Real cool traders
Pretty much the only difference between the video "Cheerleader Stunt Gone Wrong"
and what you can routinely see in "America's Funniest Home Videos" is
that this one probably didn't end happily, so that after the amusing
pratfall, the doofus gets up laughing and doesn't realize how close to
death or becoming a quadriplegic he just had a brush with. "Ow, my
head!"
In other news, I guess that Arnold will not be eating spicy tamales in his campaign trail. I am not entirely sure that I understand what his actual sin in this case was, but I guess that I'll have to accept that we just live in confusing times and leave it at that. Was what he said statistically incorrect, or was it statistically correct but something that shouldn't be explicitly said, even in private?
But diversity will always remain a, uh, divisive topic in politics and life in general. As much as people give lip service to diversity, they would really prefer to have equality, which is the polar opposite of diversity. In fact, as The Danimal once pointed out, in reality everybody hates diversity, because diversity means that no two people will enjoy exactly the same success at any endeavor, no matter how equal their starting positions. Especially ideological diversity seems to be very much despised in practice, at least judging from the zeal that all bloggers and other opinionistas out there try to convince others of the superiority of their respective ideas and worldviews. That is, they actively try to decrease the amount of ideological diversity that exists in the world.
Anyway, rising material inequality seems to be a hot topic on the blogosphere these days. Will Wilkinson has an excellent post "Again: Why Worry About Inequality?" that argues that material inequality is decreasing since most things are getting cheaper so that the main difference in what the average joe and richie rich can buy is mostly in the status value. Even with all their millions of dollars stolen from the workers, the rich don't really get to buy things are that much better than what the normos shop at Wal-Mart. And I would add that in some products, such as most of consumer electronics (other than perhaps those big plasma televisions), information and entertainment, there is very little difference whatsoever.
"Asymmetric Information" has also recently featured several posts about this vexing topic. The post "In which I fall through the looking glass" indirectly demonstrates the dangers of using analogies and hypotheticals to argue your point.
Jeremy Pierce guest-blogging at "Philosophy, et cetera" links to an excellent site "Ethics Scoreboard" that contains lots of good stuff about ethics in the spirit of Snopes or The Straight Dope. To answer the ethical dilemma of "Take the Little League Baseball Ethics Challenge!" I would say that absurd rules of the game necessarily lead to absurd behaviour. There is also a lesson to be learned here about the perverse incentives and unintended consequences the come from the benevolent meddling that tries to guarantee that everyone is equal.
I am sure that "How It Should Have Ended" has already been linked to from countless places, that's how funny it is. As the name promises, this site features Flash animations of how certain famous movies would have ended if their characters had had even a smidgen of common sense. When I was watching the improved endings for the movies "Superman" and "Lord of the Rings", I actually remembered wondering the exact same problems as these videos illustrate when I saw these original movies. However, an even better ending for LOTR would have been that destroying the ring would have had no effect whatsoever on Sauron or his orc armies. Think about it: could you destroy me by hacking into this blog and erasing a few posts that I have written in the past?
There are a few TV shows developed from comic strips, such as "Dilbert" and "The Boondocks". What puzzles me about them that all right, these shows have the same characters as the original strips, and they are named the same, but other than that, the show and the strip seem to have absolutely nothing in common, so that all these characters are like totally different people from how I have learned to know them in the strip. (I am familiar with "The Boondocks" comic strip because I read BartCop.) So I can't help but wonder if I have again misunderstood something. Anyway, Boing Boing links to the site "Mary Worth", an adaptation of the beloved newspaper comic strip of our parents that most certainly does not suffer from this particular problem. Or maybe that was "Sally Forth", or something like that. Wasn't there such a comic strip heroine? After this, perhaps they ought to remake "Bobby Sox".
Speaking of Ol' Bart, I wonder why only the Hammer of Truth has bothered to link to the page "Suri Cruise Photo Revealed To Be A Fake". You'd think that such undeniable photographic evidence would make even the MSM dinosaur pay attention, but I guess not. It's time for the blogosphere to assemble and once again show its mighty power to reveal such insultingly crude forgeries!
Meanwhile, I still haven't seen that one movie where Katie Holmes supposedly shows her tits (think of the Holocaust, then picture the opposite of that, as somebody once said), but we did watch "Go" again last night, since I remembered that it was quite good, in the way that nonlinear narrative movies usually are. I was rather surprised in that scene where the Limey and that black guy from Rent went to a private booth in a strip club and Limey couldn't help himself but just had to grab himself some hot stripper ass. Surprised, because I vividly remembered watching that same scene but with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. If you had asked me before last night, I would have sworn to you watching that scene in some movie in which Vince Vaughn is the asshole sitting in that chair. This must be how all those false memories are created. Jesus, if you can't trust even your own memories, who can you trust?
A while ago I had a similar, a bit disturbing experience when I was flipping around the TV grid and one channel way playing "Mad Dog and Glory", a story about a meek cop who saves the life of a big time mobster. This 1993 movie stars Robert de Niro and Bill Murray, and de Niro plays the meek cop while Murray plays the mobster. Talk about boldly casting against the type. I had seen this movie long time ago, but I was totally surprised to watch a few minutes of it, because in my mental recollection of this movie, Murray played the meek cop similar to his role in "Lost in Translation" whereas de Niro was the Goodfellas-style cool hardcase mobster.
It is always so cute and adorable when certain people automatically imagine that the non-Western people who they just so admire share all their lofty progressive ideals and views, such as the need to increase the welfare state or legalize the gay marriage. Today's illustrative case in point is linked for us by Tjic, namely the article "The Russians Are Coming".
In the earlier post today, I wondered what I should think about the fact that our savings account now pays us an interest rate that is really not much lower than our mortgage interest rate fixed a few years ago. I remember when we were shopping for home and mortgage, how enthusiastically this one lady in the bank tried to sell me an ARM, telling me how I would save a lot of money with it. I was rather suspicious of her spiel, a bank employee trying to convince me to get a product that will make them less profit. How very nice of her! But I sure wouldn't want to be holding an ARM these days, like those suckers who keep making interest-only payments (or even less) for a grossly-inflated (in more ways than one) home in some bubble market. The article "Nightmare Mortgages" explains how these "last fools" were suckered in. But as I said, I like deflation in prices because I like to get more value for my dollar, and I merrily anticipate the housing prices to come tumbling down, which would allow us to trade up to a much better place at some point in the future. One man's loss can be another man's gain, assuming that other man is smart enough to swoop in. So remember this good old advice, all you Ilkkaheads out there: when the blood flows in the streets, it is time to buy!
In other news, I guess that Arnold will not be eating spicy tamales in his campaign trail. I am not entirely sure that I understand what his actual sin in this case was, but I guess that I'll have to accept that we just live in confusing times and leave it at that. Was what he said statistically incorrect, or was it statistically correct but something that shouldn't be explicitly said, even in private?
But diversity will always remain a, uh, divisive topic in politics and life in general. As much as people give lip service to diversity, they would really prefer to have equality, which is the polar opposite of diversity. In fact, as The Danimal once pointed out, in reality everybody hates diversity, because diversity means that no two people will enjoy exactly the same success at any endeavor, no matter how equal their starting positions. Especially ideological diversity seems to be very much despised in practice, at least judging from the zeal that all bloggers and other opinionistas out there try to convince others of the superiority of their respective ideas and worldviews. That is, they actively try to decrease the amount of ideological diversity that exists in the world.
Anyway, rising material inequality seems to be a hot topic on the blogosphere these days. Will Wilkinson has an excellent post "Again: Why Worry About Inequality?" that argues that material inequality is decreasing since most things are getting cheaper so that the main difference in what the average joe and richie rich can buy is mostly in the status value. Even with all their millions of dollars stolen from the workers, the rich don't really get to buy things are that much better than what the normos shop at Wal-Mart. And I would add that in some products, such as most of consumer electronics (other than perhaps those big plasma televisions), information and entertainment, there is very little difference whatsoever.
"Asymmetric Information" has also recently featured several posts about this vexing topic. The post "In which I fall through the looking glass" indirectly demonstrates the dangers of using analogies and hypotheticals to argue your point.
Jeremy Pierce guest-blogging at "Philosophy, et cetera" links to an excellent site "Ethics Scoreboard" that contains lots of good stuff about ethics in the spirit of Snopes or The Straight Dope. To answer the ethical dilemma of "Take the Little League Baseball Ethics Challenge!" I would say that absurd rules of the game necessarily lead to absurd behaviour. There is also a lesson to be learned here about the perverse incentives and unintended consequences the come from the benevolent meddling that tries to guarantee that everyone is equal.
I am sure that "How It Should Have Ended" has already been linked to from countless places, that's how funny it is. As the name promises, this site features Flash animations of how certain famous movies would have ended if their characters had had even a smidgen of common sense. When I was watching the improved endings for the movies "Superman" and "Lord of the Rings", I actually remembered wondering the exact same problems as these videos illustrate when I saw these original movies. However, an even better ending for LOTR would have been that destroying the ring would have had no effect whatsoever on Sauron or his orc armies. Think about it: could you destroy me by hacking into this blog and erasing a few posts that I have written in the past?
There are a few TV shows developed from comic strips, such as "Dilbert" and "The Boondocks". What puzzles me about them that all right, these shows have the same characters as the original strips, and they are named the same, but other than that, the show and the strip seem to have absolutely nothing in common, so that all these characters are like totally different people from how I have learned to know them in the strip. (I am familiar with "The Boondocks" comic strip because I read BartCop.) So I can't help but wonder if I have again misunderstood something. Anyway, Boing Boing links to the site "Mary Worth", an adaptation of the beloved newspaper comic strip of our parents that most certainly does not suffer from this particular problem. Or maybe that was "Sally Forth", or something like that. Wasn't there such a comic strip heroine? After this, perhaps they ought to remake "Bobby Sox".
Speaking of Ol' Bart, I wonder why only the Hammer of Truth has bothered to link to the page "Suri Cruise Photo Revealed To Be A Fake". You'd think that such undeniable photographic evidence would make even the MSM dinosaur pay attention, but I guess not. It's time for the blogosphere to assemble and once again show its mighty power to reveal such insultingly crude forgeries!
Meanwhile, I still haven't seen that one movie where Katie Holmes supposedly shows her tits (think of the Holocaust, then picture the opposite of that, as somebody once said), but we did watch "Go" again last night, since I remembered that it was quite good, in the way that nonlinear narrative movies usually are. I was rather surprised in that scene where the Limey and that black guy from Rent went to a private booth in a strip club and Limey couldn't help himself but just had to grab himself some hot stripper ass. Surprised, because I vividly remembered watching that same scene but with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. If you had asked me before last night, I would have sworn to you watching that scene in some movie in which Vince Vaughn is the asshole sitting in that chair. This must be how all those false memories are created. Jesus, if you can't trust even your own memories, who can you trust?
A while ago I had a similar, a bit disturbing experience when I was flipping around the TV grid and one channel way playing "Mad Dog and Glory", a story about a meek cop who saves the life of a big time mobster. This 1993 movie stars Robert de Niro and Bill Murray, and de Niro plays the meek cop while Murray plays the mobster. Talk about boldly casting against the type. I had seen this movie long time ago, but I was totally surprised to watch a few minutes of it, because in my mental recollection of this movie, Murray played the meek cop similar to his role in "Lost in Translation" whereas de Niro was the Goodfellas-style cool hardcase mobster.
It is always so cute and adorable when certain people automatically imagine that the non-Western people who they just so admire share all their lofty progressive ideals and views, such as the need to increase the welfare state or legalize the gay marriage. Today's illustrative case in point is linked for us by Tjic, namely the article "The Russians Are Coming".
In the earlier post today, I wondered what I should think about the fact that our savings account now pays us an interest rate that is really not much lower than our mortgage interest rate fixed a few years ago. I remember when we were shopping for home and mortgage, how enthusiastically this one lady in the bank tried to sell me an ARM, telling me how I would save a lot of money with it. I was rather suspicious of her spiel, a bank employee trying to convince me to get a product that will make them less profit. How very nice of her! But I sure wouldn't want to be holding an ARM these days, like those suckers who keep making interest-only payments (or even less) for a grossly-inflated (in more ways than one) home in some bubble market. The article "Nightmare Mortgages" explains how these "last fools" were suckered in. But as I said, I like deflation in prices because I like to get more value for my dollar, and I merrily anticipate the housing prices to come tumbling down, which would allow us to trade up to a much better place at some point in the future. One man's loss can be another man's gain, assuming that other man is smart enough to swoop in. So remember this good old advice, all you Ilkkaheads out there: when the blood flows in the streets, it is time to buy!
You "Cheerleader stunt gone wrong" YouTube link does not work anymore since the user has removed the video. I guess this is the same one posted by another user http://youtube.com/watch?v=lFvXpQq-0eo
Posted by Anonymous | 6:37 AM