Sixteen Volts

In the Indian grocery store today I saw a little albino boy. He was maybe about eight or so, but he still looked a lot like that guy from The Da Vinci Code. What made him seem even creepier was the way he acted, zooming back and forth the store to carefully examine all products in the shelves, bringing each one close to his face to intently read the fine print of the packaging. Brrr, freaky. To release the tension of the situation, my wife leaned to whisper to my ear "We know all your secrets!" Even so, I was happy to be out of there.

In today's news, we can see that 150 participants of the recent AIDS conference in Toronto have decided to stay here and file refugee claims. I am not even going to check how the usual suspects will react to this, since this is such a great chance for them to show off their moral superiority. I also wonder that if we took a world map and drew a little X on the country where each of these 150 people are from, would we learn anything important from the way these X's are distributed? Nah. "I like Canada and the people here", says one man interviewed in this article. I'm sure you do, buddy, I'm sure you do. And I just bet that you love our health care system too. I believe it was Milton Friedman who said that you can't have open borders and welfare state at the same time, and the truth of this observation is vividly illustrated here. Should everybody in the world who has AIDS be allowed to claim refugee status in Canada? If not, what exactly makes these 150 guys so special?

If all nations were as wealthy as the Anglosphere, the problems like the above wouldn't exist. "Act locally, think globally: Shop Wal-Mart", says the article "Forget the World Bank, Try Wal-Mart" that explains how the poor countries are best lifted from their primitive but oh so authentic and exciting poverty. Here in the First World, the post "Choosing Poverty" at "Chicago Boyz" reminds us of the fact that when society gets more meritocratic, those whose choices have little merit tend to reap what they sow.

"Pook's Mill" is a new, very interesting looking anti-feminist blog. The post "Pookish Commandment Three: Become Financially Free" praises the possibilities that the financial independence yields. Another post "The Poisoned Feminist Tree..." vividly illustrates the difference between humanities and reality-based sciences. "Origin of the 'Nerd'" gives a simple explanation why some things are considered nerdish and why this definition changes over time.

In ten years, once the bridge over the uncanny valley has been completed, humans probably won't get much work as catalog or stock photography models, at least when computer graphics can semi-automatically create synthetic humans like this one. The same might even happen to porn, which, as The Derb's article "Ner's One Time Revolution" points out, is rather formulaic and hence probably easy to reduce to algorithms. Meanwhile, the real flesh-and-bone humans, even the smart ones, continue to fall for phishing scams, as explained in the post "Phishing Phor Phishers". As long as one recipient in thousand falls for it, phishing is a very lucrative scam. And it will go on like this for a long time, since I have never seen anybody provide instructions that the proverbial grandma from Louisville would understand so that she would be able to determine whether an email is genuine or a phishing scam. Another post at the same site, "Why Web Hosting is Here to Stay", illustrates why Americans as a nation are so obese these days.

A while back Jacqueline Passey got instantly famous for her post "Dating tip: Quality dates quality" in which she explained what puts her to the top of the female attractiveness hierarchy to men.

The above list explains why I typically receive 50-100 (sometimes more) responses whenever I post personal ads. This is in addition to getting hit on almost every time I go out alone (and all that those men know about me is that they like the way I look, they don’t even know about all the other qualities I have that make me more appealing than most other women).

A twentysomething woman gets fifty to a hundred responses for a personal ad, imagine that! I found this paragraph to be the most humorous part of Jacqueline's delusion of her alpha status. The post "Your chances of getting laid through Craigslist: A Bloggasm case study" illustrates why.

Sex with attractive women being such a scarce resource for most men, the world needs more managers as the one depicted in the article "Restaurant Manager Gives Sexual Favors As Performance Bonuses". (Satire, of course.) And when you get to the actual act, what should an atheist yell when having sex? The webcomic "Deist On Top" (NSFW) at FreeThunk answers this age-old burning question.

I guess that of all the animals on Earth, sharks are the one closest to Alien, perfected by evolution to swim and kill. Good thing that they can't come up to the dry ground to chase us, perhaps in symbiosis riding on the back of an elephant, thus creating a deadly duo that stomps and eats everything it sees. But more seriously, I certainly didn't know that certain sharks are killers literally from the womb, as quoted in the post "As A Side Effect, the Sharks Got Smarter" at "The American Scene".

I can't believe that otherwise intelligent people can peddle the silliness of how the middle class people are these days somehow poorer on average, compared to some ideal era that was thirty or fifty years ago. Now it is Kevin Drum, in his post "The Republican Party Owes You $20,000". "GMR Musings" actually crunched the numbers a while back in his post "Are You Better Off Today than you would have been 25 or 50 years ago?". At "Cafe Hayek", the post "We're Much Wealthier" asks

would you prefer to live in 1967 with today’s real median household income ($46,326) or live today with 1967’s real median household income ($35,379)? (These figures are expressed in 2005 dollars, by the way.)

Speaking of the standards of living, I somehow ended up reading the columnists of "Demari", the newspaper of the Finnish Social Democratic Party. It was quite an experience after being accustomed to the thinking at this side of Atlantic. Let's just put it by saying that Jesus, am I ever glad to have got away from that country. It is certainly no wonder why the Finnish upper middle class enjoys essentially the same material standard of living as the working class around here.

As Kip Esquire notes in the post "Kip's Law Sighting: Oxford Graffiti", every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner. But the other side of the political spectrum between the 0% tax rate and the central planner can also be quite silly, as best seen in their Free State Project. Just imagine, thousands of Comic Book Guys making a difference. The post "Live Free or ... Move?" criticizes this fizzled movement from a libertarian perspective.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, September 02, 2006 at 1:44 PM