Sixteen Volts

I recall Markku once suggesting that during the education of girls, they should be made to play a lot more zero-sum games than they typically do now, to better prepare them for the real world and eliminate certain feminine tendencies for irrationalism and collectivist thinking. Certain zero-sum games are clearly inevitable, but all kinds of negative-sum games are the scourge of civilized society. In the post "Why I hate gambling", professor Greg Mankiw explains his views on the topic, and links to the Slate article "Full House" that illustrates what it is like to be the spouse of a professional poker player. Unless that player is Daniel Negreanu, of course.

I used to have "Notes from the Lounge" in my blogroll a long time ago, but dropped it when there didn't seem to be any new content. I haven't checked this site out for a while, but now that I did, I note that there is quite a lot of good stuff available. In the front page alone, we can find the posts "A Good Word for Bad Faith", "When Is Hate Speech Funny?" and "Gresham's Law for the Blogosphere?" Now, I have always held that appealing to Gresham's Law when it comes to anything else than money is a surefire sign of an idiot, but I can't deny that Sanchez's version of Gresham's Law seems quite apt.

When I have to choose what to put my retirement money in, I don't pay much attention which mutual fund I invest in (other than it is of high volatility), since I tend to believe in the efficient market hypothesis and the random walk hypothesis. However, I am getting second thoughts after reading Dennis Mangan's posts "Are You the Next Warren Buffett?" and "Beating the Market: An Occasional Series". Stumbling and Mumbling disagrees with this in his post "Yes - markets are efficient". Greg Mankiw examines the topic in his post of the same title, and concludes that

Here is my bottom line: The efficient-market hypothesis is not strictly true, but it is close enough to true that most investors are better off believing in it nonetheless.

Sometimes pragmatic approach to truth is the best. This is especially true (or meta-true?) at times when objective statistics trump the vague subjective feelings, as in, for example, the article "The Six Most Feared but Least Likely Causes of Death".

The wives of the local gang of islamists that was famously caught by the RCMP also don't seem to like Canada very much, tells the news article "Hateful chatter behind the veil". If they really hate Canada so much, I could immediately think of at least one easy solution for this problem. I guess that there is a good reason why Western feminists so seldom advocate liberating the Muslim women from their patriarchal slavery. But perhaps these angry Muslims could be made happier by having Wonderland amusement park organize a Muslim-only day, the way that another amusement part apparently recently did in Britain.

Sometimes when I want to feel really pretentious and intellectual, I read the New Yorker. Other than the famous cartoons, I haven't really found much anything of value in this magazine. Michael Blowhard has a slightly different view in his post "Looking Through The New Yorker".

I am not entirely sure if "DiversityInc Factoids & Style Guide" is a genuine article or a joke, but it's often so hard to tell these days. (As a humorous aside, as I was writing this sentence, I became aware that I had "Hello Dummy" by Don Rickles playing in the background.) The observation

Acceptable words and phrases today can become obsolete and even offensive tomorrow. The opposite can also be true, breathing new life into formerly forbidden words and phrases.

remound me of The Danimal's observation that he laughs at people who think the moral high ground represents anything other than the most rapidly moving piece of real estate in the world. I casually browsed the same site and discovered another product, an 80 dollar piece called "Avoiding Liability Under the New FLSA", whose description informs the potential buyers that

It is not easy to comply with the labor and employment laws, especially the FLSA. Relying on your common sense will not work with the FLSA.

I guess that American employers are lucky that they have Diversity Inc advising them. But let's leave that site for future browsing and move on to something that actually does make common sense. If the idea is to establish a floor for everybody's standard of living, screw the minimum wage and other socialist ideas, since there is only one fair and efficient way to do this: "A Basic Income for All".

The essay "Speciesism: a beastly concept" at Spiked explains why it is OK for humans to use animals to advance their ends.

Fausta's post "Yesterday at the Church of Oprah" tells us how Oprah swooned about the wisdom of Leonardo di Caprio. I kind of hope that global warming is true and will result in a disaster, as it certainly would be a fitting end for all the irrationalist leftists who oppose nuclear power simply because it is such a constant reminder of how wrong their worldview of romantic antitechnology is. The hardline opponents of nuclear power simply cannot be convinced with reason, because for them, nuclear power is a symbol for everything they hate in the larger cultural war. You could just as well ask a fundy Christian to bow down in front of a statue of Buddha. No objective comparison of safety and price will ever be enough to convince them of the blatant superiority of nuclear energy, so it is perhaps best not to even try.

You know, it's pretty funny how both Soviet Union and the Western coal and petroleum industries have played the leftists almost like a violin; the former wanted to hinder the growth of the superior Western economy, whereas the latter knew perfectly well that the only real alternatives to nuclear power were coal and hydrocarbons. Not having learned anything, leftists continue even today to repeat their hysterical talking points that were originally written by KGB and Exxon, apparently blissfully unaware that the world didn't even come close to an end at the Chernobyl disaster the way that it was supposed to by the arguments of anti-nuclear activists. In fact, the total death toll of Chernobyl, which was pretty much the worst nuclear accident that is even possible, ended up being less than what the coal industry (or leftism, for that matter) still continue to kill every single day. If building more nuclear power is forbidden because it is too "risky", leftism should also be forbidden and even more so.

In his post "Marital Rape Never, Ever Happens", Glaivester comments on some TV show that apparently featured marital rape. That reminds me of how in one of the last episodes of "Desperate Housewives" of the second season, according to the feminist definition of rape, Tom clearly raped his wife Lynette inside the company elevator, since he did not accept an explicit and repeated no for an answer but kept pushing until she finally relented. I may be mistaken, but I don't recall anybody raising a fuss about this, not even the Dworkinite wing of Internet feminists. Or maybe they just don't watch soaps.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, July 05, 2006 at 12:50 PM