Sixteen Volts

I haven't been interested in Survivor for a few seasons now, since the whole idea and joke has grown rather stale. However, today's morning news on CNN informed me that the upcoming season will start with the contestants divided to four tribes based on their race. Well, now I am certainly curious to see how they guarantee that the white tribe always loses, at least until they shuffle the tribes in episode three or so. In the first season of Apprentice when they had the separate teams of men and women, the contests of the first four episodes mainly seemed to involve looking good and giggling, to make sure that the women's team always won. I am also curious to see how soon the "race is only a social construct" gang will protest that there is no real way to tell what race a contestant belongs to and what about all those mixed-race people and so on. Perhaps this could even be followed by a lament how the television shows these days don't show enough people who are identifiable nonwhite minorities. Even though races don't exist, mind you.

In other news today, we get a nice demonstration of the self-correcting nature of science: "Pluto no longer a planet, say astronomers". I wonder if we shall soon see a similar headline "Marx no longer our intellectual hero, say the humanities". Ah well, probably there was such a headline a long time ago and I just missed it.

Another mistake that should be corrected is having a Caps Lock key in the keyboard, and in such a prime location. I can't even remember ever using this key on purpose any more than I would have used those... ScrLk or PauseBreak keys. Besides, the whole idea that you would need to type something in all caps is something that belongs to the seventies. The blog "CAPSoff" leads the battle to eliminate this mistake, as reported by article "Death to Caps Lock" in Wired.

The morning news also warned about some U.S. government report that indicates that the housing bubble in America is close to bursting, as is also explained in the opinion piece "Face it: The housing bust is here" linked to by Dennis Mangan. I certainly hope that this is true and that Finland with its outrageous housing prices will soon follow the suit. Now, kids, every bubble lasts longer than it should because people believe that this time it will be different, and this belief is mutually reinforcing with the bubble itself, but it sure would be nice to see the all the doomsaying of the past five years or so finally come true. Up here the housing bubble isn't even close to what I read it being in America, but now that our mortgage payments will soon be a thing of the past, I'd like to be able to trade up in a few years, and a housing crash would nicely facilitate that. Meanwhile, I would certainly laugh at people who are shown crying on TV how they didn't know that paying six hundred grand for a two-bedroom condo and taking an interest-only mortgage to do so was somehow a stupid thing to do. The only way to go was supposed to be up!

Speaking of human stupidity, now I know that I am a man and a lovable lunk and all that, but I just don't understand all that frilly about weddings and how they cost tens of thousands of dollars. I'm pretty sure ours didn't cost that much, and it looked perfectly fine to me and everybody had a good time. (By the way, now that I am thinking about this, I would like to warn other young men who are reading this and about to get married about the perils of making a friendly suggestion to your girlfriend of just skipping all that wedding hassle and getting married in a courthouse or something.) Anyway, Half Sigma has a post "Weddings keep the poor people poor" that links to a New York Times opinion essay "Pass the Aspirin, Wedding Bells Are Ringing and Ringing and Ringing" and rightly calls this silly phenomenon a scam that it is. Perhaps posh weddings originally had some signaling and point-of-no-return strengthen-the-commitment purpose, but they have lost it a long time ago.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 9:17 AM