Sixteen Volts

"Study Casts Doubt On the 'Boy Crisis'", tells the Washington Post article. If we only look at the average, boys are doing worse, but when we look at the whole picture, it is only certain kinds of [british_accent]very naughty little boys[/british_accent] who are in crisis and pulling down the average, and most boys are doing just fine. You really have to laugh at the poetic justice of this whole thing: in their enthusiasm to hurt the males, they only managed to hurt the minorities that they were supposed to help.

MetaFilter's post "Leisure Suit Larry" links to the story of Larry Hillblom, an American billionaire who retired to Micronesia to bang as many obese middle-aged women teenage virgins as he could until he unfortunately died in a small plane accident. Perhaps he should have relocated to Canada, considering that the age of consent here is 14. Well, it used to be, until those nasty and morally prudish (and probably also Christian) Harper Conservatives decided to raise it to 16, with the window of five years so that a 19-year-old can still legally have sex with a 14-year-old. Strangely enough, the only opposition that I have seen for this change has come from the leftists. We can only speculate what this tells about the real motivations of these Humbert Humberts. I don't think that I'd want to be a hot teenage girl after the Revolution comes, serving as a concubine of some politburo bigwig cleaning himself inside the bodies of his women, as one late hero of leftism once famously noted.

It is always easy to be right and brave in retrospect once you know who is going to win, and say that of course we would have been on that side. Since Americans apparently had some kind of holiday celebration recently, Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution looks back and asks himself "Would I have supported the American Revolution?" In a similar spirit, Donald Pittenger of Two Blowhards asks if, when Nazi Germany occupied France, he would choose to "Collaborate, Resist or ..."

Dennis Mangan continues on the theme of efficient markets hypothesis with the post "Beating the Market: An Occasional Series: The Robot". While reading this, I immediately started wondering what would happen if everybody became a "contrarian" investor. More generally, if there really are investment strategies that beat the market, why doesn't everybody already follow them, or invest to mutual funds that follow them? You'd think that somebody would start such mutual fund, with all the hoopla and energy spent in this field.

I also remember many years ago when me and the chums wondered what would happen if somebody invented a machine that could reliably predict the stock market. I didn't really think it through, but I don't think that the mere existence of such machine would directly lead to a paradox as in the standard proof for the algorithmic unsolvability of the halting problem.

Now that Ken Lay of Enron fame died before going to jail, the post "The Ken Lay Obits" by Ezra Klein makes a few observations that I recall similarly wondering about in other contexts. But it's not like the death penalty is any kind of feast of intellectual consistency anyways. However, much more interesting for me was the link to the obituary at Washington Post. Reading it, it sure feels surreal to see a major newspaper nonchalantly admitting, even taking delight in the understanding that being raped is a de facto part of serving a prison sentence in America. And this in an obituary.

(I could also write a bit more about the curious fact that whenever somebody gets all giddy about the prospect of prison rape, the target of this fantasy always seems to be a white male who is not that strong or threatening physically, and the perpetrator is either a person of colour or clearly belongs to the white underclass. But perhaps I shall leave digging through the obvious motivations for now, for someone else to catch and run with. I am sure that the reason for this enthusiasm for prison rape is totally different from what my cynical mind assumes it to be.)

Brooke Oberwetter has noticed that these days "Everyone's an Expert". Well, that's Internet for you, releasing all this so far untamed and unused knowledge for the masses. Information wants to be free, as somebody once famously said.

To prepare for the holiday in Las Vegas, I re-read some of the Mark Pilarski's gambling columns that I remember enjoying years ago. I don't intend to do any gambling myself, since if I spend a wad of cash, I might as well get something for it and blow it in Scores or Spearmint Rhino to get at least something back for it. But the missus has her heart dead set on the blackjack tables. Even now there is a basic strategy chart taped on the side of our monitor, for her to study when she practices online. With the house edge under 1%, who knows what might happen? I don't know what I'll do instead while she is playing, perhaps I'll just stroll the Strip and look at the sights. If any of my readers have tips and suggestions, I am happy to listen to them.

Vox Day made me laugh with his observation about "A taste of NRO's own medicine". After pointing out the amusing hypocrisy of the neocon gang, Vox goes on to apply the exact same logic to show that

Seeing as the original Patriarchs were all Jewish, it is obvious that "Patriarchy" is a nifty code word for "Jews", so therefore feminism is nothing but a particularly ugly face of anti-Semitism and all feminists hate Jews.

Steve Sailer has often written about the "dirt gap", that is, the fact that "blue state" cities tend to be located on coasts while the "red state" cities tend to have space all around them, making land and real estate cheaper in the latter. However, the news article "Condos for sail" tells us how the useless sea can be put to productive uses. All aboard on Rosie's cruise of love and acceptance!

Donald Sensing at Winds of Change takes a pessimistic look at the possibility of our being able to turn back global warming in his post "The wrong size glass", linking to Robert Samuelson's opinion piece "The Real Inconvenient Truth". For some reason, reading these articles suddenly remound me of Markku's old laconic point that he is perfectly willing to give up his present consumption of electricity, if he is guaranteed to get the two hundred human slaves who would be needed to do the things for him that electricity currently provides him. But go on, leftists, keep opposing nuclear energy and energy in general, if you really believe that women and your other beloved minorities will be better off in a low-energy society. Keep spreading your moronic slogans and painting horror scenarios about two-headed babies, and who knows, you might even be rewarded with more cigarettes! (I simply never grow tired of seeing a lefty telling people that nuclear power causes cancer and oppresses the Third World, a ciggy hanging from his mouth as he is telling this. It's just so... oh, I can't even think of a word.)

I am not sure if I approve the whole notion of personal bankruptcy, that is, the idea that you should be able to take debts and then not pay them back. The article "12 myths about bankruptcy" explains that bankruptcy is not really a big deal and that there is absolutely nothing wrong in shafting the people who loaned you money. Since in some American states you even get to keep your home at the bankruptcy, certain rather perverse "investment strategies" start looking like a pretty good deal to me.

For some reason, I have never really liked beer. At a restaurant I can enjoy an occasional Corona with my burger or steak, but ordinary normal beer, especially if it is not ice cold, usually just makes me want to spit it out. After I went to college, pretty soon I learned to drink liquor instead of beer, scotch being typically my drink of choice. This way, you don't need to be constantly going to the bathroom, which makes the whole evening more enjoyable. (And make mine straight up, none of that "coke and X" crap for me, unless it's rum and coke, which I finally learned to drink here in Canada in my desire to assimilate to my new homeland). Now, I have heard of the maxim "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" before, but I had never heard of another similar maxim "beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you’re in the clear" until I read the post "Beer before liquor…" that examines and debunks the accuracy of this heuristic. "In fourteen hundred ninety three, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea..."

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, July 06, 2006 at 3:10 PM