Puny men fight well with their words!
The Last Angry Young Man gives us "The Great Big List of Things that Make Me Angry".
I can't help but enthusiastically agree with every single item in this
long list, thinking "Now why the heck didn't I think of pointing that
out?" This list sure has saved me a lot of blogging in the future.
Speaking of things that make me angry, I wonder how my readers are ever able to find this blog, seeing that according to Google search "link:sixteenvolts.blogspot.com", only nine other sites in the world link here. So this is supposed to be the number one search engine in the world? But I guess that people somehow find me, since I have noticed via SiteMeter that some other blogs have linked to me in their blogrolls, for example, Ruminations, Mangan's Miscellany and Half Sigma.
Of course, people have fewer reasons to be angry if they get to live in the more enlightened nations in a more natural and authentic manner. The Internet's foremost progressive thinker Professor Kurgman has written a moving "Tribute to Zimbabwe: Nation of Millionaires!"
Udolpho also has a new post out, in which he examines the social class of people whose tastes are "Middlebrow". I am not one of those people. I am not, am not, am not!
Right Reason reveals us "How the Other Side Thinks". This is, of course, the exact same valuable service that I try to provide to my surroundings by linking to leftist sites.
In my opinion, grading students on the curve is just silly. Each student should get the grade that he deserves based on his learning and knowledge, independent of how the other students did. If this results in all A's or all F's, so be it, but in such a case the course has more serious problems to begin with. In the post "Grading on the curve", Mark Kleiman observes that grading students on the curve creates some perverse incentives. Another post "Abolish the death tax!" makes an argument about taxation that I would certainly agree with. After all, something has to be taxed for the government to be able to perform the tasks that it is there for, and most certainly taxing unearned income (in this particular case, income won from genetic lottery) is more moral in every possible respect than taxing income that was earned with actual work.
Moebius Stripper had "A Canadian Moment". I can actually see how this would happen. Certainly it wouldn't have happened that way back in Finland.
Feminist relativists are so goshdarn cute when they try to claim that Muslim women wear burqas on their own free will, and therefore the evil Westerners shouldn't be so judgemental and prejudiced towards this exciting alternative culture. Hogtown's post "Burka-clad Muslims and topless babes in string bikinis. Why can't everyone just get along?" sure cuts through the crap.
The Chinese sure have the right idea these days when it comes to energy production, by letting a thousand nuclear reactors bloom instead of smoking dirty oil and coal. Now the news tell us that "China to build commercial fast reactor by 2035". Woo-hoo! Forget putting a taikonaut on the moon, this is where the Chinese should invest their excess money to benefit the mankind.
A song by Ultra Bra that lists various curious phenomena of everyday life mentions that if you see somebody often enough you start greeting him even though you don't know his name or anything else about him. Several times when I have taken the bus home from work, in the bus there has been this young woman who I guess works in this strip mall. (No, not as a stripper, though I guess she could.) I have never talked to her, but I once almost started to greet her without thinking when I saw her in another bus, out of the ordinary context. I think she also smiled at me once, but I am not sure. The post "User delight and the guy-from-the-train phenomenon" at "Creating Passionate Users" suggests how this same phenomenon could be used in business. Another post asks "What makes a popular blog?"
Black Death swoops in from the above with the news article "Special forces to use strap-on 'Batwings'". Eat our black sperm of vengeance, terrorists!
The post "On ticket scalping" at Division of Labour wonders about something that I have also often wondered: why exactly is ticket scalping supposed to be a bad thing, even a crime? In every other walk of life, you are allowed to buy stuff and later sell it for profit. The arguments against scalping are spectacularly stupid, for example, that scalpers somehow make the ticket prices higher and this way restrict attendance only to the elite. Bollocks. If the tickets are originally priced under their market value, there will be more demand than there is supply, so to get a ticket you will pay this difference somehow, most likely with the time spent waiting in the queue.
I remember many years ago back in Finland when I stepped into a bus with my wife to get home from downtown, and an old wino came sit next to us. He started chatting with some teenage girls on the opposite side of the aisle, and after taking off the bus had not even travelled for a block before the creep had asked them how long it has been since they last had an orgasm. When the man later turned his attention to us, he loudly proclaimed that we should respect him since he is a professor at Standford University. (Of course I didn't think of asking it then, but in retrospect, he must have been a professor of symbology.) When I didn't indulge his desire to chat, he laughed and told the others that since I'm so quiet, he'll go get his gun and this way make me even quieter. From that day on, I have held a negative attitude towards the professors of the top-tier American universities. Fortunately, at least some of them have useful stuff to offer. For example, professor Greg Mankiw of Harvard advices his readers about "My Ten Principles of Time Management".
I am still skeptical towards some of Don Boudreaux's ideas such as large trade deficits being harmless, and I share Kunstler's skepticism towards the idea that technology could somehow create additional energy, but what Boudreaux says in his post "The Best Deal Going" hits me close to home:
Speaking of things that make me angry, I wonder how my readers are ever able to find this blog, seeing that according to Google search "link:sixteenvolts.blogspot.com", only nine other sites in the world link here. So this is supposed to be the number one search engine in the world? But I guess that people somehow find me, since I have noticed via SiteMeter that some other blogs have linked to me in their blogrolls, for example, Ruminations, Mangan's Miscellany and Half Sigma.
Of course, people have fewer reasons to be angry if they get to live in the more enlightened nations in a more natural and authentic manner. The Internet's foremost progressive thinker Professor Kurgman has written a moving "Tribute to Zimbabwe: Nation of Millionaires!"
Udolpho also has a new post out, in which he examines the social class of people whose tastes are "Middlebrow". I am not one of those people. I am not, am not, am not!
Right Reason reveals us "How the Other Side Thinks". This is, of course, the exact same valuable service that I try to provide to my surroundings by linking to leftist sites.
In my opinion, grading students on the curve is just silly. Each student should get the grade that he deserves based on his learning and knowledge, independent of how the other students did. If this results in all A's or all F's, so be it, but in such a case the course has more serious problems to begin with. In the post "Grading on the curve", Mark Kleiman observes that grading students on the curve creates some perverse incentives. Another post "Abolish the death tax!" makes an argument about taxation that I would certainly agree with. After all, something has to be taxed for the government to be able to perform the tasks that it is there for, and most certainly taxing unearned income (in this particular case, income won from genetic lottery) is more moral in every possible respect than taxing income that was earned with actual work.
Moebius Stripper had "A Canadian Moment". I can actually see how this would happen. Certainly it wouldn't have happened that way back in Finland.
Feminist relativists are so goshdarn cute when they try to claim that Muslim women wear burqas on their own free will, and therefore the evil Westerners shouldn't be so judgemental and prejudiced towards this exciting alternative culture. Hogtown's post "Burka-clad Muslims and topless babes in string bikinis. Why can't everyone just get along?" sure cuts through the crap.
The Chinese sure have the right idea these days when it comes to energy production, by letting a thousand nuclear reactors bloom instead of smoking dirty oil and coal. Now the news tell us that "China to build commercial fast reactor by 2035". Woo-hoo! Forget putting a taikonaut on the moon, this is where the Chinese should invest their excess money to benefit the mankind.
A song by Ultra Bra that lists various curious phenomena of everyday life mentions that if you see somebody often enough you start greeting him even though you don't know his name or anything else about him. Several times when I have taken the bus home from work, in the bus there has been this young woman who I guess works in this strip mall. (No, not as a stripper, though I guess she could.) I have never talked to her, but I once almost started to greet her without thinking when I saw her in another bus, out of the ordinary context. I think she also smiled at me once, but I am not sure. The post "User delight and the guy-from-the-train phenomenon" at "Creating Passionate Users" suggests how this same phenomenon could be used in business. Another post asks "What makes a popular blog?"
Black Death swoops in from the above with the news article "Special forces to use strap-on 'Batwings'". Eat our black sperm of vengeance, terrorists!
The post "On ticket scalping" at Division of Labour wonders about something that I have also often wondered: why exactly is ticket scalping supposed to be a bad thing, even a crime? In every other walk of life, you are allowed to buy stuff and later sell it for profit. The arguments against scalping are spectacularly stupid, for example, that scalpers somehow make the ticket prices higher and this way restrict attendance only to the elite. Bollocks. If the tickets are originally priced under their market value, there will be more demand than there is supply, so to get a ticket you will pay this difference somehow, most likely with the time spent waiting in the queue.
I remember many years ago back in Finland when I stepped into a bus with my wife to get home from downtown, and an old wino came sit next to us. He started chatting with some teenage girls on the opposite side of the aisle, and after taking off the bus had not even travelled for a block before the creep had asked them how long it has been since they last had an orgasm. When the man later turned his attention to us, he loudly proclaimed that we should respect him since he is a professor at Standford University. (Of course I didn't think of asking it then, but in retrospect, he must have been a professor of symbology.) When I didn't indulge his desire to chat, he laughed and told the others that since I'm so quiet, he'll go get his gun and this way make me even quieter. From that day on, I have held a negative attitude towards the professors of the top-tier American universities. Fortunately, at least some of them have useful stuff to offer. For example, professor Greg Mankiw of Harvard advices his readers about "My Ten Principles of Time Management".
I am still skeptical towards some of Don Boudreaux's ideas such as large trade deficits being harmless, and I share Kunstler's skepticism towards the idea that technology could somehow create additional energy, but what Boudreaux says in his post "The Best Deal Going" hits me close to home:
I love this market process. People such as me -- people who lack even a whiff of creativity, people who are terribly risk-averse, people who lazily prefer to read novels and work at secure jobs and spend our evenings at home dining and drinking with family and friends -- just sit back and wait for profit-hungry hard-working anxiety-ridden creative entrepreneurs, each in competition with others, to find new ways to improve our lives. And we don't even have to accept what they devise. If we like it, we buy it. If not, we don't buy it.
I almost feel like a free-rider, a lazy bum, a poacher. I do nothing entrepreneurial, and yet my daily life is filled with the marvelous fruits of entrepreneurial creativity and effort.
I have the same opinion on grading! I ranted for about a page on the subject a couple weeks ago.
Posted by waytoogeeky | 8:12 PM
Here is totally un-PC joke:
Aziz the Combat Fighter
http://www.evil-products.com/movies/go_aziz.htm
Posted by Anonymous | 5:13 AM
Aziz the Combat Fighter is from a Finnish sketch comedy show Kummeli, first aired in 1990's. I wonder if we could make sketches like that and air them on a national state-owned television channel anymore.
Ilkka, I can imagine that the event described in "A Canadian Moment" could have happened in Finland for some Swedish-speaking Finns. Those people even live longer than Finnish-speaking Finns because they are nicer to each other.
Posted by Rebyk | 5:44 AM