Gifted Slacker

A short, not-so-sweet explanation of the root cause of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapse (via MR, Econlog, and others):

What went wrong? The illusion that the companies were doing virtuous work made it impossible to build a political case for serious regulation. When there were social failures the companies always blamed their need to perform for the shareholders. When there were business failures it was always the result of their social obligations. Government budget discipline was not appropriate because it was always emphasized that they were “private companies.” But market discipline was nearly nonexistent given the general perception — now validated — that their debt was government backed. Little wonder with gains privatized and losses socialized that the enterprises have gambled their way into financial catastrophe.

This is fascinating. It provides a sort of C.V. for the Oracle at Delphi.

The best sentence I’ve read today:

[...] many jobs that require a college education today will require little in the way of education tomorrow. Many people may then defer college until retirement, in order to increase the returns to leisure by widening their cultural horizons.

From xkcd:

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors.  And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they’re doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.

You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off.  There are so many adventures because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go along.

I’m was reading through a chunk of the xkcd archives the other day when this bit smacked me upside the head.

Most people are talking about Web 2.0, 3.0, and the Semantic Web as the next big things. I think an undervalued concept is the live web. I’m not even sure that Searls highlights the idea as much as he should in this LinuxJournal column.

The future is not in monetized widgets, Beacon-style advertising platforms, Web 2.0/3.0 or the Semantic Web (though Semantic Web technologies might play a part in things). The future is in moving from a static web to a rich, highly interactive (on the order of a FPS) live web experience.

I would rather not vote. Not because it let’s me say I have no responsibility for poor policy and legislative decisions. I believe I have as much responsibility for those things as people who vote for them.

However, when my all-over-the-place ideology conflicts with something like the Patriot Employer Act, I won’t vote for those who endorse it because I don’t need to be a hypocrite in a way that I can avoid. (I will say that I won’t eat cookies for my health, and that you shouldn’t either. But you and I both know I’m going to eventually have a cookie.)

If the Patriot Employer Act is enacted and turns out to be the best thing for the economy and everyone involved, then I will be ecstatically happy that I was proven wrong.

A question occurred to me as I wrote this, and I’ll leave it as a mind-reading exercise for the reader: Why does the philosophy behind this potential legislation remind me of something born from the same people who opposed NAFTA?

Obama has what is likely a very bad idea.

I was almost going to vote in the upcoming presidential election until I learned of this. The Patriot Employer Act doesn’t make me dislike Obama per se, but it reminds me of why I don’t vote.

I don’t agree with a lot of the things Arnold Kling has to say on politics, but I agree with a bit of one of his recent posts:

Elections, rather than representing an opportunity for “change,” are instead a massive marketing extravaganza on behalf of the status quo. They are, as I remarked in another recent post, geared not toward changing policies but instead toward achieving “quiescence” for existing policies.

Many times, when someone points to a truth that goes against common perception people see the person making the point as saying something negative, insulting, or just plain false. When in reality that person is just stating facts.

Is it really an insult to say that by definition Roger Ebert* is a movie reviewer and not a movie critic?

Public opinion definitely labels Ebert as a critic. The public consciousness perceives the work of critics to be a higher status pursuit reviewing. So people see calling him a reviewer as taking away his status as critic. I think this is where the perceived insult comes from.

Criticism is more abstract and more objectively useful. On the other hand, reviews are subjectively useful (they help me decide what to buy) and more economically impactful. This is similar to the perceptions surrounding psychologists that are doing research and those that are counseling sick people.

What’s the difference? One is theoretic and concerns the state of the art; it mostly concerns experts. And the other is concerned with helping people who aren’t experts. Thus our society sees the researcher as having higher status than the practitioner, even though both are working with the same ideas and materials.

Unthinking acceptance of the culturally endorsed group of thoughts bugs me a lot. I think people are slaves to their reality and the collective reality of their culture. I really wish more people could see their way to perceiving their world from multiple perspectives, so they can see reality more clearly than the reality that is fed to them.
Do me, and everyone else, a favor and call a reviewer a reviewer an attack an attack**.

* At least in the context most of us know of Roger Ebert in, he is very much a reviewer. He very well could be a known critic, but I don’t know much about the world of film criticism.

** “To divert by the way, it is an utterly unfair critique, and ignores Cooper’s manifold literary virtues; one may point out that in Samuel Clemens’s era, Cooper was widely considered America’s greatest novelist to date, a position Mark Twain later supplanted. The essay can also be read–as it rarely is–as a calculated, and highly effective, attack on a literary rival, and as such, should be treated with far less respect, and far more skepticism, than it normally is. There: In the space of a paragraph, I’ve written an effective critique of a work of criticism.” — costik

It’s been quiet around here lately, and it doesn’t look like it will get any noisier anytime soon. I’m sorry about that. Hopefully you’ll all live without my linksterbation.

Anyway.

Two Saturdays ago I was walking back from grabbing food at Gregg’s (ew, I know) when I was approached by a teenage girl. She wanted to me to go into the newsagent and buy her a bottle of vodka. I declined with a smirk.

This would be a completely mundane story if I stopped here. However, that’s not where this story ends.

As I turned and started walking away, the girl offered me a blowjob to run her errand! Well, me being me, I crossed my eyes in shock and started walking faster, at which point she offered the whole shebang. I could barely keep myself from running!

Can’t these kids get some meth somewhere, or at least find a few liters of gasoline to huff. They obviously don’t have enough brain cells to worry about becoming any more retarded than they already are.

I’ll admit, they aren’t operated with exactly the same aims. However, Techcrunch tends more toward the baseless, incorrect, misleading, and ad hominem instead of clear, rational arguments and criticism. GigaOM, on the other hand, is almost scrupulously “good.”

This article highlights the difference you’ll see if you read virtually any Techcrunch post. I’m not saying the GigaOM post is groundbreaking or very thought provoking, but it is definitely the kind of criticism I can endorse: thoughtful, reasonable, clearly argued and written.