Category: Uncategorized

Regarding number seven

The final NAR prices are in.  And while it wasn’t as close as 2008, it wasn’t too far off, especially since prices did plunge below $165,000 in February before bouncing back.

“7. The national median existing-home price will not rise 4% from $172,600 to $179,500 as predicted by NAR’s lead economist Lawrence Yun, but will fall below 165k instead.”

From the article entitled 2010 weakest year for home sales since 1997:  The median price for a home sold in December was $168,800, down 1 percent from a year ago.

Mailvox: le progrès, c’est moi

Remir throws down the gauntlet:

If you can beat an extrapolated 6.9 s for 10 clicks on a Meta, I will buy one. Likewise, if you beat 13.8 s for 20 clicks on a Meta, I will eat myself whole live on the Internet.

Now, I’m not saying that 21.59 s is slow, since it approaches the superhuman. I’m merely pointing out that you can’t reasonably expect to beat a jet with a propeller, even if it’s a turboprop.  Who needs extrapolation when you can simply do it for real?  Better start filing those teeth, Remir.

In addition to shattering the development team’s records, I thought it was interesting to note that the best of the 10 times that went into the 6.89 time was only 0.59, considerably slower than the present record of 0.41 that went into the 6.80 I clocked a few minutes later.  This led to an emotional epiphany in which I suddenly realized that I am presently at the very apex of human progress. The entire history of Man’s technological development and achievement over the millennia currently culminates right here: le progrès, c’est moi. Being a man who lost his fifth gear more than a decade ago, I harbor no illusions that this historical landmark in man-machine relations will be not surpassed soon, perhaps even today. But for one brief, shining, glorious moment, on a planet of 6,894,600,000 people, I can legitimately claim to be the world’s fastest mouser.

The binary choice

Children have to belong to someone who is responsible for their upbringing. For centuries in the West, they belonged to the father. Thanks to feminist family law, they are now generally assumed to belong to the mother by default. Here’s how well that has worked out:

Welcome to 2011: post-morality and stigma-free. One in eight children under five will never meet the man who donated half their genes. Seventy per cent of young offenders were raised in a lone-parent home. It’s an anguished statistic. “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection,” said Sigmund Freud. Yet, in some of the poorest parts of the UK, families have been without fathers for three generations. For every feckless Keith, there is an uncertain young dad who would love a chance to be near his children if only their ex-partners would let them. Panorama asked a 20-year-old single mother if she thought her two little boys would miss out by not having a dad around. She could not have been more bemused if they’d offered her a crinoline and a horse-drawn carriage. For young mums like her, fathers are an extinct species. The dadda is deader than the dodo.

The solution is as simple as it is obvious. First, all children must remain in the full legal and financial custody of their genetic fathers regardless of the marital state of the mother and father. Second, no public money will be allotted to the private maintenance of children or their mothers. If private charities and churches wish to provide assistance, they are of course welcome to do so. But either the subsidizing of socially destructive reproductive behavior will end or society itself will collapse. The author’s inevitable recommendation of “education” is as feckless as the reproductive behavior of her poster boy. And if you think the measures I recommend are too harsh, then contemplate the alternative of maintaining the present course.

Hmmm, this could be embarrassing

The newly self-appointed defender of the Obama birthplace appears to find himself at a loss:

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie suggested in an interview published today that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health. Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star Advertiser he was searching within the Hawaii Department of Health to find definitive vital records that would prove Obama was born in Hawaii, because the continuing eligibility controversy could hurt the president’s chances of re-election in 2012.

This is rather interesting given the long and public history of people insisting that the information had already been released. Perhaps Gov. Abercrombie should be looking in Connecticut… or, you know, Kenya.

Roissy reviews a movie

It’s certainly an unusual take on the usual reviewer’s formula. And significantly more insightful:

Blue Valentine is an exploration of a modern marriage in the process of disintegrating, told via alternating scenes between the couple’s sordid present and their romantically heady past of five or six years ago. The flashback scenes aren’t labeled as such; the viewer knows they are flashbacks by the youthful hairline of Ryan Gosling’s character, Dean, and by the fact that there’s no kid around. The effect of the flashbacks is like a prolonged near-death experience, where the characters’ dying relationship is punctuated by gauzy vignettes of happier times.

Although the theater was filled with SWPL women probably on a bender from Glee house parties, don’t mistake this film for a chick flic. There’s too much truth told in the portrayal of a relationship hitting the skids for this to be anything resembling the typical sappy romance movie. For one, there’s no happy ending. Women’s faces after a manipulative cheese-fest chick flic show the telltale signs of throat-lumped weepiness: the glisten of fresh tears on cheeks. But the crowd of women filing out of the theater after Blue Valentine had only the vacant-eyed look of a shellshocked soldier who has just seen his buddy catch shrapnel. Or, in this case, catch a little too much reality.

Quite simply, there hasn’t been a movie in our lifetimes which depicts the fall of a man from charming nascent alpha to inept needy beta, and the loathing that this engenders in his lover, better than Blue Valentine.

There are apparently “spoilers” in the review, although since I assume most of the readers of this blog are about as likely to see Blue Valentine as I am to win the Powerball lottery, (never having purchased a lottery ticket in my life), there is no reason not to read it. And it’s interesting to learn that Hollywood, in at least this one instance, has abandoned the Disney Snowflake formula in favor of a more realistic Game-like perspective.

One uncomfortable observation that men would do well to accept is that even with the best will in the world, when a man makes a habit of automatically deferring to a woman’s wishes, it tends to cause her to develop contempt for him. It’s simply how they are wired; it can be astonishing to see how quickly a woman develops a prickly queen bee attitude towards others as soon as she has her social status upgraded for one reason or another. Also, because women are dynamic, (which is admittedly part of their charm), they can’t necessarily articulate what they happen to want at any given moment, so the gamma’s plea of “tell me what you want and I’ll do it” not only sounds craven and off-putting to them, it’s not even relevant. The correct thing is to simply do whatever it is that you do and understand that a woman will be with you as long as she chooses, all promises and vows notwithstanding.

Men should pay very little attention to what a woman says. That’s just a snapshot of her emotional state at the moment, which, for good or for ill, is guaranteed to change. In the end, it is only what she has done in the past that is informative and what she decides to do now and in the future that matters. And if she doesn’t want to be with you, why would you want her to stick around anyhow? There are literally three billion other members of the opposite sex out there, after all, and the chances are pretty high that at least one of them will appreciate you considerably more than a woman who has gradually come to dislike or even loathe you.

The pointless college non-education

Wine, women, and song would arguably make for a better and more educational investment:

You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.

And you end up learning … not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The ironic thing is that this near-complete lack of learning doesn’t stop the average college student from believing that he’s somehow learning something by osmosis. The most cocksure and clueless critics are almost invariably college students, who aren’t learning anything substantive at their universities but haven’t been smacked in the back of the head by reality yet either.

The crazy thing is that even the Voxiversity quizzes, which cost you nothing at all and take me about 30 minutes to write, are more challenging than anything you’re likely to encounter in a history or literature class at an Ivy League university.

Speed freaks

Speaking of technological visions, as the Dread Ilk are aware, I am not in the habit of making assertions that I am not fully prepared to back up. In light of this, Markku and I have created a means of verifying our claims regarding the speed of our new mouse interface. While this is designed to permit one to test the Meta interface against the traditional interfaces, it also happens to serve as an excellent means of testing one mouse against another on the traditional point-and-click interfaces. We also included 20 of the most common hotkeys simply to see how the three mouse interfaces fared against it, but that’s really neither here nor there since practically no one uses more than five or six of the basic ones and you don’t leave your finger positioned over the Ctrl key in normal usage.

So, if you’re interested in trying it out and seeing how fast your mouse is against the best and average times of our interface, you can download the 5.3 meg zipfile here. Unzip it, click on the executable, and you’re in. First maximize the window, then select the interface you’re testing under Options; you can’t use Meta unless you have one, of course. Click on the black button with the blue logo to start the timer and it will stop once you click on the correct icon or menu. The logo will flash green, the timer will stop, and the logo will turn blue again, waiting for your next click.

Do at least 20 to get an average score, although 100 is better. If you have a high performance gaming mouse, please email me with the mouse model and your best average for 100 on icons and menu. You can see how it compares with my scores and the development team’s record scores below – I managed to beat the best single time but couldn’t maintain that pace.  And if you can beat Markku on his Logitech MX-518 on the menus, (34.19 for Menu 20 at 1920×1200 resolution), I’ll be very impressed indeed.

The end of Apple

My implacable hatred for Apple’s relentlessly fascistic vision of technology notwithstanding, I am a longtime admirer of Steve Jobs. I even regard him as somewhat of a role model since I am as confident in my own technological visions as he is in his. It is his unique talent for not only having a vision but also successfully communicating it that makes his recent departure so potentially ruinous to Apple:

Apple has not elaborated on the reasons for Steve Jobs’ medical leave, and it probably won’t unless/until it has to. As a result, those who care about the company and Steve can be forgiven for wondering how serious Steve’s condition is and for looking for clues about this in every communication.

In this vein, in our opinion, the wording of one sentence of Steve’s email to Apple staff is not encouraging: “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can.”

In our opinion, those are not the words of someone taking a short leave who is confident he will be back at the company soon (or ever). Rather, in our opinion, they read like the tragic, heartfelt sentiments of someone who thinks he might never be coming back.

I wish Steve Jobs all the best and sincerely hope he makes a full recovery in order to come back and subject a new generation of Macintossers to imprisonment in his beautifully landscaped, walled-in, fascist, techno-utopian garden.

Krugman attacks logic, hilarity ensues

Paul Krugman inadvertantly reveals a glimpse into his reasoning process:

My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account. Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when we’ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick.

O.K., the speaker hasn’t actually weighed in on our plans for the evening. But he and his G.O.P. colleagues have lately been making exactly the nonsensical argument I’ve just described — not about tonight’s dinner, but about health care reform.

in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes. And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform.

But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform. So the G.O.P. argument here is exactly like claiming that my mortgage payments, which I’ll have to make no matter what we do tonight, are a cost of going out for dinner.

Krugman’s column is based upon three assertions. Number one, that the large divergence in the cost of a mortgage versus an inexpensive dinner is comparable to the cost of future fixes versus the total cost of health care reform. Let’s consider that one first. The average monthly mortgage payment is around $1,750. An inexpensive dinner for two is around $50. Krugman tells us the cost of fixing Medicare for 10 years is $208 billion. The CBO’s revised estimate for health care reform, which does NOT include the Medicare fix, is $1,055 billion. (The Republicans say that the total will be $2,600 billion, but we’ll go with Krugman’s favored estimate just to be fair to him.)

So, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Krugman is claiming that 1750/50=208/1055, or that 35=0.197. And you wonder why the economy is in such dire straits…

Number two, Krugman is assuming that the Medicare fix is as inevitable as a mortgage payment. But this quite clearly isn’t the case; whereas not making the mortgage payment entails losing the house, (or at least it did back when mortgage banks held legitimate title to houses and were actually willing to foreclose on properties and write off the bad loan), the possibility that doctors might elect not to see Medicare patients hardly makes increasing Medicare payments a necessity. There are other options available that don’t require spending the money, which is not the case when it comes to making mortgage payments.

Number three, Krugman declares that “the modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs.” But if this were actually the case, then the modern G.O.P. would simply solve the budgetary problem by not spending the $208 billion instead of insisting that it be counted as part of the cost of health care reform. Even if we ignore the fact that this is the fiscally responsible decision as well as the Constitutionally correct thing to do since Medicare is not a legitimate function of the federal government, Krugman’s failure to realize that the Republicans are not advocating this only underlines his complete logical incoherence.

Far be it from me to defend the Congressional Republicans, but for all their ill-conceived enthusiasm for illegitimate military adventures, a war on logic is not one in which they are presently engaged. It is instead Paul Krugman who is waging a public one-man crusade against it.

WND column

The Tree of Liberty

In the aftermath of the lethal Arizona shootings by Jared Loughner, the media have been caught up in an emotional orgy of sanctimonious worship of the state and its representatives. We have seen the ritual calls for more gun bans, the requisite quotes from the freedom-hating Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and Republican Rep. Peter King has even announced plans for new legislation creating an anointed class of legal aristocrats, in whose presence no weapons shall be tolerated.

Or presumably, as we have already seen in the arrest of Ms. Theresa Cao, verbal dissent.