Politics is, admittedly, a weak point [in America]

The Economist, from Declinism Resurgent [economist.com]]

Understatement of the century… It’s not a weak point, it’s fucking broken.

[T]he testicles are exquisitely sensitive to touch and there is a huge release of adrenalin when there is excessive force applied to these organs. … A heart attack could certainly result from severe testicular pain from squeezing.

Dr. Irwin Goldstein, quoted in Can You Die If Someone Squeezes Your Testicles Hard Enough? [gizmodo.com] by Jesus Diaz

“As Lin Yutang, the famous Chinese writer and inventor said: “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” That must be it.”

Kenneth Jeyaretnam in Disneyland With the Death Penalty, Revisited [wired.com]

That might be the most insightful thing about Singaporeans I’ve ever read… You could never find another place on Earth that has the variety of food in Singapore. Food is one of the things that make it hard to take a Singaporean out of Singapore.

Someone, commenting on this article in another forum said:

“I think we have to stop saying shit about the place you live. If you dont like it, move :)”

Setting aside the fact that moving is often not an option, I think this person missed the point of the article, expressed near the end:

“Later this evening I’m going out to eat in Little India’s Serangoon Road at the Banana Leaf Apolo Restaurant. There one dines deliciously off a banana leaf rather than a plate. It’s still one of my favorite places to eat. I used to go with my parents as a boy and my father used to take my son out there for breakfast. No doubt my son will take his son.”

Despite the fact the the author’s father was sued into destitution by members of the ruling party for defamation, the author still calls Singapore home. And regardless; if one is going to complain about a place, it is in the end only where you do, or have lived, that you should be complaining about. I think it is altogether right to complain about is where you live… No place is perfect and one can always desire change in this things you don’t agree with. It might be a product of leisure time but it is what it is. We all want things to be better. Every time we get what we want we move the goal post. We always strive for a better place in the world. Singapore is a good place on balance but that does not mean people who live here should just accept things as is forever.

“The money we spend on health care is money we don’t spend educating our children, or investing in infrastructure, scientific research and defense spending. So if what this means is we ultimately have overmedicalized, poorly educated Americans competing with China, that’s not a very good investment.”

Uwe Reinhardt, quoted in Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

“Our findings suggest that if the pursuit of self-interest goes unchecked, it may result in a vicious cycle: self-interest leads people to behave unethically, which raises their status, which leads to more unethical behavior and inequality.”

Paul Piff, quoted from Shame on the Rich [sciencemag.org] about research into ‘whether dishonesty varies with social class’.

For my own experience, I can state that, without doubt, people in Singapore who drive expensive cars (one of the things studied in the research), drive like they own the road. I remember this was the case in the US too, but in Singapore when we talk about expensive cars we are talking about 50% of the cars on the road (BMW, ‘Benz, or more expensive!). That many ass hole drivers makes the traffic in the tiny island of 5 million, with very good infrastructure, as bad as the traffic in New York City with it’s much larger population!

The Guardian has a great article [guardian.co.uk] about the mathematical basis (or lack thereof) of the derivatives market explosion which lead to the financial meltdown when the sub-prime mortgage market collapsed.

As with most things that eventually come crashing down spectacularly we should have seen it coming… between the hubris:

“[the equation] allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.”

and the eye watering numbers:

“[the equation] underpinned massive economic growth. By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world’s manufacturing industries over the last century.”

All that because of the abuse of mathematics by people who don’t understand math. When people who do understand (scientists) math abuse it you end up with nuclear WMDs. When people who don’t understand it (traders) abuse it you end up with financial WMDs.

To quote:

“market traders copy other market traders. Virtually every financial crisis in the last century has been pushed over the edge by the herd instinct. It makes everything go belly-up at the same time. If engineers took that attitude, and one bridge in the world fell down, so would all the others.”

My favorite quote in the article has nothing to do with finance or math:

“In ancient times, all known swans were white and “black swan” was widely used in the same way we now refer to a flying pig. But in 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh found masses of black swans on what became known as the Swan River in Australia. So the phrase now refers to an assumption that appears to be grounded in fact, but might at any moment turn out to be wildly mistaken.”

..a new study argues that for a democracy to function at all, you need lots of ignorant people blindly siding with the majority.

…

There needs to be just enough people who know anything about the issues to act as leaders for everyone else, but the majority disintegrates if there are too many viewpoints pulling in different directions.

…

[The researchers] looked at golden shiners, a species that is naturally attracted to the color yellow. The researchers took a bunch of these fish and trained most of them to act against instinct and swim towards a blue target, while the rest were trained to follow their natural preference and go for a yellow target.

When the researchers placed just these two groups together, the smaller group of yellow-seeking fish was able to dominate the blue-seeking fish, making them all swim to the yellow target 80% of the time. This is because their natural instinct gave them a stronger desire go after the yellow target than their counterparts. But then, when fish with no prior conditioning were added to the mix, the influence of the yellow-seeking fish quickly dropped away, and the initial, blue-seeking majority regained control.

From Democracy needs ignorant people, says science [io9.com]

The article is a summary of a paper in Science [sciencemag.org]… now go read the article about how ignorant fish are required for an enlightened fish democracy to work. Before I plagiarise the whole damn article.

“free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.”

Maciej, from Don’t be a Free User [pinborad.in] blog post at Pinboard.

Neurosis can be the sign of a decent guess

Tom Murphy, from Wind Fights Solar; Triangle Wins [physics.ucsd.edu] a post on his blog; Do The Math

Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period. These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $160 billion over the three years, included: Pepco Holdings (–57.6% tax rate), General Electric (–45.3%), DuPont (–3.4%), Verizon (–2.9%), Boeing (–1.8%), Wells Fargo (–1.4%) and Honeywell (–0.7%).

DuPont and Monsanto both produce chemicals. But over the 2008-10 period, Monsanto paid 22 percent of its profits in U.S. corporate income taxes, while DuPont actually paid a negative tax rate of –3.4 percent.

Department store chain Macy’s paid a three-year rate of 12.1 percent, while competing chain Nordstrom’s paid 37.1 percent.

In computer technology, Hewlett-Packard paid 3.7 of its three-year U.S. profits in federal income taxes, while Texas Instruments paid 33.5 percent.

FedEx paid 0.9 percent over three years, while its competitor United Parcel Service paid 24.1 percent.

Robert S. McIntyre, Matthew Gardner, Rebecca J. Wilkins and Richard Phillips. Taken from Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010

Stop having a tax or find some way of making companies pay it.