My next car will be a Tesla Model 3.
There are enough supercharger stations and such now — hell, where I work currently has charging stations at both locations.
Fewer moving parts, less maintenance, decent range and better tech? Sounds like a good thing to me.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an example of the poor excuse the US has for public intellectuals these days.
Rationality simply cannot be the basis for any political organization. Evidence? Whose evidence? On what basis? Applied to whom?
Especially in a world where something like half (or fewer) of studies are not reproducible, and no one (not even many scientists) are sure what constitutes evidence, what sort of society would “Rationalia” create?
Economists believe they have evidence for supporting all manner of preposterous and contradictory policies. There was incontrovertible “evidence” for the inferiority of blacks, the degenerate nature of Jews, the unsuitability of women for holding political office.
I wish NDGT would just shut the hell up. His thoughts are always a waste of space, particularly because he could be so much better.
I usually read a book at my desk at lunch at work, on my screen. The other day one of the interns with whom I routinely work came by to ask me a question and noticed I was reading something.
So she as people do asked me what I was reading.
I said, “Cognitive Neuroscience of Language by David Kemmerer.”
She said, “Is that like for a class or something?”
Me: “No. No class.”
Intern: “Oh, did you major in that? Like in college?”
Me: “No, just thought the book looked interesting and it’s related to something I’ve been thinking about.”
Intern: “But why are you reading it?”
Me: “When I was a kid, I used to invent my own languages and such. Now I’m researching how language works at the neural level the best we know, anyway, to see if there are more pragmatic ways of designing languages without something so absurd as Lojban but with some optimization and greater specifiability but without related reductions in connotative expressiveness necessarily built in.”
Intern: “Ok, I don’t think I understood any of that but sounds, uh, interesting? Anyway, about that system….”
What’s wrong with some light lunch reading? 😉 Anyway, the book I mentioned is rather good. I’d say you need some significant grounding in functional and theoretical linguistics and neuroscience (or be a quick learner) before you tackle this book, though.
It is not a book aimed at undergrads. Fortunately, I am not an undergrad so with looking up a few words here and there it’s fine and a good read.
This has always puzzled me — how eager pseudo-liberals are to accept the narratives of economists when it is consonant with their interest of supposedly bettering society. The alignment of neoclassical economics and modern political liberalism on the economic effects (or not) of immigrants is one of those puzzling areas.
Ironically, even though labor is described as a commodity sold in the “labor market,” conventional (neoclassical) economists insist that supply and demand play no role whatsoever in these markets! So, for example, increasing the supply of workers by, say, massive amounts immigrant labor is said to have no effect whatsoever on domestic wages. Neither does the addition of millions of additional workers via globalization. Rather, according to economists, in this “market” everyone simply gets what they produce, no more and no less!
It’s an excellent bit of propagandizing aimed at those who want to (or at least believe they want to) help people that masterfully manages to align their sense of social justice with the desires and imperatives of capital.
I’m generally pro-immigration, by the way — just not pro-stupid immigration. That is, “open borders” is completely preposterous an idea for any society. It is just some odd fetishized liberal ideological fantasy that could never work anywhere without tearing the host society apart.
That said, the US is at no real risk from immigration. We mostly admit people with cultures and views much like our own. We are still pretty decent at integration (though that is changing, and not due to racism etc but due to capitalism and all the pseudo-liberals’ neolib heroes, mostly).
Europe, however, in admitting millions of North Africans and Muslims is going to experience huge and society-rending problems in the next 20-40 years. That is baked in, alas.
I wish I just had the power to believe propaganda like what I mentioned above about the magical always-positive effects of immigration, though, without pondering it at all. It would make life so much easier, really.
The first ten on today’s playlist:
Most attackers have no training and are looking for easy victims, not for anyone who fights back. Resist effectively and you will prevail, even if you are smaller.
At that point, Herron had already gone public with the story of her harrowing run, telling ABC News that she used her self-defense training to defeat the attacker by scratching his face, “hitting the side of his head,” and ultimately locking him inside with a carabiner until police arrived.
If you are fighting someone who is both well-trained and determined to harm you in specific, you are probably doomed no matter how large or well-trained you are. But that is maybe 0.01% or fewer of attacks. Most are just opportunistic ambushes like the one Herron experienced.
You’d be just amazed how quickly someone lets you go when you poke both thumbs in their eyeballs as hard as you can.
It’s not advertised anywhere but I know this from Krav Maga classes: the best thing they teach you is to get over your natural aversion to truly fucking someone up by using tactics like I mentioned above. The good ones aren’t (mostly) going to teach you crazy kung fu garbage that is actually worthless in a real fight, but rather the above.
That is where their value lies.
“Black Magic Woman” by Santana and “Witchy Woman” by The Eagles have to be two of the worst songs ever written or performed.
Another thing I am 99.99% sure scientists are incorrect about is on the insistence that Fox News et al. has not had any effect on people’s attitudes and political views.
Literally everyone I’ve ever talked to has had an older (usually) parent or relative or friend who was relatively normal during the 1980s and 1990s, found Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, and then went completely paranoiac, deranged, and delusional. Just like this person.
The other day, I was talking to someone at work about how he never discussed politics with his parents anymore because after they started watching Fox News in the late 1990s they went politically nutso.
My grandfather (who was always a Republican, but a fairly liberal Republican) did the same thing.
It’s harder to find people who haven’t experienced someone who has undergone this lunacy transition than the opposite.
Why I don’t trust experts, part million.
It would’ve been nice if the Democrats had subjected the also-terrible ACA to the same scrutiny that the Republican health care “plan” is receiving.
Yes, yes, the AHCA is worse. Far worse. But pretending as Dems now seem to that the ACA was some magical achievement that solved all our problems is very disingenuous and counter to reality.
Both are terrible, giveaways and handouts to the already rich, just the Republican plan is actively designed to be malicious and not to help people, while if Obama’s ACA incidentally helped anyone, that was ok, as long as the health insurance industry was protected and the right pockets got greased.
The guitar solo in that song….fuck…why would you ever cut away from her hands? I’m no guitarist but I know that solo is impossible for normal human beings.
That might be the best rock guitar solo I’ve ever heard.
One of the young (20?) interns at work was completely surprised that I know who Sylvan Esso is, and that I listen to a lot of EDM and electro-pop, including some that she’d never heard of.
Most people die before they get old. I’d prefer the opposite.
On a related note, there’s a group of older people in my office who nearly every day talk about how great the Rolling Stones or Yes! or some bands from the 1980s were and how all music is terrible now — and if I have to listen to that litany of despair and surrender again, I think I will blast out some Rameses B from my computer.
I never thought I’d live in a world where people gleefully subject themselves to surveillance and control technologies like Facebook and this garbage.
Sure, I will put Alexa in my home — a device that literally listens to all my conversations and sends them to who knows where.
That sounds like a great idea. Sign me up. Really avoids inconveniencing the NSA, FBI, etc. Instead of bothering to bug my domicile, I pay all the costs. It’s laissez-faire snooping. Ah, the glories of market-based solutions.
If you’d told me Trump would be president when I was a kid — ok, sounds weird, but maybe.
If you’d told me that people would willingly subject themselves to Facebook’s program of surveillance and manipulation, and would voluntarily pay to place bugging devices in their homes and would also carry tracking devices in their pockets at all times — I would’ve thought you to be absolutely raving mad and would’ve laughed at you.
But here we are.
I helped close a $1.2 million sale at work in the past few days. Doing technical sales isn’t really something I want to pursue as a vocation, but turns out I am pretty decent at it.
Those sales pay my salary, so interesting to see it and do it from the front lines.
We’ve been having a problem lately at work with very expensive hardware arriving non-functional. This hardware runs $50,000 or $60,000 each — not cheap. It’s not clear if it’s the shipping company or the hardware reseller causing the problems — or perhaps both.
Lately, the reseller has been giving the hardware the “white glove” treatment (they claim) as they handle it.
Even with this, another $60,000 box arrived in a non-working state today.
On an internal call discussing it, someone said that damage occurred even with the vendor’s white glove treatment.
And I said, “Yeah, but it was a boxing glove.”
No one laughed! And it was funny! It was a good quip!
So now I recount it here so at least someone can laugh, somewhere.
I’m curious why Marketwatch used Stan Lee for the illustration of this story.
Wonder if they even knew it was Stan Lee? Because that’s definitely not an economist — no, it’s someone with actual talents and skills to contribute to the world.