Author: VD

Spacebunny sends a link to an article about a new book on women and the workplace. She notes: “And women wonder why they get paid less…..”

The authors] call for women to say no to 60-plus-hour work weeks and overly demanding jobs that yank them away from their families. Instead, they urge working women to use their clout in the workplace to demand fewer hours at the office, turn down non-family-friendly assignments, and take control of their time by working from home more, checking e-mail less and avoiding meetings whenever possible.

It may surprise you to know that I’m generally in favor of both men and women doing as the Womenomics authors recommend, so long as they do so in the full knowledge that they will receive lower pay and fewer promotions than those who are willing to put in more time and work harder. Women should by all means avoid jobs that tear them away from their families; the smart employer will actively look to find a way to accommodate such women, who tend to be smart, efficient, dependable, and very hard-working within the time limits that their family responsibilities permit. And everyone would be better off with fewer meetings; one of our business partners has a meeting-heavy culture and it’s astonishing how long it takes them to do anything.

The problem with this book, I suspect, is that the usual female fascism will likely rear its incoherent but lushly-maned head and demand that everyone do less work so as not to make working women look bad by comparison, thereby transforming what could be a reasonable call for workers to examine their individual priorities into yet another justification for government intervention into the workplace.

I can’t say with complete certainty that Gordon Brown is the worst Prime Minister ever to be inflicted upon the English people, but he’s without question one of the worst. Of course, if the British Labour Party wasn’t such a bunch of feckless, economically-incompetent, euro-subservient ninnies, they wouldn’t be the British Labour Party:

Honestly, my granny could run a better coup than this lot. How hard can it be? What does it take to get rid of Gordon Brown? You’d think a well-judged shove would do it. Or a lone tank outside the radio station. Or a ranging shot from the destroyer offshore. Or just one gentle puff from someone close – and he’s gone. Yet after another day of political comedy, the Prime Minister is still locked away in Downing Street, refusing to budge. Westminster thinks he’s finished, but he’s still there, like a gangster shouting: “Come and get me, coppers!” He has no intention of making things easy by walking away.

Send Labour – and perhaps more importantly, the Conservative Party – a message by voting UKIP today. And for the love of Her Majesty the Queen, find her a less obnoxious Prime Minister to serve time until the next parliamentary elections, the calling of which should be the new Prime Minister’s first action. It is rather amusing, though, to see the speed with which Tony Blair’s Nu Labour managed to transform itself back into a media-friendly version of Old Labour, complete with its patented capacity for economic self-demolition. Unfortunately, David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher and the Tories are too europhilic to be a genuine alternative. Regardless, as even the Labour-loving Guardian has concluded, Gordon Brown must go.

They’re kind of like fairy tales for scientists, except they are usually less coherent than the Brothers Grimm variety:

Although many scholars have tried to identify a useful function for human hairlessness, they have failed. Indeed Alfred Wallace, the biologist who jointly described evolution with Darwin, concluded that our hairlessness proved the existence of God. Only a supernatural being, unconcerned with natural selection, could have designed it.

But Darwin showed that hairlessness was proof of a different type of evolution, not by natural selection but by sexual selection. Under natural selection, individuals survive if they are adapted to their environments: a brown bear, being conspicuous, would not last long in the Arctic, so it evolves into a polar bear. Sexual selection is not concerned with the environment but with sex: individuals breed only if they find a mate, so animals have to attract one. Consider the peacock.

OK so already we’re in trouble. The guy is going to use the example of a peacock’s plumage to prove why we lost our hair. (!!) If that were the end of the story, I might say some wise aleck remark like, “If the guy were trying to explain why women had such lush manes, compared to the meager covering of the males, then it might make sense to bring up the peacock.” But I can’t go that route, because the “scientific Darwinian” story gets even more convoluted.

Of course, this is an amateur Darwinian Tale. We Scientific Selectionists prefer to explain Evolutionary Stable Strategies, such as why passive men pursue ill-tempered women, also known as the STD-PW Dilemma:

Heritable psychological variation is the “raw material” of human evolution by natural selection, and understanding the mechanisms that generate such variation has become a fundamental challenge for contemporary evolutionary biology. A male human faces an inescapable reproductive dilemma, in that he seeks to spread his genes as widely as possible, an evolutionary pressure which is countered by the fact that an overly aggressive man risks a higher probability of being injured or diseased, thus resulting in a hindered ability to mate. However, a wholly passive man faces the high probability of falling under the influence of his mate and being prevented from going out to find other potential mates, thereby limiting his gene-spreading.

The STD-PW dilemma has, through Natural Selection, resulted in the evolutionary stable strategy of passive men selecting for bitchy women, with whom they mate and spread their genes before prolonged exposure to the bitch results in the application of one of two variant strategies. Either the male cannot stand the female’s bitching anymore and flees of his own volition, (the proto-passive strategy) or the female becomes so disgusted with the excess passivity of the male that she either kicks him out of the house or initiates a relationship-ending affair (the passive strategy).

Either strategy results in freeing the passive man to pursue subsequent mates and further spread his genes without any need for the aggression that would force him to risk reproductive-hindering injury and/or disease.

It is science!

Leveraged lawsuits. I like the sound of that one. Vampire money squared!

Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits. Not in trip-and-fall cases, mind you, but in disputes that are far larger, more costly and potentially more lucrative, often pitting major corporations against each other. Mr. Fields is chief executive of Juridica Capital Management. which runs a fund that invests in one side of a lawsuit in exchange for a share of any winnings…. Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company’s backers, but said that “on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.” He added, “We’re certainly beating the market.”

You know there are already guys at Citi and Goldman Sachs who are busy figuring out how to assess the risk factors and price the securitization of lawsuit investment products.

“Polls ahead of tomorrow’s elections suggest that Labour could be facing the worst drubbing in its history. By some counts the party is even trailing the UK Independence Party in voting intentions for the European Parliament.”
– The Daily Telegraph

That’s my recommendation for any British readers voting in tomorrow’s European parliamentary elections. The two most important issues for Britain right now are a) leaving the European Union, and b) ending immigration. Everything else is irrelevant in comparison with those two issues, which threaten the sovereignty and survival of the nation. With the exception of Daniel Hannan, the Tories are pretty much useless, while Labour is unspeakable and the Liberal Democrats are little more than Labour lite.

If there is no UKIP candidate standing, vote BNP. Despite their left-wing economic policies, they’re on the right side of the two most important issues at the moment. Don’t be put off by the hysterical media rhetoric or fooled into supporting Cameron’s Conservatives, they’re nearly as Europhilic as Nu Labour and they’re not going to allow a referendum on the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty either. The Tories don’t want to change the direction set by Blair and Brown; they offer nothing more than the illusion of change. Fortunately for British voters, the parliamentary system precludes the ridiculous “a vote for a third-party is a vote for the Democrats” argument that so many mathematically challenged Republicans find convincing.

And you thought it was bad enough when you thought Obama, or at least one of his pet Keynesian economists, was running GM:

“There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”

But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention. While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit, it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options.

A month ago, when the administration was divided over whether to support Fiat’s bid to take over much of Chrysler, it was Mr. Deese who spoke out strongly against simply letting the company go into liquidation, according to several people who were present for the debate.

Now this is fabulous! We actually have a wannabe lawyer with a poli-sci degree from Middlebury and no absolutely experience in the real world handed directly responsibility for making important economic policy decisions. I’m going to go out on a real limb here and predict that this automotive experiment isn’t going to end well.

Better yet, he was the top economic staffer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Remember, that was the campaign that didn’t know how the nomination rules worked. What are the odds he knows the first thing about malinvestment or realizes that he’s following the Japanese zombie model? One in one quintillion against or one in one megabazillion? I’d have more confidence in Paul Krugman. Actually, come to think of it, I’d have more confidence in the decomposed corpse of John Maynard Keynes.

This is just a reminder that Voxiversity III will be kicking off with the first quiz on June 13th. The paperback is now available, so if you don’t already have the hardcover, pick up a copy and start reading the introduction, “Everything You Know About Fascism is Wrong”. Even if you’ve already read the book, as many here have, you may want to consider re-reading it next week since you have to know your stuff fairly well if you’re going to score highly on the weekly quizzes.

It is not enough for the gorilla to read Nietzsche. The gorilla must grok Nietzsche.

My new publisher was kind enough to supply me with a number of books I needed for reference while working on the current project, so I now possess more Paul Krugman books in multiple editions than I would have imagined one year ago. Having read the 1999 edition of The Return of Depression Economics as well as a few of his self-serving attempts to pretend that he saw the housing and financial crises coming – sorry, Paul, but spotting the housing boom in 2005, one year before it ended, is not exactly impressive – I was curious to see how he would deal with two rather glaring statements that had appeared in that original edition in the 2008 re-release, titled The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.

“On the whole, I have an easy conscience about the problems of the advanced countries. What I mean by that statement is that the solution for these problems do not seem to involve any especially painful tradeoffs…. the things advanced countries need to do to counter depression economics any compromise of the commitment to free markets.” (1999, p. 162)

“The world economy is not in depression; it probably will not be in depression anytime soon.” (1999, p. 154)

I haven’t found any reference to the former quote yet, in fact, the section of the title essay to which it belongs, “Protecting the Rich”, appears to have been excised entirely. Apparently Krugman isn’t eager to remind everyone how he declared that keeping interest rates low and maintaining inflation around two percent would be sufficient for the USA to avoid a Japanese-style liquidity trap. Surprisingly, however, he repeats the second quote twice in the space of two pages in the new edition.

“We’re not in a depression now, and despite everything, I don’t think we’re headed into one (although I’m not as sure of that as I’d like to be).” (2009, p. 180)

“The world economy is not in depression; it probably won’t fall into depression, despite the magnitude of the current crisis (although I wish I was completely sure about that).” (2009, p. 181)

It should be interesting to see how those statements continue to evolve in future books and/or revised editions. Unsurprisingly, his proposed solution involves increasing the size of the next fiscal stimulus equivalent to 4 percent of US GDP. But since this is only $560 billion, his published proposal is smaller than the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama has proposed as part of the 2010 budget.

In which a teacher offers copious evidence for my calculation that the average teacher’s IQ is below the societal norm:

Here are my top ten reasons why homeschooling parents are doing the wrong thing:

10. “You were totally home schooled” is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled….

8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.

If you truly don’t grasp that the public school system is an idiot factory, staffed by predatory, propaganda-infusing idiots, you probably aren’t capable of reaching the logical conclusion about your own place on the intellectual totem pole. Which is fine, I see absolutely no need to spell it out for you and wish you all the joy of the summer re-runs.

I’m a day behind, unfortunately. Nevertheless, booklovers might be interested in my belated post there today, as I wrote about an online tool that I’ve found to be useful for locating hard-to-find books.

I am firmly of the opinion that a family library is one of the most important contributions one can make to one’s own education as well as the education of one’s family throughout the years. My autodidacticism was far less influenced by the books I was encouraged to read by my father as a teenager than it was by the relatively few, but high-quality sets of children’s books acquired by my mother. Those books were responsible for my acquaintance with everything from Plato and Demosthenes to Roland and Oliver, Coleridge, the Kalevala, and the Chronicle of the Cid. I particularly remember the oversized hardbacks in a series that included Robin Hood, The Virginian, and my favorite, The Tales of Paul Bunyan.

I was the beneficiary of an expensive private education from the seventh-grade through university. And yet, I can testify that the return on my parent’s investment was far, far greater on those thirty or forty books to which I was exposed in my childhood than it was on the much larger one they made in my formal, credentialed education.