Back in the mid 2000s, I graduated with a liberal arts degree from one on the top-ranked universities in America. During college, I received a certain world view about sociology, politics, economics, history, education, and all matters of human affairs. One could call this view the modern progressive zeitgeist. Since college, I hear this same world view promulgated every day by NPR, the New York Times, 60 Minutes, and featured books at the library.
However, my own varied life experiences, combined with continued readings of alternative sources, have lead me to question the progressive zeitgeist. Over the years, I encountered thousands of provoking articles that contradict modern, polite opinion. And often, the counter-zeitgeist articles had much better explanations for the world that I saw with my own two eyes. As such, my world view has gradually grown estranged from the views of friends and family who have not read the same things that I have read. As a way of avoiding fights, I came up with the idea to go through a decade of links and bookmarks to gather provocative articles on all sorts of subjects. My thought is that in the future, I can share these links with friends. And then my friends can read these articles too, and we can together discuss to what extent these articles are true.
These articles are not for the intellectually lazy. In some areas, I include articles that contradict each other, because I think there may be partial truths involved, and no one has pointed out the whole truth. My sense is that you will profit more from reading these articles if you focus on finding the insight, rather than hunting for errors.
I am always on the look out for improvements to this list, so if you have good links to recommend, or reasons why links I uncluded are unworthy, or find a broken link, please email me at .
Since this list can be overwhelming, I have made it possible to subscribe and get one link a day pushed to you via either RSS or email, so that you can gradually mix in alternative views into your daily reading.
I love philosophy. I took my first college philosophy class at 16 because I went through school one year ahead of myself and when I enrolled in high school at duPont Manual in Louisville, they let us take college classes at the University of Louisville our junior and senior years.
- Being smart is the price of entry, but drive matters more. (The #1 & #2 people from my high school class of 500+ had nominal professional success. The breakout successes were the 5'2" guy who made the basketball team, and the chunky musician who never missed a class 6-12.
A number of years ago, I came to a surprising observation:
a) I realized people need to make a lot of decisions (big and small)
b) For the most part, decisions get more difficult over time.
“The job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” Dani Shapiro wrote in her beautiful meditation on the perils of plans.
Small talk can be a big problem. I want to be friendly and polite, but I just can’t think of a thing to say. 1. Comment on a topic common to both of you at the moment: the venue, the food, the occasion, the weather (yes, talking about the weather is a cliche, but it works).
Scott Adams, the man behind Dilbert, has a new book out about career success. He discusses some concepts from the book in this Wall Street Journal article, and the most interesting thing to me in the article is his rejection of the conventional wisdom that you should “follow your passion.
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly
ovel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But
it's not enough just to tell people that.
I wrote this talk for a
high school. I never actually
gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious.
Please don't get mad at me. I am only a messenger. If you're going to get mad at anyone, get mad at all the authority figures who give you counter-productive advice to spare your feelings - and their own.
The only option available for the rest of us is to be as much of a man as we can while still toeing the line. We can only be alpha within limits. So in trying to come up with a term beside Alpha Male, I decided to use Renaissance Man instead. This is a term that is also used by Tariq Nasheed. The Renaissance Man is a modern man who is as alpha as he can be despite not being rich and powerful and while still living within the limitations set upon him by society and his power level. You can often see examples of such men in old movies that were made before the 70s.
Spurred by Mangan’s recent post on Avoiding Psychopathic Predators, and Heartiste’s on How To Spot A Psychopath, I’ve some thoughts to share on psychopathy. To wit: the entire concept of psychopathy is a flawed and harmful belief.
Recently, in the Washington Beta, an article was published confirming that the CH game advice to never apologize is effective at winning people to your cause.
A lost boy desires a blessing of Chateau munificence,
What is the most effective thing a long time Beta male can do to introduce some ‘game’ into his life? I don’t mean things like pick up tips, do more of this, more of that… I mean lifestyle changes.
The brief version, with the exact search queries you'll want bracketed: you send a [debt validation letter] under the FCRA to the CRAs. This starts a 30 day clock, during which time they have to get to the reporter and receive evidence from the reporter that you actually own the debt.
Like most of us, by which i mean intellectual types who define our selves and worth in part by the relative level of our perceived knowledge, speed reading seems like a holy grail. There's so much out there to read, and not enough time in my life to do it.
My own testing shows that the Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot needs almost three times the tension to pull it undone than either the Ian Knot or any Standard Shoelace Knot. See my Technical Info page for more details.
If you struggle with keeping on top of your emails in Gmail you want to maybe try my setup. It’s hard for me to lose track and trust me - I am easy to distract.
I came to realize that there is no such thing as a "morning person". There are just people who get up early. Literally all you have to do is get up out of effing bed.
In his excellent book How to Fly a Horse, Ashton makes a case for working alone. He quotes Apple’s co-founder and technical genius Steven Wozniak: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee.
People are interesting. We know so little about ourselves compared to what we’d like to think we know. We’re all subtly different even though we’re, on a whole, overwhelmingly predictable.
GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework for organizing and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a bit higher than just “getting things done”, though.
You build only on success. I turned around the United States Army pistol shooting program. I made certain that the first time someone shot a pistol, instead of shooting thee .45 caliber pistol from 50 feet away — which is what they were starting these guys out at — I brought the target literally five feet in front of the students.
GTD is not for creative work. GTD is great to deal with type 2 procrastination [1] because not everybody can afford to have somebody doing their important errands.
Let's start with a bang: don't keep a schedule.
He's crazy, you say!
I'm totally serious. If you pull it off -- and in many structured jobs, you simply can't -- this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity.
In the first part of this article, I wrote about taking time to understand the problem and plan your solution before starting to code. Now, I will discuss how to actually work faster by mastering your code and work environment.
About six months ago, Tilt Engineering switched from technology-focused teams to product-focused teams - what this meant was that rather than have "API" or "Website" teams, we have a few teams focused around core customer flows (my team owns login/signup/invites).
If you're ethical and hard-working but, at the same time, don't allow anyone to lower your status, ever, you definitely invite short-term rockiness (see: my Google experience) but people respect you more in the long term. Obviously, you have to be tactful and sometimes a bit political.
Eventually, this reaches a crisis point where you realize that the current models are unable to explain reality, and then they get thrown out (a "paradigm shift") and everything needs to be figured out again from first principles. At this point, younger scientists have the advantage, because the "knowledge frontier" contracts back to nothing (almost...the new theory still has to account for old experimental results).
When Matthew B. Crawford graduated, he found that there was more demand for his services as an unlicensed electrician than as a credentialed physicist. He discusses what a good job looks like: The work of electricians, plumbers and auto mechanics cannot be outsourced.
This is Dale Carnegie's summary of his book, from 1936 Table of Contents Part OneFundamental Techniques in Handling People Don't criticize, condemn or complain. Give honest and sincere appreciation. Arouse in the other person an eager want.
We’ve all known them—bosses who act like children when they get bad news, face a crisis, or perceive a bureaucratic slight. Some are screamers. Some are whiners. Some just go “into the bunker” and won't talk to anyone at all.
While I do know some absurdly successful 20-somethings, they are usually the exception to the rule. It takes more focus than most people have to get much success at a young age, especially when there’s no meaningful nepotism at play.
About a year into the job I accidentally came across a piece of private paperwork a less experienced co-worker left on the shared printer that had her salary on it.
My wife & I have a close friend who recently entered the workforce for his first-ever job. On his first day of work my wife was kind enough to write down words of wisdom from her years on the job. I don’t write about Tania very often – mostly at her request.
If you don't know what a realistic salary is for this position, then by all means avoid being the first to put a number on the table. That's negotiation 101.
The other day at work we had a debate about being productive and a few people were surprised when someone said "if you work with computers it's nearly impossible to have your brain wired in productive tasks for more than, on average, 4 hours a day" :-)
I remember showing school essays to my dad growing up. He’s a really good writer and so getting his feedback before I turned a paper in usually helped me make some improvements.
I think creative people want and need both. I spent a lot of my free time working on a non-fiction book[1]. I'm really aggressive about soliciting feedback: every page of the book links directly to its issue tracker on github[2]. I love critical, detailed feedback.
I've done both - 3 years as an employee across two different startups, 18 months as a founder, 5.5 years at Google, and now 18 months as a founder. All I can say is that the market is actually a lot more efficient than most people give it credit for.
Pmarca Guide to Career Planning:
Part 0: Introduction
Sep 30, 2007
In real life -- as opposed to blogging -- one of my least favorite things to do is give career planning advice.
Hey, fitness junkies, here's something to ponder the next time you lace up your athletic shoes for that long, heart-pounding run: A Danish study recently concluded that high-intensity, high-mileage joggers die at the same rate as channel-surfing couch potatoes.
Drugs kill at least 30% of Americans. You never hear this from drug policy reform groups because it shows that drugs are dangerous. And you never hear this from the government because it shows that our drug policies are a complete and utter failure.
For most of my life, if I’ve thought at all about the bacteria living on my skin, it has been while trying to scrub them away. But recently I spent four weeks rubbing them in. I was Subject 26 in testing a living bacterial skin tonic, developed by AOBiome, a biotech start-up in Cambridge, Mass.
Already, the benches in gym locker rooms and beside basketball courts are filling with 2012's early casualties, those of us who, goaded by New Year's resolutions, are exercising a bit too enthusiastically and developing sore muscles. Many of us will then drape ice packs over our aching muscles.
To be honest, it doesn’t look like much. It’s short, just over an inch in length, and stubby, about half an inch wide. It is white, slick, and striated like a cluster of angel-hair pasta.
Since I was twelve years old, my life has taken place in a series of Four Year Intervals.
Four years of high school. Four years of college. Four years of medical school. Four years of residency.
If you have won the lottery, or if you plan to do so, please keep reading this column. The information is vital not just to your happiness but also to the progress of social science.
Want to be happier? I have good news and bad news. First, the bad news: Research shows that approximately 33-50% of your level of happiness is hereditary. Your genes dictate your “happiness set point.
Say hi to Lucy. Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.
Just a few weeks ago, a study was published in the Journal of Nutrition that many reports in the news media said proved that honey was no better than sugar as a sweetener, and that high-fructose corn syrup was no worse. This shocked people on all sides of the sweetener debate.
U.S. dietary guidelines have long recommended that people steer clear of whole milk, and for decades, Americans have obeyed. Whole milk sales shrunk. It was banned from school lunch programs. Purchases of low-fat dairy climbed.
Fish oil is now the third most widely used dietary supplement in the United States, after vitamins and minerals, according to a recent report from the National Institutes of Health.
The vegetarian diet — characterized by a low consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol that includes increased intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products — carries elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health disorders.
Science shows the low-fat diet to be BS, and yet the American Heart Association keeps touting it as the ‘heart healthy’ choice. Why? The quick answer: money, honey.
A new JAMA study finds a strong correlation: the third of folks who eat the least salt die over three times as often as the third of folks who eat the most salt.
A sixty-year torrent of bad dietary advice is coming to an end
My Times column on the U-turn over cholesterol and saturated fat:
If you are reading this before breakfast, please consider having an egg.
My Times column on low-fat diets and the evdience behind them:
The diet police are on the prowl: if you hear a knock on the door, hide the sugar bowl, the butter dish and the salt. A draft report from the scientific advisory committee on nutrition said last week that we should halve our intake of sugar.
Recently, it has become a craze to demonize hydrogenated vegetable oils, also known as trans fats.
Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) is seeking to outright ban this class of substances, since they are, after all, “artery-clogging” and “a threat to public health.
I’m not going to lie to you – being wealthy is a lot of fun. And I’m not just talking about novelty fun that you get from driving around in a fancy car. True wealth is more of a big picture thing – freedom from negative stress and a higher confidence about how great life is.
Investors commonly make a handful of the same major mistakes. The ease by which one can invest gives a false impression of safety and lures many into complacency. People often do not take the time to learn about what they are investing or the common risks of that type of investment.
Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financially and what I learned as a result. Your mileage may vary.
This is the Chateau men’s fashion post. While normally guests of the Chateau idle about in hooded black robes accessorized with cat o’ nine tails, there are those times in the company of the outside world that genitals must be sheathed and attention paid to dress norms.
That's right. I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers' school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn.
A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is a character with only one 'part'.
I met my first New York foodie over twenty years ago, when I was seventeen, hawking “local bananas” at a roadside produce stand in rural New Jersey. It was my first job, and I worked all day on my own.
The last time I bought a mattress for myself was about 11 years ago. I bought a fairly new full-sized one off a coworker. Four moves and a decade later, we’ve decided it’s time to replace it with an adult (and sometimes an extra toddler)-sized bed.
Buying a new car is lot of work and really not much fun, but I learned a few things during my recent experience. Mostly, I followed the awesome tips at RealCarTips, but there’s a few tweaks to their tips that worked for me.
I think there really does need to be some kind of change to the process here, sales people just literally cannot survive on what Edmunds would consider a fair price.
I moved into a chinatown apt June 2012 and it was in shambles. I'm not just talking about holes, screws, and off paint, but also broken handles, broken cabinet doors, water damage around living room + bedroom window, water damage in the bathroom, mold growing in the bedroom window. It was a shithole.
Glasses are actually much cheaper than many people think. Some people think glasses are expensive, costing $300 or more, because the big brands (Oakley, Ray-Ban, Persol, etc.) are all really the same company, Luxottica, which uses their monopoly power to distort the market.
Haley Thurston is a resident blogger visiting us from her home turf at The Sublemon. Art criticism, whether written by professionals or fans, is plagued by nonspecificity and a lack of self-justification.
Today's Art world is so far gone, so lacking in any substance, even anything naive and amusingly humanistic, that it befuddles any average person with a working sense of reality.
Advice. To a boy: get dirty. To a girl: stay clean. Art. The artist is a passive conduit to a higher truths, which he transmits through the filter of his personality, and then shapes their representation into material form.
If Leo Tolstoy were alive and working in San Francisco as a web developer, he might tell us that poorly designed websites are all alike; each well-designed website is well-designed in its own way. And, having watched the web evolve over its first 20 years, I would agree.
I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste.
Of the music I listened to ten years ago, only one album is still in rotation. The rest of it fell away as, piece by piece, it started to seem shallow. In high school, I probably thought my parents didn't understand my music, since it wasn't from their era. Instead, it's possible they understood it better than I did.
From time to time, readers have complimented me on my learning and asked me to provide a list of recommended books. I’m embarrassed by such compliments because I am not at all a learned or very widely read person.
When I first heard about virtue ethics I assumed it was a clever way for people to justify things they did when the consequences were bad and the reasons were bad, too.
Natural law and natural rights follow from the nature of man and the world. We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
People who act dishonorably in one context are likely to act dishonorably in another. People who use force improperly in one context are likely to use force improperly in another. This is both obviously true, and easily verified from everyday life. We judge deeds in order to judge men. Since our judgments of men can be wise or unwise, plainly then our judgments of deeds can be correct or incorrect.
Living beings predate on other living beings. Animals are, with narrow exceptions, in the world for themselves, and other animals, again with narrow exceptions, are obstacles and raw materials. Caring even the tiniest little bit about other animals is the rare exception, not the rule. This is true between species and within species.
By “ethics,” in quotes, I mean talk about ethics, rather than what people actually do. This page explains “ethics” as signaling: personal advertisement.
There are some people who as teenagers were normal. Then there are some who were so socially maladjusted, so personally pathetic, and so lame in any way they can conceivably now imagine as adults, that they played D&D.
Aristotle is verbose and inconclusive, and sometimes plain silly.
Aristotle's physics is mostly a large collection of excuses and
rationalizations for evading quantitative methods and refusing
to do arithmetic.
In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the
less honorable was to shock people.
Once upon a time, a younger Eliezer had a stupid theory. Let's say that Eliezer18's stupid theory was that consciousness was caused by closed timelike curves hiding in quantum gravity. This isn't the whole story, not even close, but it will do for a start.
Imagine that I, in full view of live television cameras, raised my hands and chanted abracadabra and caused a brilliant light to be born, flaring in empty space beyond my outstretched hands. Imagine that I committed this act of blatant, unmistakeable sorcery under the full supervision of James Randi and all skeptical armies. Most people, I think, would be fairly curious as to what was going on.
There's an interesting article on statistical prediction in the FT this morning. The FT firewalls articles after a day, so I suspect this link will break, unless you are an FT subscriber. I want to quote some chunks of the article, not because it's smart, but because it's one of the most embarrassing essays to ever appear in print.
Sophistry, Fallacies, Rhetoric, and Statistical Malpracticeback to top
There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder.
There is an apocryphal story about the visit of the great atheist philosopher Diderot to the Russian court.
Diderot was quite the clever debater, and soon this scandalous new atheism thing was the talk of St. Petersburg.
I.
It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing.
You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more money” stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is.
March 2008The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago,
writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and
increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their
own blog posts.
One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do a very good job of it. The original discussion is in the middle of a post so controversial that it probably can’t be linked in polite company – somewhat dampening its ability to popularize anything.
My wife and I recently had a baby. The experience has given me some insight into how progressives see basic life and biological issues. Being responsible people, we took all the classes.
It really should come as no surprise that I was bullied in school, though I know a lot of people have had it far worse than I did. 1. Sporadic or short-term bullying. This bullying lasts less than two years and/or involves fewer than five bullies.
As a parent of two young children, it's my job to keep them healthy, safe, and happy. But I'm not at all worried they're going to be snatched off the street.
Make your bed. Clean your room. And eat your veggies! I often hear parents lump kids’ eating in the same category as other chores. But eating food is different — very different.
Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s — walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap — are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting.
Which is the lesser of two evils: staying married for the kids or getting divorced? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of studies showing that kids from divorced families do worse on scores of outcomes.
So many pieces of folk wisdom in this informal discussion among parents, led by Fred Rogers, that would trigger the Child Protective Services alarm these days. Try it and see. The helicopter parents have your place bugged, waiting for you to slip up at indulging your kids' egos.
At the grocery store yesterday, I passed a man and his daughter in the snack aisle. She was maybe ten or eleven, a little overweight, and begging for cookies. He was tall and muscular, a blue-collar type, clearly exasperated with her. “You have no conception of how hard your mother and I work to earn money, do you?” he said. There was desperation in his voice.
In the comments on Dalrock’s post “The one that got away,” which discusses a woman’s penchant for holding on to memories of a previous lover even if married to a man who gives her everything she could ever want, anon66 criticizes the movie Titanic, saying: This is why I dislike the movie Titanic, saying:
C'mon, gals. I can't be the only one who envied the boys in Varsity Blues when they realized that the exotic dancer at the strip club was in fact their teacher.
You know what? I'm exhausted. It's July, the month of exponentially increased sweat production, exponentially increased air conditioning bills, short skirts and tube tops at all times, constant leg shaving, flip flops (but only in the park!) and afternoons that last until 9 p.m.
After agonizing for months about whether to take the risk, a shy high school nerd asks out the pretty girl from his English class who, by the luck of random seat assignments, sits next to him. She reacts with visible disgust, considering the nerd’s excessively polite request sexual harassment.
It's well known the JFK was a man who honoured his wedding vows in their breach. He was a notorious philanderer and the the passage of time seems to have exposed the majority of his lovers.
Whilst many people who read Mimi Alfrod's book will be interested in her liaisons with JFK, I must admit that it's this aspect of the book that hold the least interest for me. The fact that JFK had numerous affairs really doesn't interest me that much. I can separate the politician from the man.
I sat across from him and listened. He was trim, tall, bearded (as they all seem to be), a recent transplant, having only lived in Seattle for a year or so.
You folks should keep in mind the primary reason why all the nasty, sexist, bigoted things the TRP guys say about females that you find so objectionable are nevertheless acceptable to them.
Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.
Reader Fabian linked to a funny entry on the ‘Don’t Date Him Girl’ blog:
He had several “lady friends” who stayed the night at his house and he claimed they were “Just friends”.
hed flailed:
“you will sooooo come to hate the technologies that prove you wrong!”
you mean like paternity dna testing? before getting married every man should have his fiancee sign a dna p
The primary focus of Seddit (/r/seduction) is the study of human seduction. Mainly, how to integrate specific seduction and self-improvement techniques into our long-term personalities and how to succeed at forming successful romantic relationships.
Some of my commenters on the Sixteen Commandments post seemed confused. I thought it would be a good idea to answer their objections.Keep her jealous, has to be done with care.
Ouch. Any truly high-quality woman (gorgeous, nice, etc.) is going to see nothing but a HURT LITTLE BOY in these. One who gets laid, and probably a lot, but still a hurt, little boy.
Solitude is fine, as long as you aren’t bothered by the fact that you’re alone with your mind. Perhaps tuesday I had too much of it. Regardless, like Carrie Bradshaw does in every episode of Sex and The City; I asked myself a question: Why are we drawn towards people that cause us SO much emotional distress that physical pain ensues?
Communication with this person always results in the same empty-yet-offended feeling; the emotion that cripples our confidence and fills us with resentment.
Although, in terms of subsequent affective response, women do not seem well adapted to casual sexual encounters, it may be important to distinguish impelling sexual motivation preceding intercourse from later evaluations of the event.
Women across the mainstream political spectrum, from progressive feminists to slightly more progressive feminists, are in agreement: men have suddenly gone crazy for no reason, and they should stop and do what progressive feminists tell them to do.
Published in 1837, The Young Husband’s Book is described as a “manual of domestic duties.” Written by “a mentor” it contains within its pages advice on everything from choosing a wife to dealing with pesky in-laws.
Mitch Cumstein has a story about a careergrrl nursing pained regret that, while entertaining on its own, contains within it an eternal truth that CH house lords thought proper to feature and expand upon. Off-topic…a career woman ghost story I thought CH and the readership would enjoy.
TL;DR : couple who had been together for 20 years get a 22-year-old au pair to look after the children; husband dumps wife to be with au pair. Part of the modern western mythology of romance is that we fall in love with people for who they are inside.
There is another classic pattern of marital disharmony occurring so commonly today that I feel I should devote an entire chapter to its cause and effect. Many of you will find yourselves described on the next few pages.
This is an honest, open story from a young woman about her marriage. There are some powerful truths spoken here, worthy of notice and reflection. If you’re married, have ever been married, or plan on getting married eventually, this is for you.
Tacitus has got to be one of my favorite Latin authors. He’s the devil to work through: Latin and Greek both are both bad about dropping the verb “to be,” but Tacitus leaves out all manner of other words too.
I came across another familiar story on the TRP Reddit this week. It’s familiar because this story is becoming increasingly more common as Hypergamy becomes a more open secret that women can no longer keep under wraps.
Dalrock, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this. I’ve heard it talked about in the Manosphere a lot about how men cannot rely on women, even their wives, for emotional support, especially if it involves the men demonstrating any sort of weakness.
They say a diamond is forever -- but new research suggests the bigger the diamond engagement ring, the shorter the marriage might be. Economics professors from Emory University surveyed 3,000 U.S.
Do you fuss at your spouse a lot? You’re probably just hungry, or rather hangry, that deft combination of hunger and angry mania. A new study found that marital drama is often at its highest when all parties should’ve just had something to eat.
A few years ago, my husband, Mark, and I were at one of those hip downtown restaurants sipping mojitos and nibbling on lime-spiked seviche when one of my bosses appeared from a cloud of Cuban-cigar smoke.
But even if you are not an adulterous wife yourself, there are good reasons for paying attention to Langley’s documentation of social dissolution. An advanced civilization requires high-investment parenting to maintain itself. The greatest threat to proper parenting in our time is divorce, overwhelmingly initiated by the wife (70-75 percent of the time, according to Langley).
When you date a girl for longer than two months the odds become better than even that she will erupt into spontaneous waterworks for no discernible reason.
Men are burdened with a duality. We feel impelled to commit to a chaste woman but we will happily sleep around with raging sluts. Women, too, are creatures of duality.
There are times when we men can’t help but gush our feelings of love for our woman. It’s Ok. Passionately pouring out your heart is not inherently un-alpha.
No one goes on vacation thinking of the long ride home.
What is unique about love is that it alone among all the human desires defines by its absence the utterly meaningless life.
Dave Alex,
Good morning! I see you have a fresh, albeit somewhat tired, round of excuses for me today. Let’s dive right in:
Obsidian: So? Dirty looks don’t mean squat.
I’ve been getting a lot of emails recently from readers who want to know how to square game with relationships. As has been discussed here before, game never ends.
If your girlfriend is complaining about your selfishness, you’re doing it right.
Your gift to her is that you don’t go around sleeping with other women.
A dusty tome retrieved from the recesses of the Chateau study reveals an ancient code inscribed by prophets of yore:
statement-statement-question
What’s this, you ask?
Asshole Game Week: Day One is here. Day Two here. Day Three here. Day Four here.
The Chateau has plenty of readers already in relationships and (lucifer help you) marriage.
Relationships are merely a continuation of pickup by other means. Just as she must never forget to keep in shape for your pleasure, you must never stop gaming your girl.
The coda to this week’s relationship game posts is a sampling of comments from reader Dave from Hawaii, a guy who kills wild boar with a knife for fun, wherein he discusses his transformation from a nagged beta husband of a contemptuous wife to alpha husband of a loving, grateful, gina tingly wife.
A commenter at 28 Sherman writes:
I’m in my late 20s and know the millennial dating scene well. In my experience, most of my friends who got married wound up marrying their girlfriends from college.
Sex differences and the nature of the sexesback to top
Writing a critical book review is difficult for me. This is partly because I am mindful of the vast amount of work it takes to write a book, the serious scholarship it typically involves, and the fact that the author, at least in the case of academic books, is usually an intelligent person.
In both reality television series, a team of men, and a team of women, are dumped in separate locations to survive in a tropical paradise. In both, the men promptly locate a campsite, build a fire, and build shelter. The women hang around in the open in the rain.
You’ll have to forgive this exceptionally long post here, but for many critics of (and in) the manosphere of evolutionary psychology the following post articulates things better than I could.
IQ testing and research has been around for over 100 years. Though it is often a controversial issue, the fact remains that more than any other psychological trait studied, IQ scores contain a remarkable amount of predictive power with regards to life-time outcomes.
I do like to suggest that the genetic and archaeological record support the conjecture of Conan the Barbarian in terms of what our male ancestors thought was “good in life.” Basically, to conquer your enemies and seize their women, which is a distillation of a disputed quote from Genghis Khan.
Ruchira Paul sent me an email asking me to clarify this exposition of how gene selectionism can explain 50:50 sex ratios. First, I would like to second the author of the original post’s injunction to read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, it is a masterpiece of scientific exposition.
The collagen in old bones of humans shows stable isotope levels similar to that of the old bones of wolves and hyenas, indicating that humans ate at the same trophic level as wolves and hyenas or higher.
These few words of Jouy, Sans les femmes le commencement de notre vie seroit privé de secours, le milieu de plaisirs et la fin de consolation, more exactly express, in my opinion, the true praise of woman than Schiller’s poem, Würde der Frauen.
A lot of stuff has been going on these days, but I want to go back to talk about women.
A big part of the success of the altright blogosphere is the synergy between HBD and the Game movement.
That is the new book by Keith Lowe, with the subtitle Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Excerpt:
The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering.
What if difference between men and women turns out to be a phenomenon not of oppression, but rather of social well-being? There is much to admire in Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
By the time a woman hits 30, nearly all of her ovarian eggs are gone for good, according a new study that says women who put off childbearing for too long could have difficulty ever conceiving. The study published by the University of St.
Today I will sell you on the idea of a Stay at Home Mom for a wife. I'm preaching to the choir, but let me ramble on about it. Let me also sell it for the ladies out there, as I have a small female readership. I'm just offering one post of counter-programming as a howl at the progressive hurricane.
Lean In, Ban Bossy, brogrammer culture, Ellen Pao, German board rooms creating quotas for women, am I missing any progressive women in the workforce memes? Work ladies. It's the only good way to live.
One of the more entertaining debates I’ve had in my post-red pill awareness has been discussing the issue of men doing more “chores around the house” so as to more equitably distribute domestic duties amongst couples.
Young, healthy women are, on average, much more powerful than young men: powerful in the social arena, powerful in the sexual arena. Indeed all young healthy women are valued, all have significant power - because all are significantly desirable and desired.
Research from the Center for Work-Life Policy shows mid-level, professional women need powerful, senior executives to help promote them to the next level of management.
Many of today’s young women are starting careers instead of having babies only to discover later in life they have missed the boat on family life. This essay provides an alternative life roadmap you should know about when deciding your career goals.
I was inspired to write this piece by a female friend. This friend, who is in her mid-30s, recently asked me 'I don’t get it. I have a graduate degree, I make great money, I own property, I’ve got a great car, I’m independent and I’m ambitious. Why can’t I get a good man to marry?'
Women the military and in physical jobsback to top
IN this entry about the Pentagon’s decision to admit women to all combat roles — a decision which was clearly foreordained before the bureaucratic charade of testing women to see if they could do it — a reader explains why women do not belong in combat even if a minority of brave and strong Amazons can actually do it.
I recently watched the above video of a Demi Lovato song. I like Michelle Rodriguez’s stomach as much as the next guy (OK, perhaps more), but one thing that struck me in particular is that throughout the whole narrative arc Lovato, a 5’3 tall female, beats the crap out of many much larger men.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus thinks the results of the recent Marine Corps study, which demonstrated that women are less capable at ground combat than men, are biased and wrongheaded.
In 2013, the US military lifted its ban on women serving in combat. Shortly after, the Marine Corps began what it calls an “unprecedented research effort” to understand the impact of gender integration on its combat forces.
If you’re ever trapped in a burning building, just pray the firefighter climbing up to rescue you isn’t Rebecca Wax. Or someone like her, who’s been given an EZ-Pass through firefighting training for the sake of gender equity.
For several decades now, Western armed forces—which keep preening themselves as the best-trained, best organized, best equipped best led, in history—have been turned into pussycats. Being pussycats, they went from one defeat to the next.
The Women's World Cup team is getting lots of love from media and fans alike, thanks to a win for the U.S. on penalty kicks after a 2-2 tie of Brazil over the weekend. The ladies from America moved to the semifinals of FIFA's WWC.
Starting Jan. 1, every woman in the Marines Corps was supposed to meet a new physical standard by performing three pullups. But that has been put off. The Marine Corps announced it quietly.
Conservatives often stand accused these days of standing outside the "reality-based community." Yet liberals can be blinded by ideology, and nowhere is this more true than in the debate over women in combat.
I’ve never thought about losing as a skill set, but it’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing. It’s probably what I’m best at. For example, I’m a mediocre chess player. This means that at around 4pm everyday I’m losing positioning midgame to a coworker.
Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, mathematician and English society hostess, daughter of the poet Byron, is today revered as something of a prophet. She’s been the subject of at least three biographies, numerous articles, essays and, most recently, a movie starring Tilda Swinton.
I’ve read tons of articles about or by women who work as developers. I read a thing yesterday and it was the best thing I’ve ever read. Yesterday I found a link to a survey on Twitter asking for the experiences of women who work in technology, and did the survey.
I.e., about the time when computing stopped being a career, it started being an adventure. Before the personal computer came along, computers were most famously associated with IBM. IBM was the most valuable company on the New York Stock Exchange for much of the 1960s and represented extreme respectability (with a certain muted sexy Mad Men glamor).
This NPR story, When Women Stopped Coding, has been making the rounds in tech circles. Its main thrust can be summed up with the following graph: However, the data they use for the graph is essentially "percent of a percent". As you know, I loathe this type of data.
At something called the Harvard Gazette, apparently a literary asylum for ed-majors, sociologists, and the mildly brain-damaged, the female inmates are riled because there are not enough girls in computer science.
It’s easy to make fun of your peers who wax hysterically and indignantly about sexism.
But I can sense a touch of unease. So many people believe in social justice. And they believe in it so very passionately.
A Googler did the math: of the top 100-ranked Google meme creators, only 6 are female. (Well, “female.” At least one of the 6 is female only because of current social convention: because of current political insanity.
Counting internships, I’ve worked two decades in the computer biz. When I was a kid, there weren’t that many female programmers, but there were a few. None of them seemed to find their male-dominated workplace denigrating or hostile or hazardous.
Asking Me To Watch Your Stupid Video Constitutes a “Microaggression”
If like me you receive endless exhortations to watch actors demonstrate “privilege”, you may find this compare/constrast checklist helpful.
Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to me – Hacker News had figured a lot of it out before I even woke up this morning – but I think it’ll at least be helpful to collect all the information in one easily linkable place.
Why aren’t there more women in science and engineering? They just aren’t interested:
Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves.
interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs based on their interview performance rather than their resumes. Since we started, we’ve amassed data from thousands of technical interviews, and in this blog, we routinely share some of the surprising stuff we’ve learned.
[Content note: hostility toward social justice, discussion of various prejudices]
“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through. First from him, now from you.
Early in T/Maker’s life, I was working on a company-defining deal with a major PC manufacturer. We were on track to do about a million in revenue that year: This deal had the potential to bring in another quarter million, plus deliver millions of dollars in the years to come if it went well.
Eleven tips for getting more efficiency out of women employees. There's no longer any question whether transit companies should hire women for jobs formerly held by men. The draft and manpower shortage has settled that point. The important things now are to select the most efficient women available and how to use them to the best advantage.
Flirting at work usually isn’t cool, or staring at women at work. But it’s not grounds for crucifixtion lol: They get way too angry about it. Maybe a woman or a man in the office, can just nicely tell the man, “Your behavior isn’t cool, please stop it, or tone it down. Dude.
CNN reports on a new study showing there is a HUGE gender bias in hiring decisions in the United States and it has been this way in some fields since the eighties. You already knew there was gender bias in hiring (duh) but you probably did not know how bad it was.
Background: In a recent post I expressed confusion and ignorance about gender bias in the workplace. I asked how it could be true that studies consistently show bias against woman while studies on pay gap do not reflect that bias (according to strangers on the the Internet).
Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that mediocrity and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive?
Among high-skilled professionals, gender gaps in earnings and a lack of female representation in senior positions persist (e.g. Bertrand and Hallock 2001, Manning and Swaffield 2008, Bertrand et al.
The New Scientist has a new article up titled: When should you get pregnant? Computer knows age to start trying. Happy with just one? The model recommends you get started by age 32 to have a 90 per cent chance of realising your dream without IVF.
The U.S. Census Bureau released new tables and figures today using the 2014 Current Population Survey’s Fertility Supplement, which includes fertility and relationship data for women age 15 to 50.
At present, only poor countries have reasonable fertility. The fertile age white population is everywhere declining, and the most intelligent and educated women reproduce the least.
Anyway, I’ve come up with my own definition of post-modernism. It is when a society forgets all of the lessons about human nature handed down from the previous generations and then embarks on the process of re-learning them through painful trial and error.
A reader who is a veteran police detective in a major college town writes in response to the “What Is Consent To A Drunk?” post. I have removed identifying information at his request. He starts by saying that the four years he spent working in his department’s sexual assault division were the worst of his career.
Every civilization in the history of the World has been a patriarchy. There is not a single exception. Sure, there are some matriarchal cultures. They exist as anthropological curios in remote hunter-gatherer areas or in archeological studies on lost tribes.
In a Pew Research Poll, it was found that divorce is “contagious.” It turns out that if a close friend or family member gets a divorce, that you will be 75% more likely to experience divorce in your marriage.
If we cast a sociological eye at the bad family values of the ruling classes of ancient Greece and Persia, we must realize, Randall Collins says, that these are not just really bad people.
It is well known to readers of this journal that white birthrates worldwide have suffered a catastrophic decline in recent decades. During this same period, ours has become assuredly the most sex-obsessed society in the history of the world. Two such massive, concurrent trends are hardly likely to be unrelated. Many well-meaning conservatives agree in deploring the present situation, but do not agree in describing that situation or how it arose. Correct diagnosis is the fi rst precondition for effective strategy.
Over at Alternet, they posted an article about a "middle-class" single mother named Nan Mooney complaining about the fact that if her state cuts daycare subsidies, her artificial middle-class existence will cease to exist.
I don’t think a lot of my MRA readers read my book reviews. I hope they make an exception for this one.
Mencken defends women in a way that only he can. He argues that women are smarter than men, but to him smarter means (basically) more cynical and coldly-realistic.
In a post on game, Jim mentions that the geek-as-disgusting-to-women stereotype is relatively recent:
Before 1972, there was no stereotype of the sexually unsuccessful awkward high IQ nerd. I don’t believe the awkward high IQ nerd existed until recent times.
For forty years as the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School—twenty-six of which were also spent as Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital—I’ve been studying people who claim to be transgender.
One of the biggest challenges facing medieval historians, and perhaps especially historians of medieval sexuality, is interpreting the actions of individuals at a remove of several centuries.
When Rio and Ray married in 2008, the Bay Area women omitted two words from their wedding vows: fidelity and monogamy. Love brought the middle-age couple together — they wed during California’s brief legal window for same-sex marriage.
It gets a little frightening out there when the sex positive libertarians are ignorant to the reality of HIV/AIDS. They are focused on discussing the positives of sexual liberation but never the outcomes of their policies.
Casual and anonymous sex arranged via social media sites, such a Tinder and Grindr, has led to an increase in STDs across the US state of Rhode Island, health officials have announced.
Here is a very interesting New York Times article from over 27 years ago on a classic long-term study. I'm not aware of this type of study ever being done again. The article is quite good on the complexities of nature and nurture, of glasses that are part full and part empty.
Pedophiles Mate For Life
In the farming era, people disapproved of sexual attraction, especially outside marriage, but weren’t much more offended by attraction to adolescent girls than to older women.
Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 1 in 5 sexually active gay and bisexual men in America are HIV-positive.
The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex.
I.
I remember explaining polyamory to my father when I met him in Utah. He just shrugged and said “I guess I’m too old-fashioned for that sort of thing to make sense.”
I feel blessed to have a father with the rare skill of being able to generate “I am old-fashioned” as a counter-hypothesis to “other people are evil”.
"There is a theoretical debate...over the evolutionary status of human polyandry and whether it is truly an adaptation....We argue that marriage (or pair-bonding) is the adaptation."
Humans are an effectively polygynous species; that is, the reproductive fitness variance of males exceeds the reproductive fitness variance of females.
A major new report, published today in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that the media has pushed regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.
There has been a lot of good stuff written over the years on the topic of calculating customer lifetime value (LTV). Thus, it amazes me how many times I discover faulty thinking when I talk to entrepreneurs regarding their LTV math.
Financial statements are a Rosetta Stone for startups. They reveal the strategies and the tactics of how to bring a product to market. These are the ten metrics I look at when sifting through a startup’s operational model, whether when considering an investment or in a board meeting.
Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves.
An intro is worth its weight in gold. Don’t waste one by saying the wrong thing, or worse, not replying at all. Here are some notes on how to maximize your success in either sending or receiving intros.
[This is a weekly series that brings you raw, first-hand experiences from founders and investors in the trenches. Their story submissions are anonymous, allowing them to share openly without fear of retribution.
I have a lot of conversations with entrepreneurs. In them, I’ll mention something I found confusing or offputting. 99 times out of 100, the entrepreneur will immediately start defending the choice or selling me on their decision.
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.
“You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska.
One truth I've found about startups as they transition to become growing companies is that decisions tend to get tougher - not easier. I attribute this to the fact that for any sufficiently novel or innovative idea - someone is going to think it's terrible.
Here in the third installment of “Be the Boss,” I make three positive points: 1)How listen to your employees 2) How to handle insubordination 3) How to grow as a boss.
This post is not for those who seek to improve on their already-established effectiveness as managers. This post is for readers who struggle with the basics of being a boss; specifically, struggling to secure respect from their male and female subordinates.
I first read High Output Management in 1995. In those days, there were no blogs or TED Talks teaching us about entrepreneurship. In fact, there was almost nothing of use written for people like me who aspired to build and run a company.
When Buffer first moved to a self-management model, we moved to a completely flat structure. We just let loose and the message was “everyone go figure out what you want to do and work on, without too much guidance or leadership.” We talked about some of those challenges recently here.
There comes a point when your job is no longer to be a founder. It can happen because you raised institutional capital, reached market fit, or hired enough people that the system becomes more important than your individual contribution.
Hoffman would know. As co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, he sits atop the largest, most data-rich hiring platform the world has ever seen.
I’m gonna give it to you straight. If you’re not listening closely to the employee you’re evaluating, & interviewing their peers about how helpful and knowledgable that employee is… Whatever else you’re doing is costing you dearly. Stop right now.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. - Bill Gates, The Road Ahead I'm always suspicious of aphorisms. Usually you run into this situation.
Yesterday I spoke at an event and some of the stories I told about how I managed the team at Backupify got a good response - so much that I thought I should write about them.
Ah, the dreaded weekly 1-on-1! Do you get nervous leading up to your 1-on-1 with your boss? Are you sometimes caught off guard or feel unprepared during the discussion? Do you ever feel like the time isn’t valuable? Hopefully you find some of the tips above to be useful.
Stream of consciousness with quotes. Deal with it, Some recent writings on management give the impression that their authors consider management to be an invention of the years since World War II, and an American invention at that.
My greatest disappointment as CEO was the day I realized that helping my executives develop their skill sets was a bad idea. Up to that point in my career, I prided myself on my ability to develop people and get the most out of them.
Any (senior) executive who changes things in the first 90 days has got it completely wrong. And if who hired them expect sweeping changes in 90 days then they got it even worse.
They understood that slaves could not simply be terrified into being good at their job. Instead, the Romans used various techniques to encourage their slaves to work productively and willingly, from bonuses and long-term inducements, to acts designed to boost morale and generate team spirit.
The software developer job interview doesn’t work. Companies should stop relying on them. The savviest teams will outcompete their peers by devising alternative hiring schemes.
There was a time where it seemed like we barely even needed to talk about this: Joel had won the argument, the Internet agreed that private offices were the future, and only incompetent management (or a tight budget) was still putting developers in cubicle farms. A glorious future lay before us.
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.
Kelly Johnson is one of those engineers you rarely hear about, but are likely obsessed with items he had a hand in making. If you've ever looked at an SR-71 Blackbird, U-2 spy plane, or the F-94 StarFire and wondered how these bleeding edge aircraft were engineered, you have Mr. Johnson to thank.
A while back I wrote a post called "When Smart People are Bad Employees." In that post, I wrote about employees that you think will be incredible, but turn out to be destructive.
Imagine this scenario: you spent the past week interviewing with a hot new company, met the incredible team, stood out from your competition for the opportunity of your dreams and now the job is yours! On your first day, you walk eagerly into your new office, look around the hip industrial-chic s
A few key elements that were unorthodox: Extreme Focus (driven by Peter): Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative.
People who worked with Steve Jobs (I'll call him Steve) usually don't talk about it. It's kind of an unwritten rule, partly because he was obsessive about his privacy. I think that has all changed now, but I'm not exactly sure.
I find behavioural economics, psychology, gamification and product development interesting, and they must have been used to support the question above.
The reality is that 1-1's can add a whole new level of speed and agility to your company. Let's first talk about why 1-1's are a crucial part of the "operating system" of how a company runs.
In my #ifiwereafounder tweets, I had a few comments related to hiring high performers and team building, not only for finding a co-founder, but also more generally.
Ten years ago, while I was working at Juno, a start-up Internet service provider in New York City, my boss promoted me to the position of technical manager. The new role didn't come with a pay raise, and I had only two people reporting to me, but I still felt good about it.
Geraldine used to love her job at Cranium (the board game startup in Seattle, prior to the Hasbro acquisition & layoffs). She wrote questions for the board games, and copy for the boxes and marketing materials. She was good at it. But, something weird happened – they tried to promote her.
When I do speaking gigs, I open with a few questions to get to know the audience. I’m looking for a couple of key demographic numbers to gauge how much to focus on and tune different themes in any given talk.
This isn’t going to be the last Gervais / MacLeod post (first: here; most recent: here) and I don’t think there is a closed-form solution, so much as something I’m paddling toward.
Angela quit. She walked in on a Monday morning, went straight into Alex’s office, resignation letter in hand, and said, “I have a great offer from another company that I’ve accepted. My last day is a week from Friday.” Alex reacted.
Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, process, and other people. These people have opinions and they share them all over the place — all the time.
In all my years in business, I have yet to hear someone say: “I love corporate politics.” On the other hand, I meet plenty of people who complain bitterly about corporate politics—sometimes even in the companies they run.
As sales managers we love having a process in place around our teams’ sales efforts. We create a series of repeatable steps for our reps to take prospects through, from proposal stage to negotiations through closing.
This is the fifth article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel, CEO here at Buffer. You can grab all posts here. I’ve written in the past about the evolution of our culture at Buffer.
At Opsware I used to teach a management expectations course because I deeply believed in training. In it, I made it clear that I expected every manager to meet with her people on a regular basis.
Yves here. I have to confess that the big reason I’m partial to this article is it is consistent with my experience. Metricization of business, and worse, employee performance, has become a fetish.
If you’re a startup company founder with a technical background (or a design or product management background), building a sales team for the first time comes with a steep learning curve.
I write about sales often both because it’s the lifeblood of any organization and because in my experience it is the area in which more startups are least experienced or inclined.
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise.
I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error.
PR is one of those topics that all new entrepreneurs (and seasoned ones) often ask about. Much has changed about PR in the era of social networks and more open information. Here are some articles that I’ve written on the topic.
Most of these blogs get less than 1,000 visitors per month, and the harsh reality is, the majority of those blogs are, for lack of a better word, failures. What’s unfortunate is, in that group of people, I’m betting there’s someone just like you….
One of the myths of SaaS is that the products are so good, so easy to use, so quick to deploy … that the product sells itself. Given the popularity of try-before-you-buy and freemium-to-premium models for software as a service, it’s easy to see where that myth comes from.
Content Marketing is hot. White hot. SEO and digital marketing thought leaders are declaring that Content Marketing is the next big thing. Even Rand is touting its importance.
Stories about the growth of "hot" startups such as Facebook, Instagram, AirBNB, and others have created a belief that if you build the right product, customer acquisition will be easy. Don't be fooled.
This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here.
Lately, I’ve been deleting them because no one takes even a minute to write a well crafted email. I used to feel guilty but I figure since the person is being selfish, I can be as well.
The research you did and ideas you came up with in the brainstorm step should guide your rankings. Usually, a few ideas you thought of will seem particularly compelling – these traction channels belong in column A.
1. End up in control of a thriving business. Doesn't matter how, flashy credentials and a nice suit, mixed with lots of buzz words and business speak usually work. 2. Fire everybody responsible for driving the product forward, frame this as "increasing profitability" or "cutting costs" or similar.
August 2010When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998,
it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the
next big thing.
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
We Hired the CFO
Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board meeting of a fairly successful 3½ year-old startup.
Over the past year at LinkedIn I developed a strong appreciation for using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a key performance indicator (KPI) to understand customer loyalty.
In learning to speak another language, drive a car or play an instrument, we recognise the value of going over things again and again, of rehearsing, memorising and testing according to established principles.
As a teacher, I believe in triage. At the top, there are students who pick up the material with minimal effort. At the bottom, there are no-hopers who cannot seem to learn. In the middle are students where you think that some effort can make a difference.
For me when learning a new programming language, I find that I move through three important phases. First I'm copying what other people are doing and consulting books and manuals constantly for everything I do. After a while I'm consulting other things I've done myself and imitating those.
You don't know most of what you've learned. Why not? Because human beings forget. How and why do they forget? The main story is that people forget what they don't use.
Jessica Lahey’s In Defense of Algebra, in which she describes her adult triumph over math, reminded me of my own experiences learning math and how they might be relevant. This is long, but if I make what I did sound too easy, people will get the wrong idea.
How well someone scores on a standardized test is based on a combination of intelligence, preparation, motivation, concentration, test-day jitters, and lots of other variables.
These days the heritability of intelligence is not in doubt: Bright adults are more likely to have bright kids. The debate was not always this calm. In the 1970s, suggesting that IQ could be inherited at all was a heresy in academia, punishable by the equivalent of burning at the stake.
The SAT predicts success remarkably well given that it takes just a few hours to administer. Photo by Shutterstock
The College Board—the standardized testing behemoth that develops and administers the SAT and other tests—has redesigned its flagship product again.
It boils down to IQ, in that less intelligent people typically earn less. Second, the increasingly competitive economy has made IQ more important, magnifying the socioeconomic ramifications of individual cognitive differences.
So says Beth Visser and colleagues in the latest edition of Intelligence. She tested Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), gasp!, empirically.
In an attempt to equalize social opportunities, several large-scale studies have been launched. These studies were of special interest because they sampled a large portion of black people, since a study on white people can’t be generalized over other ethnic minorities.
Or nearly so. I was planning to publish that blog article for the 31th December 2014. As you can see, I failed in this task, and didn’t finish in the right time.
What do we know about the science of human intelligence? Douglas Detterman, emeritus professor at Case Western Reserve University, shares what he has learned from decades of working in this field.
ER’s got some interesting thoughts on ‘school choice’, charters, vouchers, ‘accountability’, teachers unions, pensions, etc. with the bottom line that what is going left unsaid and unargued (because taboo) is what’s really driving this train.
Education is a subject I find hard to contemplate without losing my temper. In the present-day U.S.A., education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets.
“…but anyone who has spent more than a minute thinking about education reform knows that kids experiences between the time they are born and the time they enter kindergarten at age five matter a whole lot in terms of how well they are going to do once they are in school, and I would say that even hardened cynics would concede that high quality preschool programs could make a dent in our mile-wide achievement gaps.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have been invited to speak here at the great University of [mumble]. Go Wildcats, Spartans, or Eagles, as the case may be! I apologize if what I have to say to you sounds a little unpolished.
Every so often I run across a forum conversation, in which one poster says “Hey, I remember reading a teacher who talks about HBD stuff” or “What’s the blog of that teacher who writes about IQ?
Shockingly, measures aimed at narrowing the gap between “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” students only narrow the gap when they’re denied to the “advantaged” students. OK, maybe you’re not so shocked, but Cornell researchers Stephen J. Ceci and Paul B. Papierno were:
Brawls broke out at two St. Paul high schools in October. Photo: KSTP News
Some St. Paul public schools are unsafe for students and teachers, writes Katherine Kersten, a senior policy fellow at the Center for the American Experiment, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Education Policy, Failed Reforms, and the Null Hypothesisback to top
In which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these d
In this study by the Urban Institute, punks freshly graduated from college and paid about $30,000 per year were found to be more effective as schoolteachers than experienced union members who dra
Mass education of populations, originally developed as a means of improving the military readiness of the population in an era of mass conscription, has developed into a tool for the preparation of mass bureaucratic labor forces.
Despite claims by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), more school spending does not translate to higher student performance. The teachers union claims the state has been underfunding education and that more money would solve the school district’s problems.
Well, turns out that Noah Smith has made my last post for October an easy choice. It all began when he and Miles Kimball declared that there’s only one difference between kids who excel in math and kids who don’t—the first group work hard, the second group doesn’t.
How My School and District Failed its Students The following is by Frank Beard, a graduate of Drake University and a former Teach For America corps member (Kansas City ’08). He taught middle school science, social studies, and communication arts in the Kansas City, Missouri School District.
The push for better education is an experiment that has already been carried out globally, and the long-term payoff has been surprisingly disappointing: In the 50 years from 1960 to 2010, the global labor force’s average time in school essentially tripled, from 2.8 years to 8.3 years.
Ericsson et al. found that top-tier experts differ from second-tier experts in the amount of deliberate practice they’d accumulated over the years. Famously, they found that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill like playing chess or playing a musical instrument.
This resonates. I have several distinct memories as a kindergartener. Two of them are: 1) I wept uncontrollably when Mommy left me with the stranger in the building with the cold floors and the big windows to let you see outside.
A naïve inquirer might ask why, after a century of effort, we still haven’t got schools right. A cynical responder might reply that there are many careers, much prestige, and boxcar-loads of public and private money in education reform, along with endless opportunities for politicians to pose as champions of some completely new approach!—for the sake of our children, you know.
Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head) examines the problem with textbooks: One can learn a great deal by surveying the physics textbooks now in widespread use, as I recently did as part of a project directed by the Environmental Literacy Council.
Is Barack Obama keeping a little list of ongoing litigation against the federal government that he intends to take a dive on during the interregnum after the 2016 election? I would hardly be surprised. It’s an old Democratic tradition.
The Value-Added Model for teachers (VAM), currently in use all over the country, is a terrible scoring system, as I’ve described before. It is approximately a random number generator. Even so, it’s still in use, mostly because it wields power over the teacher unions.
The typical story that the left tells about the relative decline of the American working class is that it was the outcome of inevitable technological and historical processes. You can see many of the shells of old factories all around the “rust belt” yourself.
I don’t know any of this for a fact, but I would imagine that, if you were to administer a spelling bee to a given middle-school classroom, there would be a fairly significant correlation between success at the bee and overall writing ability.
Time spent playing informal sports was significantly and positively related to overall creativity, while time spent playing organized sports was significantly and negatively related to overall creativity.
UNTIL THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY “REFORMING” America's schools meant persuading more people are attend. Though the mid-nineteenth century compulsory-school-attendance laws were all but unknown, and only about two percent of the high-school age population was enrolled in high school.
The Centers for Disease Control tells us that in recent years there has been a jump in the percentage of young people diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly known as ADHD: 7.8 percent in 2003 to 9.5 percent in 2007 and to 11 percent in 2011.
Nothing however, was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices, and to render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed.
Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie.
The headline sounds too good to be true, right? In contrast to the state of play in our bad-incentives-ridden, increasingly corrupt medical industrial complex, the drivers of out of control higher educational costs are astonishingly easy to isolate, and would actually not be hard to combat.
Pritchett's omission is striking because he's also famous for pointing out and trying to explain the fact that education is much more lucrative for individuals than nations. His leading explanations are (a) rent-seeking, and (b) signaling. My postcard version:1.
A few months ago I spent a day with Deborah Ball and her ace team at the University of Michigan TeachingWorks. It was a great day and I told myself I’d write a swath of blog posts worthy of the day.
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson gained fame for his research showing that true expertise requires about 10,000 hours of practice, a notion popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers.
Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem is an odd name for educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s discovery, first reported in 1984, that one-to-one tutoring isn’t just a little bit better than conventional c
The economic effects of licensing and certification regimes have been the subject of a couple of recent posts by Angelica, and of extensive discussion in the comments: “Call Me Street Food Libe
Goal Kiting
When you use check kiting, you write a check against bank A to pay off bank B, and you write another check against bank B to pay off bank A.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
I
taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and
in some of the best, and during th
The most profound structural change you must prepare for from conventional schooling to a guerrilla curriculum is the changeover from memory-driven classroom/blackboard instruction, the type customarily evaluated by grades and tests, into performance-driven instruction that can be evaluated concretely through practical demonstrations of skill.
Tabitha Allen blames herself for her 10-year-old son's violent behavior. Growing up and living in a drug-infested, hooker-inhabited neighborhood, the 33-year-old mother of five is angry about life.
The following account comes from a veteran HS teacher who just became a Coach in her building. Because her experience is so vivid and sobering I have kept her identity anonymous. But nothing she describes is any different than my own experience in sitting in HS classes for long periods of time.
It is time to get women out of the schooling of boys. It is way past time. Women in our feminized classrooms are consigning generations of our sons to years of misery and diminished futures. The evidence is everywhere. Few dare notice it.
In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and dri
“It has been said that whoever asks about our childhood wants to know something about our soul. Society must take time to inquire.” – Isa Helfield 2001
Let me bare my soul for you.
Many people have written to me about Why Nerds are Unpopular,
and many more seem to be posting about it on various Web sites.
Here are answers to some of the points they've raised.
by John Taylor GattoWhy fix a system designed to destroy individual thought? I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little.
The Deep South’s paralyzing intergenerational poverty is the devastating sum of problems both historical and emergent — ones that, in the life of a young man, can build in childhood and then erupt in early adulthood.
The Left constantly misdiagnoses the source of the problems blacks face. The Left insists that the root of all these problems—from high incarceration rates to the low academic achievement—is white racism.
ROBERT HUBER writes in Philadelphia Magazine on “Being White in Philly,” a majority nonwhite city. Huber describes — blandly and without indignation — the squalor and fear that are common in many parts of the city due to black crime and negligence.
As I mentioned earlier there’s eduformers (it’s culture!) and progressives (it’s the legacy of racism!) and then there’s the View That Must Not Be Spoken.
Steven Pinker, on IQ:
Question: Thus, I think IQ tests merely measure a pedestrian or functionary level of intellect.
US DOJ Demands Race-Based Punishments In Schools
The disparate impact doctrine is evil. Implement different standards for different races in schools or face the wrath of the US Department of Justice.
It seems to me that not all people called experts actually are. In fact, there are whole fields in which none of the experts are experts. But let’s try to define terms. You might say that an expert is someone who knows more about a subject than some random dude off the street.
There are three rules you need to remember if you want to survive grad school. Rule (a) is: never go to grad school before you're either old enough to drink, or old enough to have had a drink.
Science has revolutionized life since at least the age of exploration, through the industrial revolution, and to an unprecedented degree in the 20th century.
To rein in the problem of the higher education bubble and student loan debt, we first need to understand why so many adolescents are going to college in the first place.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s department of African and Afro-American studies offered a now-notorious selection of non-classes for athletes — and others — who needed a little… help: After the fraud was exposed and both the university chancellor and Mr.
The surging cost of U.S. college tuition has an unlikely culprit: the generosity of the government’s student-aid program, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said.
The assumption that more/better education is the cure for inequality is one shared by both major political parties, with any disagreement turning on what, exactly, is the best way to enhance education (more public school funding vs. charter schools).
One of the weirder status markers of the most exclusive colleges is that undergraduates normally can't major in business. West Hunter summarizes the distribution of majors nationally v.
The next book by Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality, will be published in August.
At the back of a small room at Coogee Beach, Sydney, I sat watching as a psychologist I had never heard of paced the room gesticulating. His voice was loud. Over six feet tall, his presence was imposing. It was Lee Jussim.
I joke with my graduate students they need to get as many technical skills as possible as PhD students because the moment they graduate it’s a slow decline into obsolescence. And of course by “joke” I mean “cry on the inside because it’s true”. Take experiments.
So here's my next book idea: I'm going to research and write an oral history of the Great New York City Crime Drop. Why? Because crime went down more than anybody thought possible, and there is still no academic consensus about what actually happened.
I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department.
This monster post has been sitting on my computer hard-drive for a few months (seriously). For awhile, I was too scared to publish it. What I’ve written below is based on a (very) informal talk I gave at a graduate student seminar series at University of Maryland.
Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result.
Last post, I argued that if Toyota would have raised the price of a Camry by one cent, it would have sold two or three fewer cars last decade. My argument went something like this: "If Toyota raised the price by $20,000, it would have sold almost no cars, which is four million fewer than it did.
Here is a mind-blowing text that was sent to all EPFL researchers (presumably) by a doctoral student during the week-end. It expresses feelings that are worth to think about. Still, if you are or have been in the academic world, I think it is worth to invest 10 minutes to read this text.
Back finally to an old topic leftover from the climate inquisition a few weeks back. One of our lefty commenters thought it important to raise the issue that I don’t publish “peer-reviewed” articles about climate issues in the academic literature, which is true.
It’s really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I’ve run across.
Reading this blog, it might be easy to forget that I’m a psychiatrist, because I’m so often criticizing something about the current state of affairs in psychiatry. But this particular criticism is more fundamental.
The problem you allude to in the above reference and in your other papers on ethics is a broad and serious one. I and my students have attempted to replicate a number of top articles in the major finance journals.
The Quarterly Journal of Political Science has a policy of in-house review of all statistical code. This is expensive and hard to do. Is it worth it? Of the 24 empirical papers subject to in-house replication review since September 2012, only 4 packages required no modifications.
Quadrant, May 1986, reprinted in Cricket versus Republicanism (Quakers Hill Press, 1995). THE FACULTY OF Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded.
Higher education has a long and fraught relationship with the labor market. From colonial colleges training clergymen to the Morrill Act, normal schools, and the great 20th-century expansion of mass higher education, colleges have always been in the business of training people for careers.
First we have False Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility In Data Collection And Analysis Allows Presenting Anything As Significant (h/t Jonas Vollmer).
Zachary Ernst recently attracted a lot of attention by quitting a tenured faculty position (Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Missouri).
Ten years ago, a team lead by Irina Conboy at the University of California at Berkeley showed something remarkable in a Nature paper: if you take old cells and put them in a young environment, you
I recently saw the show Old Jews Telling Jokes, and was reminded of a big change in humor over the last century. The show was full of old-style jokes, i.e.
In the case of health data, the big problem is something that’s come to be called the healthy user bias, because the guy who’s taking Vitamin E is also doing everything else right.
I.
From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:
“There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice.
This post started life as an e-mail to a high school teacher who is thinking about grad school in English Lit. I expanded and cleaned it up slightly for the blog, but the substance remains. Pleasure meeting you the other day.
“I hate science." In six years of graduate school, this has to be the phrase I’ve heard most frequently from my colleagues. People who have dedicated their lives to science.
I will focus on research in science, engineering and computer science. Please do understand that the purpose of a graduate student's research is not to do interesting or useful things. Its purpose is to:generate publications that make one's advisor look good in front of the funding agency (e.g.
At Brown University, in Providence, R.I., there is a secret forum in which students may discuss potentially controversial issues freely. Let me say that again: At Brown, there is a secret forum in which students may discuss potentially controversial issues — or anything they want — freely.
Now that I am finished writing my book and it is in the process of being published I have been looking for a more traditional vocation. While I look for another job, or possibly start up a business, I have been doing 1 on 1 tutoring sessions for high school students in my area.
Arthur C. Brooks, in the New York Times of all places, questions Academia’s double-standard on diversity. One of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time is the realization that human diversity is a blessing.
If you were asked to name a university that bears a disturbing relationship to an ideological re-education camp, Virginia Tech probably would not be the first to come to mind.
Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice recently pulled out of giving the commencement address at Rutgers University after students protested. Rice was just the latest would-be commencement speaker to face criticism and withdraw.
Apparently the only kind of thought not allowed is that which might “undermine,” according to UnKochMyCampus, “environmental protection, worker’s rights, health care expansion, and quality public education.
Whether liberals or conservatives are more biased in their perceptions of science and social science has, of late, become something of a hot topic in social science.
Why would you reference an article in New York Magazine about the scientific merits of our Ashkenazi paper, when you could be quoting People or Tiger Beat? The lady who wrote that article (Jennifer Senior) thought that it must not be a real scientific paper because we didn't use footnotes. I doubt if she had ever read a scientific paper in her life before covering ours.
Arnold Kling worries that there has been an erosion of intellectual integrity on college campuses:
I am becoming increasingly concerned that sending children to college is dangerous for their i
A recent editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education reminded me of how I ended up here, teaching at the Army Intelligence School, instead of where I expected to be: teaching
The Texas Board of Education has voted to include in state’s history textbooks facts more favorable to conservatives. Needless to say, this has provoked condemnations from the national Main Stream Media.
The U.S. government makes a big effort to reach out to important think tanks, often through the little noticed or understood mechanism of small, private and confidential roundtables.
I thought it'd be fun to kick off the year by retro-introducing the blog - for the benefit of innocent new readers, and crazy old ones as well.Continuing UR readers: obviously, you are not crazy.
Here is an article abstract from a scholarly journal, which I like because I think it captures many of the worst aspects of both contemporary leftism and contemporary academic writing: In this paper, I read Trayvon Martin’s murder at the hands of George Zimmerman and the ensuing debates surround
One of my responsibilities is tracking down ads for our recent PhDs. I just came across this one for SDI Training Manager. It’s self-parody, and so is good for laughs.
ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed.
"Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers.
"Stratos has never sampled the full terror stalking the stars." - David Brin, Glory Season
Paul Romer complains of "mathiness" in macroeconomics. Paul Pfleiderer talks about "chameleon" models.
Although I made the move to industry a bit more than five years ago, I still serve on program committees and review articles for journals and the like.
Anyone who has talked to me in the last year would have
heard me complain about my 8-times-failure-to-replicate which nobody wants to
publish. The preprint, raw data and analysis scripts are available here, so anyone can judge for themselves if
they think the rejections to date are justified.
Heavily publicized student protests over alleged “systemic racism” at Yale, the University of Missouri, and Claremont-McKenna College have touched off a nationwide movement, with students at other schools eager to get into the action by issuing their own demands.
A distinguished alumnus of Princeton comments on the University’s long descent into leftism and its disturbing practice of pandering to infantile race-mongers: The recent events at Princeton University are the culmination of the leftist takeover of Princeton that began in the late 1960s with the
Why are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like?
I’m a proud alumnus of Dartmouth College. Apart from my family, I attribute all the good things that have happened to me in my life to my four years on campus and in the classroom there. I remain grateful to the great teachers with whom I had the privilege of studying at Dartmouth.
BETWEEN the 19th century and the 1950s, the American university was gradually transformed from an institution intended to transmit knowledge into an institution designed to serve technocracy.
Then they put up the shacks. I told the police, “Go ask them three questions: Do you have a title to the property? (They built them on our property, not theirs.) Do you have a building permit? We have to have building permits.
This text is aimed at you, young student or recent graduate, inspired by the world of international affairs and humanitarian work, thinking of seeking an internship with the United Nations in Geneva. I want to convince you not to do it.
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
Fabian Tassano has coined the interesting noun mediocracy, which he gives two meanings: "(1) the rule of the mediocre; (2) the triumph of style over substance."His book of the same name - which for some reason is almost impossible to get in the US, and I am grateful to the author for sending me a review copy - is a comprehensive and witty dictionary of British mediocracy, specifically in its New Labour flavor.
Readers may have noticed that, where most writers of my general ilk would refer to the mainstream media, I prefer to refer to the official press.The second half of this eccentricity is easy to explain.
4894873A set of emails has exposed a sordid, transactional relationship between Hillary Clinton and the press.
The emails were obtained by Gawker as part of a large Freedom of Information Act request it made back in 2012.
While the internet’s main function may be the display of cats, beheadings, and pornography, a sizable portion of the remainder consists of opinion, both political and cultural.
I don’t remember who told me company narratives were like a clock. I was at Google, where I’d taken a job on the communications team despite zero experience in communications.
Here’s a fun little test to either help internalize the creeping horror or introduce someone new to the mind virus. The first step is to find a moderately obscure topic you would know far more about than your average English grad would.
This year, our website will deliver more than 10.5 million page views, which is an unprecedented number for Dr. Dobb's. It's up from 9 million last year and 8 million three years ago.
Allow me to speculate on new forms and models for TV news after Part I of this post looked at what’s broken and what’s possible. TV with many eyes: First, a tale… Roger Ailes’ brilliance at Fox News was economic, not political.
“Porn” stimulates strong sexual desire and satisfaction in ways detached from many of the contextual features that usually accompany such desire and satisfaction in real and praiseworthy
I learned it from watching Dennis Rodman and Paris Hilton. Tell the media what they need and want to hear. Give them a place and time to talk to you about it. Watch the headlines roll in.
I repeated on twitter a point I've made before:
I consider local stories from far away as none of my business and refuse to consider them
It was a response to bswud talking about the "Clock Boy" s
Felicia Sullivan is a blogger, memoirist, and social media marketer. Though Felicia lives in New York, like me, and probably runs in the same techie-journo-bobo circles I do, I had never heard of her until one Wednesday last December, when she called me an ignorant, inbred troll.
Last year, a couple of young guys in the pickup community created a deliberately offensive article for Medium.com about the female writers at XOjane. Not because they wanted to offend people for some personal benefit (it was published under pseudonyms) but to trace and observe the process.
Most cops hate the newspaper. I don't. But that's probably because growing up, there was more newspaper blood in my family than police blood. And a healthy freedom of the press is one of the founding principles of this nation.
Something very morbid is going on in the press these days every time there’s an act of violence by a person who might have racial, religious, or ideological motives.
As to the rapists claim, whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual assaults in 2013, even though they are only 63 percent of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Latinos, though 17 percent of the population, committed 9 percent of sex crimes.
Since our last review of Colin Flaherty’s work with the previous edition of this book, following up on the original issue of this provocative work, White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It has grown and polished itself to the point where it is...
I’ve been a bit harsh about France. Yes, the French are the kings of bullshit. Yes, their intellectual output over the last two centuries has been a net harm on human civilization.
“They’re just looking for words they can put together like a Frankenstein’s monster,” Peter Schiff, finance expert and recent guest of The Daily Show, told Mediaite.
The media is sovereign. If not, they are near sovereign in our society. They have amazing power as the megaphone, the editor of the megaphone, and the user of the megaphone.
Last night was yet another flare-up in infamous Stockholm ghetto Tensta. A crowd of 50-something masked thugs were hurling rocks and molotov cocktails at police and fire fighters. But noone was killed and police only had to fire warning shots in the air, so no big deal.
Former California Employment Development Department Director and author, The Autism Job Club (2015, with R. Holden)
(This is a slightly expanded version of an essay of mine that appeared the past Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle “Insight” section.
I have been reading How China Became Capitalist by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. It's a fascinating account and I will probably post more on it later, but one detail struck me.
Here is every article that the Harvard Crimson ran between 1973 and 1976 that mentions the Khmer Rouge. Signed pieces appearing on The Crimson editorial page represent the opinion of their authors. Only unsigned editorials represent opinions of The Crimson staff.
I’ve taken a couple of days before responding to Columbia Journalism School’s report on the Rolling Stone/Sabrina Rubin Erdely/Jackie fiasco. There’s always pressure to provide near-instantaneous reactions to news events, but the report is long and substantive.
In mid-September, some Washington Redskins fans agreed to go on "The Daily Show" to defend the team's name. In the course of negotiating their appearance, the fans asked whether they would be confronted by American Indians on the show.
Denying the Ferguson Effect and any link between policing and crime has become almost a cottage industry in some circles. It's sort of the liberal equivalent of conservatives denying climate change and, er, on the small chance it is changing, any link between global warming and human activity.
'Remember the Titans,' viewers are told as the opening credits roll, is 'Based on a True Story.' This is an intentionally vague phrase, meant to suggest that most of what follows is factual. But is it?
What happens when a National Public Radio host interviews a New York Times reporter on the subject of Venezuela’s economic collapse? You get a perfect storm of cluelessness.
The host is Terry Gross, the guest is New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey, and the program is Fresh Air.
A German rape victim admitted in an interview with Der Spiegel that she lied about her rapists’ ethnicities because she wanted to avoid sparking a backlash against refugees.
In January, Selin Gören was attacked by three men in the city of Mannheim and forced to perform a sex act.
For all of these reasons, I believe it is worth attempting a positive account of rights—an account which is both amoral and alegal. In part I of this essay I present such an account—one in which rights, in particular property rights, are a consequence of strategic behavior and may exist with no moral or legal support.
Of the security and productivity of farmland -- and of other, less historically important forms of property -- which were more important? Many traditional historians take it for granted that military organization (often determined by military technology) determined social structure as well as the success of a society.
Why did agricultural civilization remain mired in the Malthusian trap for over 5,000 years? And how was it possible to eventually escape from it? Recall the Malthusian isoclines and how various kinds of societies can be situated along them (click to enlarge all graphs):Plagues move the economy “northwest” along the isoclines, as more marginal lands are abandoned leaving the fewer people to work and share the more productive lands.
As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds.
This is a guest post by Tom Adams, who spent over 20 years in the securitization business and now works as an attorney and consultant and expert witness on MBS, CDO and securitization related issues. Jointly posted with Naked Capitalism.
No, there has been no shortage of regulation, just a shortage of regulation that has to do with systemic safety and solvency. Regulators have been obsessed with e-mail retention, policies, procedures, desk manuals, 'know-your-customer' files, control self-assessments, speed of audit follow-up, even encouraging staffing up for 'regulatory risk'!.
Regulations and accounting rule-inspired transactions describe the bulk of the well known derivative-related blow-ups of the last two decades. Proscriptive regulation and the derivative trade have a symbiotic relationship.
Over the years I have written about the stock market several times. I thought given the up and downs of the market, now would be a good time to replay some of those posts
I get asked all the time to take that leap yet, but along the way, when I find a book that really impresses me, I try to help it find an audience.
This article sums up exactly my experiences at DE Shaw during the ruble default/LTCM melt down in 1998:My Brazilian rate started trading. It blinked 17.40%, 1.50% wider than the prior day. I was out 3 million dollars, and I had no chance to trade. No chance to get out at 15.50% or 16.00%.
As far as I’m aware, private-sector firms don’t hire anyone to make DSGE models, implement DSGE models, or even scan the DSGE literature. There are a lot of firms that make macro bets in the finance industry – investment banks, macro hedge funds, bond funds.
We all know the cliché about how to deal with panics – viz., ‘lend freely at a penalty rate’ – and the fact that this is taken as an endorsement of central banking, per se, but , in fact, Lombard St (1873) finishes with a much more fatalistic conclusion. XIII.
There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would have been in the regular banking system – and this could well be true. But it also highlighted another point: in my expecience, almost nobody actually understands how payment systems work.
So a better approach, in my view, would be to purge the system of run-prone financial contracts — that is, fixed-value promises that are payable on demand and cause bankruptcy if not honored, like bank deposits and overnight debt.
There tends to be a lot of muddled thinking when it comes to the national debt. Those on the right tend to worry that someday the Fed will need to "monetize" the debt, and that this will create massive inflation.
Perhaps you are under the impression that banking, accounting and economics are perfectly understood by the bankers, accountants and economists. Or did this week cure you of that? If it didn't, next week might.
Introduction1.     As the financial crisis has developed and increasingly affected real economic activity, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England (BoE) have resorted to progressively more aggressive and unconventional easing measures.
There is much talk of China's foreign exchange reserves. it is a subject of concern for some and for back-patting by globalization pushers. It is good old fashioned mercantilism, where the Chinese manipulate the trade set-up to pull in more and more investment to build up its manufacturing base.
The book is here.
You can read all about List and his economic thought here.
List is very critical of Adam Smith, but it was interesting to read a non-Leftist critique of Smith.
On one hand, economists famously believe that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. On the other hand, they also famously believe that free trade is a free lunch.
In his recent book "Economics Rules," Harvard economist Dani Rodrik laments how economists often portray a public consensus while disagreeing strongly in private. In effect, economists behave like scientists behind closed doors, but as preachers when dealing with the public.
What is unwritten in a New York Times article is always the real story. What they write is what they want to show you–with the goal of stirring up anger.
If we cannot build high buildings any more, progressives say we are now so sophisticated that we are now superior to status competition based on giant penis substitutes, and status competition ba
Earlier I argued that technology in the west peaked in 1970, Tallest building 1972, coolest muscle cars, last man left the moon,though it continues to advance in some other parts of the worl
I think this touches on the core elephant in the room with modern (especially American) economics. There is often a lot more money and career advancement to be made as an economist if you are productively wrong - making policy proscriptions that serve an agenda, than if you are right.
In 11th grade, I took Advanced Placement U.S. History. I enjoyed it at the time. Once I started studying economics, however, I was outraged by the economic illiteracy of my history textbooks. Mainstream historians barely mentioned the unprecedented miracle of sustained economic growth.
Garrett Jones has a new book out: Hive Mind. He argues that “while individual IQ scores predict our independent success moderately well, a country’s average score is a remarkable bellwether of its general prosperity.” Makes sense. I might even call it obvious. More on that later.
I might be well behind others on this subject, but I’m trying to catch up. I just finished a book entitled Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: how microfinance lost its way and betrayed the poor, written by Hugh Sinclair.
Here is an incredible number: From 2002 to 2012 the World Bank and its client governments invested $9 billion dollars across 93 skills training programs for the poor and unemployed. In lay terms, that is a hundred freaking million dollars per program.
If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years.
One of the biggest questions you're going to be asking now is, "How much should I charge for my software?" When you ask the experts they don't seem to know. Pricing is a deep, dark mystery, they tell you.
Workforce Issues, Labor Economics, Inequality, and Bargainingback to top
This article explores the effects that pilot unionization has on the U.S. airline industry. During 2008, the author flew 50-seat regional jets for a subsidiary of a major airline.
Last month—and particularly last week— Seattle foodies were downcast as the blows kept coming: Queen Anne’s Grub closed February 15. Pioneer Square’s Little Uncle shut down February 25. Shanik’s Meeru Dhalwala announced that it will close March 21.
Go now and check what was China's annual GDP per capita in Mao Zedong times. Just see it. Apparently a lot of people need this kind of basic history education. Yaron Brook has more knowledge on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwb8m_ZbU-U&feature=youtu.be...
What jobs require minimum skills? All the jobs reformers and progressives both describe in disparaging terms: Walmart clerk, hotel maid, custodian, garbage collector, handyman, fast food worker. The average elite makes these jobs sound unfit, an insult to even consider.
This might surprise some of you – or not, I’m not sure. But one of the most satisfying things about leaving academia and the tenure system and going into industry is how, at least in the ideal situation, you can get fired for not doing your job.
The idea of technological unemployment - permanent structural unemployment and a jobless recovery - used to be dismissed contemptuously as the Luddite fallacy.
I.
“Forgive him , for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.” –George Bernard Shaw
Our tribe has a custom of dividing into Right and Left. The Right supports economic laissez-faire and traditional social norms.
Before taking my trip to Havana, one thing that I was curious about was how a half-century of Communism had affected the built fabric. While there are obvious disadvantages to economic stagnation, I figured that it would have at least created a charming-looking city.
1. I’m now a week removed from my Cuba trip, where I spent 4 days in Havana biking through the city’s near-hourly mix of high heat and torrential rainfall, returning to my bed & breakfast each night covered in soot.
Venezuela is reaching the end point of socialism: economic collapse. Its government, headed by Hugo Chavez’s successor and acolyte Nicolas Maduro, has followed the classic left-wing playbook, with the result, inter alia, that you can no longer buy toilet paper in Venezuela.
When I was about 13, 14, 15, I felt very oppressed, and I read a lot of
stuff about participatory democracy. I became very keen on participatory democracy.
Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil—and he's the typical product of money."
Here are ten fundamental ideas to help you explore and understand the world around us using the economic way of thinking. I've written an essay on each idea and listed some reading and listening suggestions if you want to learn more.
I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens.
Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day, but then a company called National City Lines, which was controlled by GM, bought up all the streetcars — or so the conspiracy theory goes.
This is the first story in a two-part report on the Mueller neighborhood for the NPR Cities Project. In Texas, a state where cars and private property are close to a religion, there is an acclaimed master-planned community that's trying something different.
Densely populated neighborhoods, commercial district city squares and multiple public transit lines all span the city of Cambridge, Mass., creating an environment ideal for walking.
This idea goes against the received wisdom that higher urban density is the key to encouraging more active citizens, and that urban sprawl is one of the factors which helped to cause our society's car dependency.
An interesting argument that we need Robert Moses and Le Corbusier-type architects to remake our cities to become bicycle friendly: If Henry Ford were reincarnated as a bike maker, Le Corbusier as an architect of buildings and cities for bikes, and Robert Moses as their bike-loving ally in govern
A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to Providence. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet. She arrived looking astonished.
It started in Soho, then moved to Chelsea and the East Village. Riots in Tompkins Square in 1988 earned it some headlines but didn’t stop its creeping advance. It moved on to lower Harlem, then jumped the river to Park Slope.
It’s time to revisit gentrification here at Social Matter. The odd part of this phenomenon is that many of the people who are most aggressive in re-settling old, run-down cities destroyed by misguided policies are also usually some of the most ardent fanatics for Civil Rights.
The descent of Ferguson into chaos, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the arrest of yet another black mayor on corruption charges might lead one to question whether or not civilization in America can be salvaged.
Gentrification in action
The neighborhood just north of where I live is undergoing a very rapid gentrification. The process is fascinating to watch to those of the HBD persuasion.
On gentrification
Megan McArdle echoes some of the thoughts I’ve posted on this blog (her neighborhood is in an earlier stage of gentrification than my own, to put it nicely):
Yesterday,
A while back Auster suggested that retail stores will have to change to adapt to flash mobs.
I think that’s probably right, but in some areas, it’s not new.
I’m starting to think that high school was the ideal social environment. The key was that I interacted with these people every day. We were in the same building together for hours. And not through any effort on our part—we were actually forced into the arrangement.
It’s a new day in the neighbourhood all across the Western world. More than 30 per cent of Canadians now say they feel disconnected from their neighbours, while half of Americans admit they don’t know the names of theirs.
Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing.
One of the objections I hear constantly to traditional buildings is that they’re too expensive compared to the glass-and-steel variety. “Do you realize how much it costs for all that custom masonry and sculpture?” they say. So, let’s play a game of Guess The Cost.
It is not a common enough trope to point out that in democracy, as in advertising, the valuable quanta consists of appearance. Reality is measured by results; appearance is measured by a view from one angle in one moment and the desires, judgments and feelings it stimulates.
Having written this column for many years now, I find myself wondering at times, "Whence?" and "Whither?" and "Wherefore?" and "To what end?" What have I gotten out of it, and what, if anything, have the readers gotten?
An answer sometimes given is that in matters such as these it is generally dominated by the opinion of the well-educated and well-off. These people (so the argument runs) are indifferent to or downright hostile to the interest of the less well-off and the poor.
Sean
said...
The external threat a country faces is going to be a big factor in how its society works (eg Sparta, Prussia). There were communist revolutions in Russia and China, which were preceded by similar peasant uprisings, how explain them on the basis of family-first social systems?In the modern era, Sweden has been a freeloader that did well out of the world wars.
I watched it happen. It started when I was seven years old. Then I watched it happen again, 47 years later. I saw Baltimore burn from my bedroom window in 1968. As a child, I lived in a Baltimore row-house neighborhood made up of working- and middle-class families.
If the Republican Party really longed for power, the Democratic Party never would have survived the ’70s.
At least that’s my takeaway from this book about the political views of some very liberal groups – Jews and Italians – in a New York neighborhood that was .
A newly hired autoworker will earn $14 an hour. This, adjusted for inflation, is three cents less than what Henry Fort was paying in 1914 when he announced the $5 day. And, of course, Ford isn’t hiring.
The December 17th editorial from the Baltimore Sun, that once venerable institution, underscores all that's wrong with the prosecution of six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray. These trials are about everything other than the commission of a crime.
This op-ed by Heather Mac Donald is the one I wanted to write. But I didn't. And she did.
The point, one could say rather simply, is that police matter as a force for crime prevention.
Background
William J. Stuntz was the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University before he succumbed to colon cancer at the untimely age of 52.
It was a simple, potent idea: a broken window, left unrepaired, invites disorder. Criminologist George L. Kelling and the late James Q. Wilson published their “broken windows” theory 33 years ago.
What's weird, at least to me, is that many (mostly from the political left) seem to dismiss the never-before-seen increase in homicides in Baltimore as just some random uptick. "You know," I've been told (and more than once), "violent crime is up in New York City, too.
I don't want to make too much out of this, but there is something just a little funny about a reporter being robbed on camera and then running, in tears, to the police. No, it's not funny because somebody is robbed.
One of the things that keeps coming out of the Ferguson shooting is that Michael Brown was "unarmed." As if "unarmed" people cannot be a threat to cop.
That's bullshit.
Now I'm not talking about whether Michael Brown was or was not a threat.
Dillon Taylor was another unarmed white boy shot and killed by police. In (mostly) conservative circles, Dillon Taylor was compared to Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri. In some liberal circles, people believe police only shoot and kill black people.
Here are a few cases were cameras have backed up the police version.
One case I'd like to highlight is the Reverend Bill Godair who claimed a North Carolina officer was aggressive in a traffic stop.
I saw a Tweet about something I already knew, and it still shocked me.
This year 1 in every 2,000 Baltimoreans will be murdered.
As of today, 1 in every 2000 residents of Baltimore has been murdered this year.
Yesterday, President Obama commuted the sentences of 61 drug offenders. Here is a list of the 61.
I have three observations. First, Obama did not commute the sentence of Weldon Angelos, the poster child (and rightly so) of the sentencing leniency movement.
On April 15th, an off-duty Baltimore cop shot and killed a man. "Witnesses" said, according to WBAL:The officer was having an argument with the man outside the store and the man ran away toward the store.
Hours after posting about the police-involved killing of robber Robert Howard, I read Justin Fenton's amazing story about the robber: "Man fatally shot by off-duty officer was also shot by police 20 years earlier.
It’s obvious that there is, in general, a geographical correlation between poverty and crime. What I mean by that is that if we look at a map of the United States (or the world—but this post will focus on the United States) at any given point in time, in places where we see lots of poverty, we will also see lots of crime.
Posted June 22nd, 2016 @ 9:17am
in #Trump #clinton2016
On average, Democrats (that’s my team*) use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime.On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and self-defense.
Once again, there has been a mass shooting involving a gun that looks like an AR-15. (It's technically a Sig Sauer MCX, which may or may not be an "AR-15" … more later on this definitional issue and why it actually matters beyond mere neckbeard pedantry.
Did you see the headline in today's New York Counterfactual?: "NYPD Kills Unarmed Man in Bronx": Protests erupted after police killed a hispanic man in a Bronx bodega. Efraim Guzman, 30, was unarmed when he was shot and killed by police.
[The flap over geneticist Jim Watson's remarks about race differences in IQ has generated some interesting mainstream comment. Some highly respectable outlets — the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Slate.
I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly.
Philosopher Jonathan Kaplan recently published an article called Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors: environments, racism, and the “hereditarian hypothesis,” which can be downloaded here.
In the late 1960s, I came back from Vietnam, once again to take up my chosen profession as a “connector” in the high steel trade. I was a member of the ironworkers union, the men who build the steel frames for multi-story buildings.
The politically acceptable explanation for gender differences in intelligence studies and tests is that discrimination accounts for all current disparities between men and women in intellectual Fields, starting first and foremost with the standardized tests themselves.
As a liberal who grew up near California’s Bible Belt in Orange County, I was brought up to believe that the enemies of reason were the Christian creationists who taught that the world is 6,000 years old and that biologists can’t explain the evolution of complexity without invoking a divine creator.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …
Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours."
I apologize in advance for the daunting length of this post. My sole excuse is that I should have made it still longer to cover the topic.
In dealing with any controversy, it’s usually healthiest to begin at the sticking point.
I’d like to talk about two points that at first blush seem quite unrelated. One centers in hard biology and neuroanatomy; the other in the softest sort of social science. Yet both converge to undermine the scientific case for a primarily environmental explanation of the race gap in IQ.
[Content warning: Polyamory, race]
I.
The best reporting on social science statistics, like the best reporting in most areas, comes from The Onion:
CAMBRIDGE, MA—A Harvard University study of more than 2,500 middle-income African-American families found that, when compared to other ethnic groups in the same income bracket, blacks were up to 23 percent more likely.
This page was made in anticipation of the release of Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History and of the firestorm that ensued. It’s here to address the basic misconceptions that circulate on these topics and to serve as a gentle introduction to this matter for novices.
School Composition and the Black-White Achievement GapSeptember 24, 2015
Download the complete report in a PDF file for viewing and printing.
You are probably used to your fellow geeks doing somewhat weird things. Hey: Nobody’s perfect. All of us are on the spectrum, somewhere.
We’ve examined the subject of gender and are ready to tackle race from the safety of The Onion Router.
This is the first book by Richard Lynn that I have read. This book is designed, by Lynn, to supplement The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve spends some time discussing the gap between black and white IQ in the US.
This book is basically Jared Diamond meets The Bell Curve. Hart's thesis is that we can't really understand human history unless we allow for human biodiversity. The result is an intellectual bitch-slap to the mainstream PC consensus (I understand why many people find this argument troubling, but troubling does not equate with untrue, let's accept the obvious truth and deal with it).
Goody (1973) attributes this generalized polygyny partly to female self-reliance in food production. Year-round farming enables women to provide for their own needs and those of their children. A wife thus costs little in terms of upkeep, and this low maintenance cost encourages men to have as many wives as possible.
The interwar years gave antiracism a new lease on life, thus reversing a long decline that had begun in the late 19th century. This reversal was driven largely by two events: the acrimonious debate over U.
Metro derailed by culture of complacence, incompetence, lack of diversity
‘Inept get promoted, … capable get buried’
By Luke Rosiak – The Washington Times – Monday, March 26, 2012
First of three parts
Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits.
I keep hearing, sometime from blacks, often from whites who heard the stories somewhere but don't know details, of cops racially harassing middle-class black people here in the metro area.
Previously reviewed: effects of marijuana legalization, health effects of wheat, effectiveness of SSRIs, effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous
Does the criminal justice system treat Africa
See Fred Reed’s Cop Columns – From a Police Reporter’s Notebook
The police are out of control all across the country. They can kick in your door at three a.m.
In a project titled “The Counted,” the Guardian is tracking killings by police in the United States and has compiled a comprehensive list for the year 2015.
I was reading a long article at DM on the Tunisian beach massacre. In it a young (presumably) Carthaginian, still suffering legacy effects from the Third Punic War, set about methodically slaughtering European tourists.
Johannesburg - Eskom has to reduce the number of white engineers by 1 081 and white artisans by 2 179 in order to comply with strict new government requirements, according to a report by specialist labour writer Jan de Lange in the Sunday newspaper Rapport.
On a lazy summer's night, a South African family drifted indoors after arriving home. A gunshot rang out and the evening flipped.
Gunmen materialized in the low light.
With the discrimination against and persecution and murder of SA whites worsening yearly -- and with Genocide Watch warning that they're imperiled by impending genocide -- my youthful (and obvious) prediction seems vindicated.
I got an email from a reader suggesting that I read this book and it was a very good suggestion. The book is seriously flawed, but Ms Chua has some wonderful insights. One can’t help but wondering if she knows of the flaws but was too afraid of the PC police to finish her argument.
Why not bring in immigrants and refugees? These people just want a better life, why not open the doors and let them in? Spandrell found a thread of a Belgian couple sharing their journey through the Congo in 2008, and it is interesting, and answers why we shouldn’t.
(And there is a line of thought which takes the view that any harm done to the host societies is well-deserved; what is rather nicely labelled ethno-masochism.
The obvious reason is just to enhance their bargaining power against their employees. Increasing the supply of potential employees enhances the relative position of labor’s buy-side. It’s cheaper to bribe politicians to open up the borders than it is to raise the prices that they pay to labor.
"The past isn't dead; it isn't even past." And we all know that America is Rome. Late Rome. But which late Rome? The late Republic? Or the late Empire? Do we deserve an Augustus? Or are we just waiting for our Alaric?
Masculinity is invasive, femininity is invitational. Funny how the most fundamental biomechanical sex differences play out similarly in the bedroom and on the geopolitical world stage.
My Sunday column argued, fairly strenuously, that mass immigration on the scale of the last two years will put more stress on the politics and culture of Germany than any prudent statesman should
This is the second of three columns relating to the recent story of Disney replacing 250 IT workers with foreign workers holding H-1B visas. Over the years I have written many columns about outsourcing (here) and the H-1B visa program in particular (here).
Christopher Caldwell is perhaps the finest aphorist in journalism today. For example, I’ve often quoted this sentence from his 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.
I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between.
We are supposed to imagine that the vast immigration from Mexico to America is an investment in our future. But in Greater Los Angeles, where the future already has happened, the median Mexican family has set aside $0.
I’ve been pro-Trump from the beginning, a supporter who thinks his rhetoric essential to facing down the unending opposition from the media and the political establishment. He may lose; I don’t make predictions.
Sweden’s message to migrants in Europe is clear: Don’t come here. “Even we have our limits, and now they have been reached,” a defeated-sounding migration minister, Morgan Johansson, explained during a press conference on Nov. 5.
Alex S. wrote in his article at (originally posted here) on the disastrous situation in Germany. But it is much worse. We are totally deprived of any civil rights as mobs of Africans and Middle Eastern Muslims settle in our country.
A British jihadist with Isil has moaned that his Arab comrades are rude, do not know how to queue and eat like schoolchildren. In a bizarre rant, Omar Hussain also complained that his fellow terrorists talk loudly when he is trying to sleep, invade his space and steal his shoes.
On the 23rd of September I became intrigued when reading an article in Swedens 3rd biggest newspapers. In the article a Norwegian working with statistics was shocked that the Swedish statistics institute (SCB), were doing a poor job.
It is true: most Muslims are non-violent (in the straightforward sense that, outside defence of themselves and their immediate family, they do not engage in violence).
The issue of whether there are No-Go Zones in Europe or not has been somewhat controversial, mainly because the term has not had a clear-cut definition when applied to civilian cities.
The original term is military lingo for hot areas controlled by the enemy, where it is suicidal to venture without sufficient firepower to match that of the enemy.
Swedish immigration in history
Historically, Sweden has benefitted greatly from immigration. From the skilled craftsmen of Flanders and Germany during medieval times to the industrial job immigration during the 1950s and 60s from Finland, Ireland, Italy, Spain och other European countries.
When thinking about the reasons for European politicians’ disastrous 2015 response to the Camp of the Saints, one subtle reason was likely due to the Establishment falling badly out of date on population trends.
'Trump is essentially the Republican party’s Bill Clinton.' Lots of foreign oligarchs live in Trump properties. Trump himself uses who is buying and who is selling to get some sense of what's going on in foreign countries.
Do you remember the last time you saw a man with wild eyes, strange clothes and a giant sign around his neck saying “The End Is Nigh”? “How ridiculous and pathetic!” you might have thought. Now, imagine the reality of your country changing within weeks to a point where you come to the same conclusion as him, suddenly feeling that his approach might be ever so reasonable.
From the New York Times:
German authorities said on Tuesday that coordinated attacks in which young women were sexually harassed and robbed by hundreds of young men on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne were unprecedented in scale and nature.
The fact that today’s terrorist attacks in Brussels occurred just days after the capture of Salah Abdeslam has fueled speculation that this was revenge. Alternatively, some suggest that the perpetrators wanted to show they still are on the front foot.
A collection of religions is no different than one religion. Even christianity has a collection of similar relgions like mormonism, but they are all classified as relgions.
Followup to: Arguing "By Definition"
The one comes to you and says:
Long have I pondered the meaning of the word "Art", and at last I've found what seems to me a satisfactory definition: "Art is
Hindsight bias is when people who know the answer vastly overestimate its predictability or obviousness, compared to the estimates of subjects who must guess without advance knowledge.
Once upon a time, there was an instructor who taught physics students. One day she called them into her class, and showed them a wide, square plate of metal, next to a hot radiator.
Once upon a time I tried to tell my mother about the problem of expert calibration, saying: "So when an expert says they're 99% confident, it only happens about 70% of the time.
We're playing a game in which you, the player, start with a number sequence. There is a rule governing which number comes next, and whoever determines the rule will recieve $10.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
Followup to: The Bottom Line, What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
In "The Bottom Line", I presented the dilemma of two boxes only one of which contains a diamond, with various signs and portents as
Followup to: Rationality and the English Language
George Orwell saw the descent of the civilized world into totalitarianism, the conversion or corruption of one country after another; the boot
Continuation of: Taboo Your Words Followup to: Original Seeing, Lost Purposes
What does it take to—as in yesterday's example—see a "baseball game" as "An artificial group conflict in which you use
One of the single greatest puzzles about the human brain is how the damn thing works at all when most neurons fire 10-20 times per second, or 200Hz tops.
Wikipedia has an article about
The map is not the territory metaphorically illustrates the differences between belief and reality. The phrase was coined by Alfred Korzybski.
Too cool for school? explains signalling and countersignalling: Contrary to this standard implication, high types sometimes avoid the signals that should separate them from lower types, while intermediate types often appear the most anxious to send the “right” signals.
Another excellent piece from TFP.
Some remarks:
But look a little past the short term, and this lack of courage results in a horrifying landscape of atomization.
If you had enough practice, advice and expert training, could you become a success at anything? How much is achievement based on natural ability and how much on hard work? For example, can a super uncoordinated computer geek become a table-tennis star in just a year? In a recent experiment, a renow
Actually, another suspicion I’ve often had is that much of that massively-promoted total nonsense like transexualism and Gay Marriage is meant to flush out and expose potential troublemakers potentially lurking within ranks of the elite before they can rise high enough to become a serious problem.
FIFTY YEARS AGO, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by
In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason.
Now a startup operating out of a garage in Silicon Valley would feel part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors. But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool.
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people.
Slippery slopes are themselves a slippery concept. Imagine trying to explain them to an alien: "Well, we right-thinking people are quite sure that the Holocaust happened, so banning Holocaust denial would shut up some crackpots and improve the discourse.
A Nash equilibrium is an outcome in which neither player is willing to unilaterally change her strategy, and they are often applied to games in which both players move simultaneously and where decision trees are less useful.
The Mutt and Jeff routine is one of the most common – and often effective – negotiation tactics. One seemingly reasonable negotiator softens opponent resistance by thanking them for their kind treatment and requesting seemingly modest proposals.
It’s common now among scientists of the brain to propose that the brain is made out of separate modules, which receive input, process it, and produce an output, often in the form of behavior. If you’ve read any Haidt or Pinker you know what I’m talking about.
Let’s see if I can expand SP theory.
Early October is the anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, and the people there get a one week vacation. As a result a billion people start moving in one direction or the other.
I dig linguistics, and I dig HBD, so how do you join them both? I’ve had this idea for some time now, but I hadn’t written about it lest some guy stole it and wrote a book before I did.
It seems I’ll have to give up on that, as science is fast catching up with my awesome blog (see, I just pulled a Half Sigma here).
Sort of a reply to SSC.
When we were kids, we played mostly soccer on the playground, our city being located in Europe. We always kept score and it was actually important which team wins, even though teams were mostly assigned randomly, in the order of showing up.
The Department of
Veterans Affairs has roots in the earliest days of the republic, and it’s been
a Cabinet agency for nearly 30 years. But in a Ben Carson administration, its
days would be numbered.
Obama already had a lot funds in the bank, and names on his lists, from his huge 2008 win. Romney is rich, but was starting from essentially scratch in building his volunteer army and voter database.
I am a member of Congress. I'm not going to tell you from where, or from which party. But I serve, and I am honored to serve. I serve with good people (and some less good ones), and we try to do our best. It's a frustrating, even disillusioning job. The public pretty much hates us.
When I come across bits in history where people warned America of the coming dystopian government or fiat FIRE economy gone mad, I pay special attention to when, where and who.
In recent decades, American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades of our politics will be about.
Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement.
My favourite example of this was trying to deploy an app within the VA that was written in Django. I was told "Python is not on the list of acceptable languages." So we came back to them and said, "Good news everyone, we ported it to Java.
ON APRIL 10, a group of kamikaze Senators marched to the chamber floor with an alternative budget. What they got back was a stark demonstration of the forces that are petrifying postwar democracy.
Interview
by Jean Marie Stine
(This
never-before reprinted conversation was originally published in an
issue
of the L. A. Reader in mid-1984 (at the time of the Dune movie's release).
For what the lawyers are never bluntly told is that the experiment of adapting our Constitution to the politics of the New Deal has been a failure; it has given us a government that is inefficient, incompetent, and unpopular. It was a jerrybuilt system back in 1937, and each succeeding attempt to patch it up has only made things worse. For four decades, it has polluted our concept of democracy, shackled our political imagination, and distracted our potential leaders.
Devin asked for some additional details on how the bureaucracy actually runs the government. I’ve been meaning to write down some thoughts on this subject for a long time.
A while back I agreed to answer reader questions about working for government. Before I get to the questions, I’ll provide a bit of background on how I see government.
WSJ on regulation
The WSJ has an article on regulation that shows how little they understand regulation. It’s here, though it may be gated, so I’ll provide relevant excerpts.
This WSJ article begins:
Last summer, Congressman Barney Frank and then-Senator Chris Dodd stayed up all night writing new rules for America’s multitrillion-dollar derivatives markets.
Now that it’s over (whatever “it” is), I guess I should say something about the government shutdown.
We should begin by establishing what the heck actually happened.
In case it's not already clear to my readers, this small but discerning bunch, one of our many goals here at UR is to paint a simpler, more compelling picture of present history than either the official story, or any of the many well-known counter-narratives.
Everyone on the Left is absolutely convinced that the Brexit vote was all about racism. In part, this is because this is the only way the Progressives know how to argue, the only approach to logic they are taught in college for political argumentation.
As most of you know, my company operates parks on public lands, so I work with government agencies a lot. Years ago, from this experience, I coined a term called "arrogant ignorance." It comes from numerous times when government employees will be completely ignorant of some process, perhaps even their agency's own rules and procedures, but will fight to the death any suggestion that I might be able to enlighten them or that they are doing something wrong.
EY's observations about the particular meeting he attended sound reasonable (I've been to similar meetings), but the group was highly selected and it's his only window into the business world.
When recruiting people for administration, administrators very reasonably look for past experience on the administration track. To him that has shall be given, to him that has not, even what little he has shall be taken away.
This past February, while declaring that infrastructure shouldn't be politicized, President Obama underscored its increasingly ideological nature in the United States. "Infrastructure shouldn't be a partisan issue," he said in front of a recently renovated St. Paul, Minnesota, train station.
Americans have little confidence in most of their major institutions including Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, banks and organized religion, according to the latest Gallup poll. "Americans' confidence in most major U.S.
There are probably many reasons that US households have so few choices for Internet service, but not least among them is the fact that starting a new ISP is really difficult, and expensive to boot.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans are wired to distrust outsiders. In the very early days of humanity, about 50,000 years ago, humans lived in very small bands of hunter-gathers. The reason for this is the species was hyper-violent and hyper-aggressive.
It's often noted that American companies and institutions tend to be divided into dynamic new ones (Twitter, Facebook, SnatchChat, The Hunger Games) and sclerotic old ones (General Motors, government agencies). It's less often mentioned that there are policy reasons why this is so.
Last week, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority abruptly cut ties with four contractors working on the 4.7-mile Green Line extension to Somerville and Medford, outside Boston.
“Advances invented either solely or partly by government institutions include, as mentioned before, the computer, mouse, Internet, digital camera, and email.
It's been a week since Healthcare.gov launched, and for anyone who has tried to register for new health insurance on the website, its online waiting room page is perhaps the most recognizable page on the site.
Recently, I got a letter that made me want to scream: A kid was stopped by the cops for riding his bike on a three-house street! But this exchange ends with … well, you’ll see. I learned something. Maybe we all will.
Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office. And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of governmnet agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, frag-mented, linear thought processs.
McCalla: Darrell Clarke’s plan feeds a monster that consumes scarce resources to build “affordable” homes at exorbitant cost. We may owe a debt to the U.S.
Evaluations of social programs have a long history, as history goes in the social sciences, but it has been only in the last two decades that evaluation has come close to becoming a routine activity that is a functioning part of the policy formation process.
There are many reasons to respect the New Deal state, and many reasons to despise it. I'm afraid for the former, you'll have to go elsewhere. For I am a hater.
In the mid 1990’s I spent over a year as part of a team consulting to Fannie Mae. Given that they have been in the news a bit over the last few days, I thought it might be interesting to pass along a few observations that initially crystallized during my time there.
It was bad enough, as I wrote here last August, that the Internal Revenue Service appeared to reach an agreement to monitor the pulpits of ill-favored churches.
Power is fascinating. It shouldn’t be though. Nothing good comes from the fascination towards power, especially for those who don’t have it. But we can’t help it. We are a political animal.
Imagine that that you are a politically savvy forager in a small band of size thirty, or a politically savvy subsistence farmer near a village of a thousand.
I am quite sure there are still some UR readers who believe in democracy. (I am supposed to be a generalist, and it hasn't escaped my notice that I've been concentrating excessively on this particular spot on the piñata. It is a tough one and it may take a couple more whacks.)
My readers - rapidly dwindling as they struggle to make sense of the bizarre, unhinged extremism that is the bread and butter of Unqualified Reservations - ask: how can we return to sanity?
You seem to be asserting that people in general care less about politics than they should.
There are several very perverse incentives driving people's actions.
My post on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Mao’s mangoes still gets a lot of traffic, which is nice. I do feel like the title wasn’t very elegant, but I wanted to make the point about ideology as “currency”. Unfortunately it didn’t get through.
Power is fascinating. It shouldn’t be though. Nothing good comes from the fascination towards power, especially for those who don’t have it. But we can’t help it. We are a political animal.
The European Union is democratically controlled
Part II – The European Parliament
In Part I, we looked at the UK Representation of the European Commission’s answer to the charge that "Europe is undemocratic and that power lies with unelected, faceless bureaucrats," and dealt with the claim that the Council of Ministers conferred a democratic element to the European Union.
Always Have Something to Say
Saturday, July 17th, 2010
In our modern political system, Edward Banfield says, the politician, like the TV news commentator, must always have something to say — even when nothing urgently needs to be said:
If he lived in a society without problems, he would have to invent some (and of course “solutions” along with them) in order to attract attention and to kindle the interest and enthusiasm needed to carry him into office and enable him, once there, to levy taxes and do the other unpopular things of which governing largely consists.
1. In the 1932 Platform of the Democratic party we may read the following:"Believing that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party when entrusted with power, and that the people are entitled to know in plain words the terms of the contract to which they are asked to subscribe, we hereby declare this to be the platform of the Democratic party.
This one’s not about IQ. Listen up.
All human traits are normally distributed, with few people on each extreme. I don’t know to what degree character is inherited, but it sure as hell is innate.
A human trait, like any other, is the thirst for power.
One of the key points to take away from Moldbug is the De Jouvenelian insight that (successful) rebellion is always, without exception, a mere tool of someone already in a position of power. Whig/ Liberal rubbish on this flows freely, with an ever ready pool of anti-establishment Liberals with an obscenely delusional conception of anthropology always coming up with new ways to rebel.
David Dayen has an article at the Intercept about Google's close relationship with the Obama administration that offers an important look at how relatively unimportant the much-discussed question of campaign contributions is. Google staff, for example, made $3.
I would like to introduce you to a talented writer who, unlike most of his peers, correctly perceived and communicated the issues on a topic. In doing so, however, he was misled from the truth he should have been looking at.
(Remember, creatives are psychotic.) People have been bugging me to write a post on South Africa ever since I started this blog, more or less, so here you go. Disclaimer: I am not a South Africa scholar.
Emkayans and Afghans alike believed they were laying the ground for a prosperous, stable Afghanistan well placed for trade at the heart of Asia. But the specialists, scientists, planners, economists, and materials were expensive. Salaries and transport costs alone were tremendous.
The central problem of writing about South Africa is that it is almost impossible to explain the country's slow-motion catastrophe in terms that make sense to foreigners. Consider these headlines, culled from just a fortnight's newspapers.
Is there anyone else in the room who's here because he's just plain embarrassed by the present world? The past is a foreign country, someone once said. If the past is a foreign country, someone else said, a reactionary is a patriot of that country. Almost an exile from it.
What the hell is history, anyway?History is just a bunch of stuff that happened. Mostly to people now dead. We owe these people nothing. They're dead, after all.
The other day I had lunch with an old friend, Erik, whom I hadn't seen in a few years. Erik is five or ten years older than me, has a philosophy degree from Berkeley, writes Internet standards for a living, and is generally a very stable, responsible and successful guy, unlike of course yours truly. He lives in Germany and is married to a German, and his politics are quite solidly progressive.
George Weinberg said...
Well, of course there's always the possibility of people doing things because they have wrongheaded ideas as to what the consequences of their actions will be.
This book is a collection of Mencken essays/articles written about party conventions and national elections. Specifically, the book focuses on the elections between 1920 and 1936 (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt).
Nick Land notes:
To publicly promote a political profile of peculiarly self-congratulating moral earnestness it is simultaneously necessary to feed the shadows. What happens unseen is essential to the purification of the image.
In which we see how a standard, textbook, tenth grade civics class history of Anglo-American political philosophy gets a lot more interesting once you realize “the Enlightenment” was wrong, and liberal democrats are the bad guys.
by Laurence Vance Did the Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment (June 13, 1866) or the states that ratified it (July 9, 1868) intend that the Amendment incorporate, in whole or in part, the Bill of Rights? It is a telling indictment of the incorporation doctrine that nowhere in the Fourteen
You can find the book here.
In the book, Professor Amar follows the text of the Constitution and explains what the specific words have come to mean. That’s really it – nothing more, nothing less. Sections begin with a sentence or a few sentences of the Constitution and Professor Amar explains what those particular now mean according to consensus legal scholarship.
‘Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmenTongue and brain not; either both or nothing;Or senseless speaking, or a speaking suchAs sense cannot untie. Be what it is,The action of my life is like it, whichI’ll keep, if but for sympathy.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision that let an Arizona pastor put up signs directing people to church services has frustrated cities’ attempts to control swelling numbers of panhandlers.Lower courts across the nation have used the case as the basis for broader First Amendment protections, overturning anti-begging ordinances on the grounds that the government generally can’t outlaw speech on particular subjects.
In an egalitarian world in which authority expects everyone to consider themselves the moral equals of everyone else on the planet, what critics call ‘pathological altruism’ is actually entirely rational.
Boston was founded by the censorious Puritans in the early 17th century. Boston’s second major wave of immigrants, Irish Catholics, began arriving in the 1820s and also held conservative moral beliefs, particularly regarding sex.
“For the first time since President Richard M. Nixon’s divisive ‘Southern strategy’ that sent whites to the Republican Party and blacks to the Democrats …” began a New York Times story last week. Thus has one of the big lies of U.S.
Academic historians dislike the concept that history is often made by groups of individuals plotting together in confidence, even though one obvious way to get big things done is to make plans with
Yeah, that Joseph R. McCarthy.
Why would anyone read a book by McCarthy? The official story of what the hell happened at the end of World War II doesn’t make any sense.
As General Wedemeyer (from whom we’ll hear much more in a separate review sometime in the future) puts it:
.
In reviewing this book, I’m going to make an argument that the only way to understand Watergate is to understand as part of a broader historical era that begins with what is called “McCarthyism” continues into “the Sixties” and end with Watergate.
Skull and Bones Bonesmen
We love Yale sluts! “No” means “yes,” and “yes” means “anal”—that’s the beastly braying cry at Yale these days. The frat boys from Delta Kappa Epsilon (G.
You can find this book here.
Wikipedia says the book is autobiographical. At times it seems so, but on the whole it's missing some keys components of an autobiography (more on this point later). At other times, it seemed like a book about the intersection between Allard Lowenstein and Dennis Sweeney – Harris knew both men.
I emailed Mencius Moldbug a few months ago and asked him to recommend books on the Sixties. He recommended this book and Dreams Die Hard by David Harris. It's hard to find good history on the Sixties, so I was grateful for the recommendation (though Mr Moldbug did note the difficultly).
Some overly terse writing by your humble blogger appears to have kicked-off a bit of a ruckus in the comments. I will try to explain myself more eloquently.
It is hardly surprising that when Faida Hamdy wonders whether she is responsible for everything that happened after her moment of fame she is overwhelmed.
“America’s infrastructure is slowly falling apart” went the headline of a recent Vice Magazine story that epitomizes a certain line of thinking about how to fix the nation’s “infrastructure crisis.
Can Christianity survive, in the face of persecution and conflict, in the region of its birth? The BBC's Jane Corbin travelled across the Middle East - through Iraq and Syria - to investigate the plight of Christians, as hundreds of thousands flee Islamic militancy in the region.
As I mentioned in the post below, the Atlantic has a long article about Silicon Valley start-ups attempting to use Big Data for job hiring testing. In the post-WWII era, the article says, American corporations did lots of testing of job applicants, but that fell out of fashion because science.
In which we scrape the very bottom of the governmental barrel, and dredge up the worst form of misrule.
Table of Contents
Liberty, Anarchy, Bureaucracy
The Worst of Both Worlds
The Myth of Peace
Basic Guide to National Administration
Recommended Reading
Letters to the Editor
Stockholm burns (image)
Police issue parking tickets (image)
To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these.
Rise, Preservation, and Fall of Civilizationsback to top
The emancipation of women and their integration on equal terms in education, the granting of civil rights to homosexuals, the removal, at least formally, of racial discrimination — these are not a common feature of prosperous or declining empires but unique moral achievements of this one.
But which late Rome? The late Republic? Or the late Empire? Do we deserve an Augustus? Or are we just waiting for our Alaric? Tonight I thought we'd hear from one of the leading experts on the subject. That's right - let's give a big hand to Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (no relation to Sam).
Today Westerners face the same issue, with Christianism replaced by Human Rights and German barbarians replaced by people from Third-world countries (especially muslim ones).
This afternoon I'll try to say something about a subject that I am sure you are all interested in: the decline and the fall of the Roman Empire. It is something that has been discussed over and over; it is because we think that our civilization may follow the same destiny as the Roman one: decline and fall. So, the Roman Empire offers us some kind of a model. We can say it is the paradigm of collapsing societies.
Paulus Orosius’ fifth-century CE The Seven Books Against the Pagans, is one of the most important histories to survive from the fifth-century. This book had been composed to compliment the seminal fifth-century Christian writer Saint Augustine’s (354-430 CE) City of God, which served chiefly as a rebuttal against pagan assertions that the Christianization of the Empire had led to the barbarian invasions and the Goth Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 CE.
However this may be, the thesis which I wish to propound is that priceless lessons could be learned if the history of the past four thousand years could be thoroughly and impartially studied. In these two articles, which first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, I have attempted briefly to sketch some of th kinds of lessons which I believe we could learn. My plea is that history should be the history of the human race, not of one small country or period.
Ben Anderson’s No Worse Enemy is a gripping account of the war in Afghanistan circa 2009. Reading the book made me want to facepalm every five minutes.
FRESNO -- For the eXile's 250th issue celebration, I've decided to step back a bit and take a look at modern warfare, a sort of mid-term summary of everything I'v
I started this book 99.5% sure violence had declined over time. I finished it 65% violence had declined over time and 100% sure that Steven Pinker needs a more aggressive editor.
Everyone liked this book, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
Forgot to post on Friday. I’m sure you all were heartbroken. Everyone knows that America is getting more ideologically polarized these days. The right is getting rightier. The left is getting leftier.
It's always fun to rethink the world by redefining our terminology. But the brain can only stand so much of this. The cerebrum boils, releasing green gas. The cortex starts to blacken and fray. A shocking, foreign pain arises between the ears. It will not go away.
The US today has about 425 billionaires, over 1/3 of the world’s total. Many folks say these billionaires are unfairly unequal, and so we should tax them lots more.
Conservative Losers
Progressives want to move the country forward, making things better for its inhabitants and the world. Conservatives want to take the country back, tossing out regulations and entitlements and liberty.
I was quite surprised when I saw Ilya Shiptser calling NRx “New Fascism” in a comment at the SSC blog. We aren’t, of course, and the best argument I can give why exactly is not merely that Fascism is evil and we aren’t, nor that Fascism is destructive of civilization and NRx wishes to rebuild civilization, but even that Fascism is an virtual evil: there is no such thing as Fascism.
In Soviet Russia, Pravda punches you
I once asked a coworker who had grown up in the Soviet Union "What was the most surprising thing about coming to the West?" I was assuming it was going to be something physical and mundane: the shape of traffic lights, or the fact that you can't find Vodka for sale in bus stops – something like that.
Lugo said...
As a modern progressive, of course, you are not a Communist but (as Sartre put it) an anti-anti-Communist. You think of Communism as a mistake, which of course is exactly what it was.
Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation’s statehouses—and could well win the presidency—but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning.
Our urban problems are like the mechanical rabbit at the racetrack, Edward Banfield says, which is set to keep just ahead of the dogs no matter how fast they may run:
Consider the poverty problem, for example.
In the Shadow of Leftward Movement This blog is on record as not caring much about The Gay Problem. Of all the identity groups in the West, gays are the least problematic. A decent number seem to be natural aristocrats and right-wingers, but even if all of them were virulent leftists, they make up a tiny percentage of the population.
This thread at Sailer’s has produced some insights, among which is the following comment:
The definition of chutzpah is someone who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy because he is an orphan.
Accelerlefto
Expanding on a comment I left on Nick Land’s excellent blog:
Jim keeps banging this drum, and it’s the truth: Acceptable politics moves further and further left, at an accelerating rate.
Do I look taller? Thinner? A little stretched?
My watch is still ticking at the same rate. But that is a local reference.
Anyone have a clock at rest that I could observe?
The “Left Singularity” is (I believe) Jim’s invention to describe the ever-accelerating movement left.
I won't waste time condemning Anders Behring Breivik for being a political murderer. Our society, right or left, has no standing whatsoever for condemning political murder. Che murdered over twice as many of his political enemies. He's a hero to millions. No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn't even make triple digits.
La Wik on Tony Benn.
When the Labour Party was again in opposition through the 1980s, he emerged as a prominent figure on its left wing and the term “Bennite” came into currency as someone associated with radical left-wing politics.
I remember very little about my childhood in the Soviet Union; I was only seven when I left. But one memory I have is being on a bus with one of my parents, and asking something about a conversation we had had at home, in which Stalin and possibly Lenin were mentioned as examples of dictators.
If we grant that the definition of dissent is the holding of a belief that is contrary to the prevailing ideology, then it’s not particularly difficult to categorize instances of such dissent.
A good metric to measure it by is the magnitude of social penalties paid for by expressing potentially dissident beliefs.
I work in city government. It's not exactly the belly of the beast, but it's not free of bloat, scandal, and waste either (not to mention the left-wing ideologues who run the place!) I try to keep my head down, do my job, and stay out of trouble.
Hyperion|8.26.15 @ 5:53PM|#
So when Bill called the Donald and encouraged him to run, he was actually trying to resurrect himself from the good ol days?
Curtisls701|8.
5200155With her speech accusing Donald Trump of associating with the alternative right on Thursday, the commentariat has worked itself into a foam over what it all means.
Who is Pepe? Are memes real? Is Donald Trump really a time traveler? Why is Harry Potter a Nazi now?
I don’t know.
Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
Courtesy Office of Sen. Tom Hayden.
THE PORT HURON STATEMENT OF THE STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introductory Note: This document represents the results of several
months of writing and discussion among the membership, a draft paper,
and revision by the Students for a Democratic Society national
convention meeting in \cf2 Port Huron\cf0 , Michigan, June 11-15, 1962.
The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971
Introduction
In 1971, Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr.
I was just going over the 1942 Time article, American Malvern and it struck me again, as if for the first time, just how complete and quick this international coup—dreamed up by a bunch of Protestant clerics, movers, shakers, and busybodies—was.
Rise and fall of the Conservative Movementback to top
As you may have heard, the novelist Christopher Buckley and the popular historian Richard Brookhiser have each written a book about Buckley’s father, the late William F. Buckley Jr. Neither is just about WFB.
On New Years, Margaret Roberts noticed that Rand Paul and the broader Washington D.C. libertarian community has embraced (physically, morally, politically) black militants and their allies in the radical left. In a move condemned even by Jennifer Rubin, Rand Paul poses with Al Sharpton.
In a sad effort to boost my sagging stats (only twelve people visited UR last week - seven of them were commenters, and the other five were me), I have decided to begin attacking other bloggers. I thought I'd start with one of the wisest and most perceptive conservatives around, Lawrence Auster, and one of his excellent frequent correspondents, "Thucydides."
While still delirious in my slow recovery from (I kid you not) the Pig Flu, I seem to have decided to do a UR post for Patri Friedman's Secession Week superevent. This would explain the UR philosophy of secession - reaction in one state, as it were - and be written for a totally naive and unsuspecting audience, simply falling on them like a falcon on a duck.
Fear not, gentle reader. Perhaps you have been linked to this essay quite casually, purely on the basis of its catchy title, and you are expecting one of those little chatty NPRish pieces that explain quite patiently to you, as to a retarded child, that libertarians are evil and the New Deal was the best thing since sliced bread.
Moldbug and Auster have been engaged in a discussion here. The full discussion is well worth your time.
I believe the discussion perfectly illustrates Moldbug’s contention that conservatism is incapable of defeating progressivism.
[This essay was first published as a monograph in 1938, now republished in Ex-America, copyright Caxton Press.]There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road.
Five years ago this week, Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, and we’ve been debating it ever since. Like many Americans, I oppose Obamacare, and I think we ought to repeal it and replace it.
Eighty years ago, Americans were also told that their nation was facing a health care crisis. Then, however, the complaint was that medical costs were too low, and that health insurance was too accessible. But in that era, too, government stepped forward to solve the problem.
I argue here that licensure not recognizing licenses issued by other states. For only fails to protect consumers from incompe- mid-level clinicians, eliminating education re- tent physicians, but, by raising barriers to entry, quirements beyond an initial degree would allow makes health care more expensive and less acces- employers and consumers to select the appropri- sible.
A central problem of all the healthcare reform proposals circulating in Congress is that they focus almost entirely on finance—giving the uninsured the wherewithal to buy insurance and otherwise increasing insurance coverage to pay for healthcare—without addressing the cost of healthcare itself. But if healthcare itself were cheap, much of the debate on finance and insurance would be moot.
How does anyone overcome an addiction? One has to admit there is a problem. Following that admission, a major stumbling block for many recovering addicts is admitting the problem’s depth, enablers, and root causes.
The great Peter A. Taylor asks an interesting question over at Land’s place. Do you have a position statement somewhere on drug prohibition? I’m wondering which way the wind is blowing in these parts, and why.
Man’s desire to take mind-altering substances is as old as society itself—as are attempts to regulate their consumption. If intoxication in one form or another is inevitable, then so is customary or legal restraint upon that intoxication. But no society until our own has had to contend with the ready availability of so many different mind-altering drugs, combined with a citizenry jealous of its right to pursue its own pleasures in its own way.
We have written many times about the fact that the temperature data used in the alarmists’ global warming models are not original data as measured by thermometers.
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future.
I’m a gearhead, a true ‘hardware’ nerd, in the sense that my toys run on petrochemicals instead of electrons.
Biodiesel’s not bad stuff, but production doesn’t scale.
At the heart of the debate about climate change is a simple scientific question: can a doubling of the concentration of a normally harmless, indeed moderately beneficial, gas, from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.06% of the atmosphere over the course of a century change the global climate sufficiently to require drastic and painful political action today? In the end, that’s what this is all about. Most scientists close enough to the topic say: possibly. Some say: definitely. Some say: highly unlikely.
In the wake of Climategate, common sense deniers like to say that there is lots of other evidence for global warming, in addition to that which has been debunked by the East Anglia whistleblower.
A fascinating, hot-off-the-presses story emerges from the emails that were hacked yesterday from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre.
One of the hacked East Anglia emails that has gotten considerable play on the web indicates that several alarmist scientists deleted emails that were subject to a Freedom of Information Act request
I am not a historian or a statistician. Nonetheless I had been skimming Climate Audit for a couple of years and knew enough to write, in January 2009, "Michael Mann should be in prison.
February 9, 2015, 10:36 am
I have been getting inquiries from folks asking me what I think about stories like this one, where Paul Homewood has been looking at the manual adjustments
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress from the first seriously-worked out heliocentric mathematical model to the final overthrow of geocentrism.
My interest in Medieval science was substantially sparked by one book. Way back in 1991, when I was an impoverished and often starving post-graduate student at the University of Tasmania, I found a copy of Robert T.
The wars of the ancient Israelites follow a distinct pattern, especially when the Israelites lose. After a defeat, there are inevitably claims that God had withheld His favor on account of impiety among His people; the solution, obviously, being to redouble their religious devotions.
When the old monarchical regimes were still around, one of the main ways that emerging nation-states differentiated themselves was by displaying a strong opposition to national pluralism — which is to say creating states composed of many different ethnic or religious groups.
Peter Thiel says that successful new companies tend to turn into founder’s cults. It’s only natural. Building things is hard. Building institutions that build things is harder.
From the 1660s until the revolution, American colonists burned effigies of the pope yearly. Loyalist officials were accused of promoting “the Popish religion.” Most colonists would have regarded the public display of crosses suspiciously.
In reading through a new book, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family by Andrew Himes, grandson of John R. Rice, I came across a fascinating quote about the etymology of the English word “belief”.
The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support the civilization they formed. Indeed, organized Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.
"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution," said Jacques Monod, "is that everybody thinks he understands it."
A human being, looking at the natural world, sees a thousand times purpose.
Small children (age 4-6) who were exposed to a large number of children’s books and films had a significantly stronger ability to read the mental and emotional states of other people.
Lyrics from 3 of the most popular Christian songs of 2012:
I fall into Your arms, Right where I belong, Your everlasting arms. And where would I be Without You.
Punxsutawney Handle 2014 – the groundhog emerges from his hovel of hibernation only briefly to keep his promised appointment and make an appearance for the cameras, and then, upon being filled
Watch this.
I’ll transcribe most of it here for those who can’t watch the video; but do watch it when you can.
I think truth and reason have always been slaves to the passions (…) truth is not very much a part of how humans deal with things except at a very mundane level; we have to know what’s true when we cross the street; but the quest for truth is subject to persuasion and victory in argument.
Victor said...
First of all, I think a little terminological adjustment is in order. It seems obvious that what you are looking for is to separate security not from information, but from information authorities; i.
Conrad H. Roth said...
"And morality is at bottom an emotional reaction. It is not a tradition. It is an aspect of human biology."I tend to distinguish between morality (biological /instinctive) and ethics, that huge pseudo-philosophical castle built on top of morality.
Editor's Note: Originally published Aug. 24, 2011, in two parts, Stratfor's U.S. monograph has proven one of our most popular analyses. We feature it today in honor of the Fourth of July holiday. It is the 16th in a series of monographs on the geopolitics of countries influential in world affairs.
In middle school, we were assigned a pro-con debate about the American Revolution; I happened to be on the pro side, but as I read through the arguments, I became increasingly disturbed and eventually decided that the pro-Revolution arguments were weak or fallacious.
We have swallowed the red pill, which now makes its way to the stomach. The coating dissolves. The rotor spins up and the device begins to operate. Inside, the sodium-metal core remains intact.
It occurs to me that the previous chapter may have fallen a bit short of its surgical purpose.I mean, I did promise to relieve your skull of democracy's mendacious and infinitely self-serving history of itself.
This book can be found here or here.
Before I get into the book, which is strongly recommended, it's worth reading a little about the author. That's what Wikipedia says. For our purposes, it will helpful to know the following as reported in the introduction:
Following this example, the writer must tell that he was born in the South, of slave- holding parents, three years after the Abolition crusade began in 1831.
“The political history of America has been written for the most part by those who were unfriendly to the theory of a confederated republic, or who did not understand it. It has been written by devotees of the protective principle [i.
This is history – it's also very good writing. One of the hardest things to do, when writing history, is to give the reader of what it actually would have been like to live in distant times. Foote does this immediately.
The second book in the series was as good as the first, which is to say that it was incredibly good.
The writing is too good to stop to take too many notes while I’m reading, so these reviews are going to be disjointed.
I reviewed the first two book s in this series here and here. This post will be a review of the third book in the series. I am not going to be able to contain myself to the third volume in this review.
In São Paulo, drinking water is used to flush toilets, bathe and, until very recently, to wash cars and even hose down city pavements, as porters use jets of crystalline water to shift those last specks of grime.
“Yeah, I want to get out,” says Ricardo, 21. Then, relaxing, he takes the hand-grenade he has been toying with on his lap and places it amid the beer bottles on the table. In Vila Aliança in Bangu, western Rio, this is not particularly unusual behaviour.
Macroeconomist Scott Sumner brings up the perennial question of why Brazil is the Nation of the Future and always will be. Brazil has made a heartening amount of progress in this century, but so has the global competition, such as China and South Korea.
I had a fascinating conversation the other day on the way to LaGuardia from my hotel in Manhattan. The publisher sent a car for me, and my driver was a Haitian gentleman in his fifties.
The governments of Europe are confronting an epochal choice in the Mediterranean. Do they allow Europe to remain on course toward inundation by the African population explosion, inevitably turning Florence into Ferguson and Barcelona into Baltimore?
The conventional wisdom is that it’s unthinkable to stop the African tsunami.
A new study on world population trends came out last week from the University of Washington in Seattle. If you’re one of those people who worry about an overpopulated world, the news is bad: total human population, currently a tad over seven billion, will likely be eleven billion by the end of the century and still rising.
A reveler from the Imperatriz Leopoldinense samba school participates in the annual Carnival parade in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome.Following the unwelcome news that Brazil is canceling its popular Carnival, GRI takes a look at what the Brazilian people can expect for their country in 2016 and what changes BrasÃlia needs to make to increase investor confidence.
What Professor Romer is proposing is exactly colonialism. What's worse - he says that like it's a bad thing. In one breath, he steals the idea and slanders its real authors. Unbelievable.
In part 1, which should be read first, we looked at three anomalies in progressive political thought: a surprising definition of the word independence, an oscillatory ambivalence around the concept of nationalism, and a chiral gradient in sensitivity to human rights violations.
Tracing rulers academic connections yields an interesting picture. Thus Mugabe, like so many third world rulers, comes from the London School of Economics, but Harry Lee Kuan Yew was educated in Singapore.
The U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment Wednesday that charges 47 individuals, including FIFA officials, with bribery, racketeering, money laundering, fraud and other related crimes.
On the question of Islamic terrorism in the West, the narrative of the right has been that letting in large numbers of immigrants from Islamic countries is dangerous.
Of course I'm constantly dreaming up new ways to seduce innocent, unwary young progressives into the dark nets of UR. I thought this title might be just the thing.But I do mean it, though. Though I must note that by "America" here I mean the government of America, aka Washington, aka USG.
The title is inflammatory. And do we need that? In retrospect, "US foreign policy unplugged" might have been a better choice. But there is already a part 1, and it's too late now.
The words are ultra vires. If these effulgent benefactors of humanity at large had received an ordinary 19th-century legal education, they'd already know them.
After USG is finally razed to the ground, the entire Potomac watershed from Vienna to Gaithersburg restored to pristine pre-Columbian conditions, and North America governed by a couple of smart, hard-working guys and a secretary out of a cozy little office in St. Louis, smart high-school kids will still need to be taught about this monster and why we slew it.
The ongoing Ukrainian crisis has produced, especially in the last month, an explosion of odd bedfellows, stupendous displays of credulity and motivated thoughtlessness (I like this better than
I am from Brazil, and although I don't like FHC party either, I remember even during the crisis of his second government, I didn't hear people blaming him all the time, I think because at the time it was understood because it had to do with the Asian crisis...
A previously unnoticed detail in a background conversion of a video taken minutes after the Ferguson shooting could change the course of the investigation into Mike Brown’s death.
The Justice Department report on the shooting of Michael Brown forces Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart to face uncomfortable truths. (The Washington Post) The late evening of Aug. 9, 2014, I couldn’t sleep.
A good article AP article by Holbrook Mohr, David Lieb, and Phillip Lucas about something every cop knows: witnesses make up a lot of shit.Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back. Another said he was face-down on the ground when Officer Darren Wilson "finished him off.
So many reports. So little time. [My other two posts on the DOJ reports: 2 & 3.]
First the easy one: the DOJ report on Darren Wilson shooting Michael Brown. The press seems more interested in the other DOJ report, the one that reams the whole criminal justice system in Ferguson a new one (more on that, later).
Usually I focus on the Eastern District, because that is where I policed. But I was looking at stats for the Western District, where Freddie Gray died. Homicides in the Western went from a long-time record low (but still shamefully high) 21 in 2014 to a record high 66 in 2015.
I don't have much to say because I wasn't sitting on the grand jury. I have no new information. Apparently the good citizens of Staten Island have spoken. From the Daily News:
After four months of reviewing the evidence, a majority on the panel
concluded there was not enough there to charge Pantaleo with
manslaughter, reckless endangerment or criminally negligent homicide.
Debbie Egan-Chin/New York Daily News Force has consequences.
If you’re a cop, how do you cuff a 6-foot-tall, 350-pound man who doesn’t want to go to jail?
Most arrests happen without a problem.
Why I Write
I began blogging in 2008 to bring an insider's perspective to Baltimore's criminal justice system, to illuminate for lay people some of the reasons why "the system" so often fails to
"Mosby is getting her rear end kicked in court. Not by a brilliant defense strategy, but by the facts. Facts that she could have discovered had she conducted herself professionally and ethically." So says Page Croyder, who retired in 2008 after 21 years with the State's Attorney's Office.
These stops are confusing and the numbering system is never consistent, but they still matter. Here are some maps from WBAL:
The summary from WBAL:Prosecutors contend Porter is criminally negligent for Gray's death, because he didn't call a medic when Gray requested one, and he didn't buckle Gray into a seat belt at the police van's fourth stop [labeled 5, above] at Druid Hill Avenue and Dolphin Street, the stop where Porter testified he helped Gray from the van floor onto the bench.
You want to know why cops are always bitching? You want to know how cops can feel like they're the victims? You want to know what it's like to be on trial for violating a General Order? (In the NYPD this in known as the Patrol Guide.
