Bill Burr takes on the Cult of Jobs
Shades of #GamerGate
The Otherwhere Gazette releases the Sad Puppies Manifesto:
- That for Freedom of Speech (and Written Word) to be free, that
Freedom must be sacrosanct, nothing is off limits, nothing is too
offensive - That Freedom of Speech does not mean freedom not to be Offended, nor to impose your Offense on behalf of others.
- That Freedom of Speech comes with consequences and others may Consequence your nose if you are too offensive.
- That Writers must be free to write what they please and that no one has the right to tell them they may not or should not.
Read the rest of it there. But for me, it is the fourth point that is the most important, and the most offensive to the SJWs. If they want to play the numbers game and see who can flex the most muscle, that’s fine. Our side invented the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after all, and we can play that game better than they ever could.
But we’d rather not. Our side also invented free will and freedom of speech. That’s what we’d prefer. The pinkshirts and SJWs cast those concepts aside at their own peril.
This time it’s different again
No matter how many times they are wrong, stock market watchers are just going to keep throwing out the same old line out, looking to catch the little fishies.
The Nasdaq is rapidly approaching the 5,000 level and is less than 4% away from all-time highs that were set 15 years ago. These landmark levels are bringing back bad memories of the late 1990s, when people went crazy over money-losing tech stocks (and bad pop songs). The good times ended when the bubble popped in March 2000, causing huge losses for investors and making many tech companies to disappear.
All of this begs the question: Does the fact that Nasdaq has joined peers like the Dow in record territory signal another bubble is brewing in tech stocks?
No, this tech party doesn’t appear destined to end in tears. That’s because today’s tech stocks look all grown up. They’re more fundamentally sound than their 1999 peers, and their valuations are based on something the dotcom stocks of the past never had: real earnings.
“There’s no bubble when it comes to technology stocks,” said Scott Kessler, head of technology equity research at S&P Capital IQ.
Counterpoint: Twitter is valued at $31 billion. Facebook is valued at $223 billion. And the world is rapidly plunging into war from the Middle East to Eastern Europe.
Didn’t he see Serenity?
Stephen Hawking is a good example of why scientists should not be allowed to vote, let alone set government policy:
The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all. A major nuclear war would be the end of civilisation, and maybe the end of the human race.
This is idiotic. It isn’t human aggression that threatens to destroy us all, it is science and scientists. Hawking demonstrates a complete inability to correctly utilize basic logic.
Scientists created the threat. Rather than work to remove the threat, some of the very people who created it now want to EXPERIMENT WITH THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE in order to do something that won’t remove the current threat and might well create some that are even worse.
Scientists love to posture as if they are the good guys responsible for saving the human race, but they are the party primarily responsible for endangering it in a variety of ways.
The Neanderthal theory of intelligence
It’s going to become very, very hard to dismiss the genetic basis for intelligence, or its implications for racial policies, if it is eventually determined that average intelligence is essentially a proxy for a population group’s greater or lesser amount of Neanderthal DNA:
Researchers also have found a peculiar pattern in non-Africans: People in China, Japan and other East Asian countries have about 20 percent more Neanderthal DNA than do Europeans.
Last year, Sriram Sankararaman, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues proposed that natural selection was responsible for the difference. Most Neanderthal genes probably had modestly bad effects on the health of our ancestors, Dr. Sankararaman and other researchers have found. People who inherited a Neanderthal version of any given gene would have had fewer children on average than people with the human version.
As a result, Neanderthal DNA became progressively rarer in living humans. Dr. Sankararaman and his colleagues proposed that it disappeared faster in Europeans than in Asians. The early Asian population was small, the researchers suggested, and natural selection eliminates harmful genes more slowly in small groups than in large populations. Today, smaller ethnic groups, like Ashkenazi Jews and the Amish, can have unusually high rates of certain genetic disorders.
Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and the graduate student Benjamin Vernot recently set out to test this hypothesis. They took advantage of the fact that only some parts of our genome have a strong influence on health. Other parts — so-called neutral regions — are less important.
A mutation in a neutral region won’t affect our odds of having children and therefore won’t be eliminated by natural selection. If Dr. Sankararaman’s hypothesis were correct, you would expect Europeans to have lost more harmful Neanderthal DNA than neutral DNA. In fact, the scientists did not find this difference in the DNA of living Europeans.
Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot then tested out other possible explanations for the comparative abundance of Neanderthal DNA in Asians. The theory that made the most sense was that Asians inherited additional Neanderthal DNA at a later time.
In this scenario, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans split, the early Asians migrated east, and there they had a second encounter with Neanderthals. Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot reported their findings in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
We shouldn’t get too carried away with a scientific hypothesis that merely happens to be in line with some computer modeling; if I was inclined to that sort of thing I’d be deeply concerned about global warming. But it is a little ominous; those who think that the third world invasion of the West is harmless should keep in mind the lesson of the Neanderthals. They may have been smarter, but they’re not around anymore and Homo sapiens sapiens is.
For all we know, there were once Neanderthals who claimed any Neanderthal who thought those nice Homo Sapiens who moved into the cave next door would be a problem were sub-speciesist, and besides, weren’t their spiced triceratops eggs ever so tasty?
Banking is bad for the economy
It’s amazing that people are talking about how excessive finance and credit money warp the economy to its detriment without ever managing to mention the vital Austrian concept of “malinvestment”. But at least they are starting to talk about it, as it will lead them there eventually.
A new study from the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ central bank, as it is dubbed) shows exactly why rapid finance sector growth is bad for the rest of the economy.
The study, by Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, is a follow-up to a 2012 paper which outlined the negative link between the finance sector and growth, after a certain point. When an economy is immature and the financial sector is small, then growth of the sector is helpful. Enterprising businessmen can get the capital they need to expand their companies; savers have a secure home for their money, making them more willing to provide finance to the business sector; and so on.
But you can have too much of a good thing. The 2012 paper suggests that when private sector debt passes 100% of GDP, that point is reached. Another way of looking at the same topic is the proportion of workers employed by the finance sector. Once that proportion passes 3.9%, the effect on productivity growth turns negative. Ireland and Spain are cases in point. During the five years beginning 2005, Irish and Spanish financial sector employment grew at an average annual rate of 4.1% and 1.4% respectively; output per worker fell by 2.7% and 1.4% a year over the same period.
The new paper examines why this might be. One part of the thesis is a familiar complaint, neatly summarised in the 2012 paper
people who might have become scientists, who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers
In short, the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers from other industries. The finance sector then lends the money to businesses, but tends to favour those firms that have collateral they can pledge against the loan. This usually means builders and property developers. Businessmen are lured into this sector rather than into riskier projects that require high R&D spending and have less collateral to pledge.
I’m reading the paper now, and will review it once I’ve finished digesting it.
Novella Book Bomb: the aftermath
Final tally: over 1,500 books sold. Thanks very much to everyone who participated! Final Amazon rankings:
One Bright Star to Guide Them: #359
Big Boys Don’t Cry: #411
Other Heads: #883
This means that nearly twice as many people bought a Sad Puppies-recommended novella as cast a Hugo nominating ballot in 2014. Larry’s campaign to increase reading is clearly working, as longtime fan figure Mike Glyer of File 770 not only read Tom Kratman’s novella, but reviewed it as well:
I plunked down $2.99 for Tom Kratman’s novella “Big Boys Don’t Cry” during yesterday’s ”book bomb” pushing novellas on the Sad Puppies slate, because I just can’t stand on the sidewalk when the parade goes by. Sometimes this leads to good things. I bought Redshirts a couple years ago because of the social media campaign and it turned out to be pretty good. Can lightning strike twice?
Maggie, the protagonist of “Big Boys Don’t Cry,” is a Ratha — a sentient armored weapons platform, the human race’s ultimate ground combat unit. Spoiler warning: She’s not a boy. And apparently she can cry.
As a big fan of Keith Laumer’s original Bolo stories, as well as Elizabeth Bear’s 2008 Hugo-winning ”Tideline”, I find Kratman’s variation compelling because he asks important questions about intelligent, self-aware tanks the earlier classics never investigated.
Like: Why do artificial intelligences subject themselves to human command? Why do they sacrifice themselves for human interests?
Stay tuned. There will be more activity on this front.
A historical crime?
Eight years of Obama have killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition:
Obama’s drone campaign has killed more people during the six years of his presidency than were killed the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.
In his speech on Thursday, he said:
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
Fair enough. But how is Obama himself doing on that score?
Well, on Monday of this week the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published their annual study of deaths from U.S. drone strikes, and reported the following:
At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals…. So how does that number of 2,464 killed in Obama’s drone program — not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan — compare to, say, the Spanish Inquisition?
About 2,250 people were tried and handed over to the crown, then executed, in the 356 years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Obama administration is nearly 50 times more murderous on an annual basis than the medieval institution he was criticizing. And whether or not you are convinced that the Inquisition’s victims got a fair trial, it should be noted that they did get a trial.
I always find it curious, too, when men conspicuously avoid mentioning the name of Jesus.
Identifying Gamma males
A recovering ex-Gamma helpfully provides a list of behavioral attributes:
- When you are having an argument with someone and it appears you are wrong, the most common belief and defense is that the other person simply doesn’t understand what you are saying.
- When discussing matters with someone and you think you are maybe, possibly, being shown to be wrong, you start to get snarky, crack lame jokes, and immediately try to change the subject.
- If someone holds an opinion contrary to yours, and you don’t think you have a good defense immediately to hand, you start to look for unrelated ways to disqualify the other person as being less than knowledgeable about the subject, even going so far as to disqualify them as being a good person or sometimes even a person at all.
- Definitions are tenuous for you and words can be redefined at leisure during a discussion. If someone quotes the dictionary and it disagrees with your definition they are arguing unfairly and the dictionary is wrong.
The rest of the list is at Alpha Game. I’m mostly interested to note how often we see this very sort of behavior from trolls and pinkshirts, which tends to confirm the more casual observations of their low socio-sexual status. See the recent post, A Rabbit Visits, and note the similarities even though this was sent to me several days ago.
Keep in mind that this is a former Gamma explaining his previous mindset, it’s not an outsider’s interpretation.
Detonating the EU
Greek has their finger on a bigger trigger than most people realize:
The political detonating pin for Greek contagion in Europe is an obscure mechanism used by the eurozone’s nexus of central banks to settle accounts. If Greece is forced out of the euro in acrimonious circumstances – a 50/50 risk given the continued refusal of the creditor core to acknowledge their own guilt and strategic errors – the country will not only default on its EMU rescue packages, but also on its “Target2” liabilities to the European Central Bank.
In normal times, Target2 adjustments are routine and self-correcting. They occur automatically as money is shifted around the currency bloc. The US Federal Reserve has a similar internal system to square books across regions. They turn nuclear if monetary union breaks up.
The Target2 “debts” owed by Greece’s central bank to the ECB jumped to €49bn in December as capital flight accelerated on fears of a Syriza victory. They may have reached €65bn or €70bn by now….
The Eurogroup insists that the primary budget surplus be raised from 1.5pc of
GDP in 2014, to 3pc this year and 4.5pc next year. As Nobel economist Paul
Krugman says, they want to force a country that is already reeling from six
years of depression – with the jobless rate still near 50pc – to triple its
surplus for no other purpose than paying off foreign creditors for decades
to come. They are doing to Greece what the Western allies did to a defeated
Germany at Versailles in 1919: imposing unpayable and mutually-destructive
reparations on a prostrate nation.
Combined with the fact that ISIS is planning to flood southern Italy with “immigrant” invaders, it becomes readily apparent that the EU may not last another eight years. The difference between 1933 and 2023 is that the enemy is no longer defined as other Europeans, but Islamic and African invaders.
Italians are already demanding that the Italian navy start sinking boats coming across the Mediterranean and attacking refugee holding centers. The Spanish are looking at the Greek situation and wondering why they should not do the same. The Front National is rising quickly in France; the rise of PEGIDA has been arrested but it will resume soon enough, along with support for AfD once the news of Germany being on the hook for up to €515 billion penetrates the electorate.
No wonder Juncker, the unelected Head of the European Commission has turned openly anti-democratic. But he is as delusional as Hitler in the bunker. Gunnar Beck from London University makes an equally apt comparison: “Germany’s leaders can’t let Greece leave the euro, and the Greeks know
it. They will die in a ditch to defend the euro. This is our Eastern Front,
our Battle of Kursk, and I’m afraid to say that it will end in unconditional
surrender by Germany,” he said.
Like gravity, economics always wins in the end.