to n females is misery in most cases.
The solution is pretty obvious: do away with marriage. This is happening in Scandinavia and coincidentally, worldwide, people are happiest in Scandinavia. Happier then our God-fearin' marriage addicted U.S. of A.
Marriage is a dull institution that flattens womens' potential as human beings, and for men, well, aside from the obvious "it sucks" I can't say it any better than this well researched and insightful piece... based on 2000 in depth interviews:
http://www.martynemko.com/articles/men-as-beasts-burden_id1228
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish journalists had to pass an introductory statistics course in order to "practice" their trade. One of the biggest bloopers that seems to come up over and over again in mainstream media, at least in the English-speaking press, are assertions that marriage makes men healthier, and makes them wealthier, and so on.
:)
Of course, that gets the direction of causality exactly wrong. Higher income and net worth is almost perfectly correlated with levels of health (Dutch study nailed this pretty well) and as any guy in a UK or American city will tell you, money is to marriage-crazed females what honey is to bees.
But the MSM can't take the necessary 45 seconds to think through correlation and causality. This statistical illiteracy in media has been a huge practical joke waiting to happen and I'm glad someone finally put out the plant. This should be awesome to watch unfold
http://www.martynemko.com/articles/men-as-beasts-burden_id1228
The steady state economic model of Herman E. Daly is the only economic theory that appears to make sense in the long haul. China and India and everyone else will just become more and more water stressed, and "everything stressed", until an SSE approach is adopted. I highly recommend checking out steadystate.org , they explain this very well.
That's a good question you raise, and it made me think. I believe (just instinct, not data here):
1) Under the National Socialist regime, Germans had been whipped up into an emotional frenzy for so long, their appetite for emotional extremism was exhausted by summer 1945.
2) The idea of hard work as penance for your sins is deeply rooted in the Protestant German psyche, so hard work as penance, plus abundant technical skills, meant a population doing things that fit the needs of a successful occupation and recovery like a hand fits a glove. I would say that for many Germans, it's accurate to say that a guiding principle for life has been "if in doubt, work harder". That is less true for my generation, but it does help as a guide.
3) There was the threat of worse...although the western Allies took out a bit of understandable anger, blowing up large factories and so on after the ceasefire, there were nods of humanitarian gestures, such as the Marshall Plan. Whereas western Germans knew that not far away the Soviets were ready to take over if the western area didn't work out.
Perhaps #3 was decisive. It would be interesting to know, what would have happened in the American South after 1865, if there was good reason to believe that if the Union army got fed up with Southern behavior, the hammer would really come down?
If you stop to think about what the U.S. would be like without the former members of the Conderacy..what a fine place it would be! Given demographics from the 19th century etc. you'd have something that was a cross between Great Britain and Scandinavia. The U.S. today would likely be like Denmark on a massive scale, a social democracy that works and everyone is happy.
As a German I've wondered why Germany was able to move on, more or less, from devastating defeat to become a modern country. Whereas the states of the former Confederacy seem mired in the past, even though the American South was also devastated in losing their war. And both National Socialist Germany and the Confederacy could point to impressive military achievements (Rommel the Desert Fox, General Lee, etc). As an outsider I see these differences though:
1) In the American South, the former slaves (the raisin d'etre of the US Civil War) were present and part of life after the war. Whereas the countries Germany tired to conquer were far away from the lives of average Germans. It is probably an unfortunate part of human nature that when you have been oppressing someone, and that person is now free and you see him every day, that constant reminder brings guilt, which brings unhappiness, and eventually anger and resentment. Rather than contrition
2) Germany was actually lucky to not have a slave-based economy (despite the best efforts of the National Socialist regime and Albert Speer). The German blue and white collar workforce was able to easily build things that the world wanted. So, for Germans the war's end meant: keep working that drill press, keep making those precision optics. Whereas I think for the whites in the American South, they did not have many skills to fall back on when the black slaves were freed. If you have been primarily a slave watcher, when the workers are gone, you are pretty much hosed.
Longer term, for the American South to move on to modernity, I suspect a big part of the answer will be for Southerners to acquire a new identity to be proud about. Today I think only New Orleans has a culture that is desired and liked. I think many parts of the South have tried to rely on American football as an outlet for a drive for excellence, but that is really not enough. The American South really needs something about its culture, or something about the work they do, that would be "world class" enough to let them cut their ties with the baggage of hate and resentment from the Confederacy. Either that or the former Confederacy will prove to have been indigestible by the United States, and the U.S. will turn away from science, and it will indeed cease to be a great power. Which would be a travesty! The U.S. has so much potential, if only the crazy haters in the geographical basement could be reset somehow.
As someone who has worked in the U.S., the U.K. and continental Europe, I have to say that both public and private sectors in the UK have an unparalleled blind allegiance to Microsoft. It's like nothing I've ever seen.
I recall seeing a timeline of the Internet's development at a display in London, and the first two dots were the 1973 launch of DARPAnet and then, incredibly, the founding of Microsoft in 1979. There was no dot for anything from Britain's own Tim Berners-Lee, for the development of DNS by Mockapetris, or other real milestones.
Honestly, it's sad to see what has happened to the land of Francis Bacon, Newton, Babbage and Turing. The UK today seems run by men without an original thought in their entire being, who slavishly follow fads from American business schools and figure one is always right if you tie your fortunes to those of Microsoft. This doesn't bode well for the future of that island nation, is all I can say. You can't rely forever on frothy financial instruments to fund purchases of food, energy and all technology from someone else.
Windows Mobile is on history's exit ramp.
Microsoft == Sauron
The best article by far on what makes well educated women tick is this classic: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/men-as-beasts-burden_id1228
These peasants are going to get used to looking at data and making decisions, and then what? It's a slippery slope to scientific habits and secularism. We'd best send in the Marines to set things right before it gets too far. Nicaraguans need to accept their place: illiterate, undernourished, and working obediently and QUIETLY for American business.
Geologists have 2 questions for the pollyanas who say Gee, there is still a lot of oil like stuff out there:
1) What are the flow rates for new sources? (compare to the 80 million bbl. per day needed currently)
2) When could those flow rates be realized, best case?
That is all. Just get data to answer those 2 questions, and you'll understand the magnitude of the Peak Oil problem.
This smacks of some (not all) women just wanting special perks, attention, and "the rules bend for me" type treatment. Or, could this be a nice little campaign from our friends in Redmond, to distract and delay? Per Occam's Razor, the Redmond angle is the most convincing to me. Fact is, with the nature of FOSS development, evangelism and practical application, you could be a purple alien with two heads and enjoy respect and success. Next topic please!
The large battery packs for cars need not be built monolithically. There can be a standard created, where the smallest size battery using the new tech is (for example) 0.5 cm x 5cm x 4cm. That would be good for small devices. Then, maybe 10 of these together in a tray make a brick suitable for power tools etc. Keep building composite batteries this way until you get a car size unit that would be composed of hundreds of the original small standard size, but still easy to slide in / out of a car at a swap station. Swap stations would charge for the convenience of fully charged packs, of course. Getting away from devices that work with only one type of stored energy (gasoline) and instead tap a source-agnostic energy bus will be a big step forward. Whether the electricity comes from nuclear, wind or whatever, the energy infrastructure can evolve and get better and cleaner, without breaking standards dependencies by end consumption devices.
I'm surprised that more economists haven't questioned the paradigm of endless material growth, now that we know the world is finite. I recall reading years ago that there is not enough energy from all sources in the earth's crust to lift even 1% of the human population to the moon or beyond. Therefore it's clear that we have to manage our affairs, for the foreseeable future (centuries) within the limits of this one planet.
I suppose we have a choice: keep breeding and consuming our petri until our log growth curve hits the maxima (8 billion people? 11 billion? Something like that). And then enjoy the corrective measures that thermodynamics and mathematics will apply to our species within our closed system.
Or we can plan ahead and and live within our means, as if we were an intelligent species, able to grasp the meaning of large numbers and apply that meaning to the physical world we live in.
About the only place I've seen that is thinking this through completely is the Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economics, over at steadystate.org .
One sees this a lot in work settings. A lot of women have been told (or have read repeatedly) that they are sooooo clever and great at multitasking, while the dullard men can only do one thing at a time, and badly at that. But -- in real life , as time goes on, it's always the men who become the "go to" employees for getting things done, in every workplace I've been in. The confident, empowered, do-it-all women are eventually seen as not much use, to be worked around and bypassed. Harsh but that's the way it is.
Most fragile ego known to man: a cop in the United States.
All this could have been avoided if the poor bastard had just NOT MADE THE BIGGEST MISTAKE A MAN CAN MAKE -- MARRIAGE. Guys, if you have not yet done so, take 10 minutes to Google for the problems of marriage for men. Or cut to the chase and skim nomarriage.com, either way. Educate yourself on the realities of marriage, please.
This could be good for married men all over America. Benefits and compensation :)
I think you're right. The point about IE enthusiasts strikes me as correct, and also jarring at the same time. I suppose somewhere in our world there must be fervent gatherings of IE enthusiasts, afficionadoes of starched woolen condoms, and so on. I hope those gatherings are far from here.
It's clearly time to bring democracy to Bolivia.
The phenomenon you describe (split, then the new becomes not so new anymore, split again) is something everyone should understand. The key is to not get locked into a 24/7 situation at all. People need space.
For us humans, the key thing (at least for males) is to avoid the marriage trap. Outside of marriage, the resources-for-nookie exchange holds true at market rates. Imbalances are corrected by the laws of microeconomics.
But once locked in a marriage contract, a human male MUST provide resources under penalty of law, while the female is not obligated to do...anything. The predictable result is the epidemic of sexless marriages in the U.S. and other developed countries.
So, just beware the marriage trap. It's like signing an oil futures contract where you're required to deliver oil at $12 a barrel, indefinitely. You'd be a fool to sign either a $12/bbl oil contract, or a marriage contract.
A really good article, best I've ever seen on what makes women tick, is this one: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/men-as-beasts-burden_id1228
love it.
Whether n = 1, 2, or 20, *marriage* to n females is misery in most cases. The solution is pretty obvious: do away with marriage. This is happening in Scandinavia and coincidentally, worldwide, people are happiest in Scandinavia. Happier then our God-fearin' marriage addicted U.S. of A. Marriage is a dull institution that flattens womens' potential as human beings, and for men, well, aside from the obvious "it sucks" I can't say it any better than this well researched and insightful piece... based on 2000 in depth interviews: http://www.martynemko.com/articles/men-as-beasts-burden_id1228