Saturday, November 8. 2014
From the report:
Each year, 4.3 million Americans turn 18, and face competition for jobs from roughly 10 million unemployed Americans, 11 million illegal immigrants, plus the annual inflow of 1.1 million new legal immigrants and 70,000 guest workers.
Earlier this year, my son came home from school and asked me how hard it was to brew beer. This was not a surprising question from a boy who is 17. I still asked him why he wanted to know. His response was related to school (shocking). He said his Chemistry teacher brewed beer. I thought for a moment, and pointed out that cooking was a form of chemistry, so brewing seemed a natural extension.
At that point I mentioned a brew kit my brother had purchased for my birthday many years ago. It languished in an apartment closet until we moved to our house, and I never utilized it It was gone, but I asked would he be interested in learning to brew?
The answer was robustly affirmative, and we began to look into the purchase of a brew kit.
If you have the desire, you can build your own brew kit for about $35. Two 6 gallon Home Depot buckets, a siphon, an airlock, some washers and a small plastic spigot and you're all set to build the kit on your own. The spigot, washers and airlock can all be purchased online. You'll need lids for the Home Depot buckets. You'll need drills to attach the spigot and the airlock. It will take a little time and effort, but would save a little cash. The alternative is to spend about $100, buy the kit ready made along with all the ingredients for your first batch of brew. I opted for the expensive, easier, route.
You'll also want to read up on brewing first, too.
Continue reading "Oktober Brew for November - reposted"
Not Asian-Americans, but Asians from Asia:
They’re far outpacing Americans, particularly on the quantitative section of the test. Many B-school admissions officers say that a score on the quantitative section is the best predictor of success in an MBA program.
One result of these disparities is that Americans’ percentile rankings have dropped, even though their raw scores have remained constant in recent years. With Asia-Pacific students applying to and attending American business schools in large numbers, some schools complained to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT. As the WSJ put it, schools “don’t want to become factories for high-scoring test-takers from abroad.”
22 habits of unhappy people (h/t Insty)
Forgiving God?
Why There Is No Wage Growth: One In Five Jobs Added Was A Waiter Or A Bartender
The Pros and Cons of Stock Diversification
The Corporate Neighborhood
RC church still stuck on divorce.
Cities: Traditional Development Is a Municipal Gold Mine
People like human scale and they do not like retail deserts
The problem is that rapists don’t care that it’s wrong. Rapists aren’t ignorant; they’re bad. They’re evil. They’re rapists.
Gallup: Most Americans trust guns in the home
Sen. Tim Scott Calls for a 'Revolution': School Choice
Harsh Winter Outlook Made a Bit More Dire by Siberia Snow
Tech firms hire a lot of Asians, and the NBA hires a lot of blacks. What’s the big deal?
Maine: Stone Brain Rises - The press mocks him, political elites hate him, but the people
of Maine like Paul LePage even more than they did four years ago.
Hatch: No, the Senate GOP should not “unilaterally disarm” after Reid’s abuses
Outrageous 'John Doe' prosecution of Scott Walker supporters in Wisconsin ends
It's called lawfare, and it is disgusting
Dems need some new ideas with new faces:
Democrats see themselves as the party of the future. But their policies are antique. The federal minimum wage dates to 1938, equal pay for women to 1963, access to contraceptives to 1965. Raising these issues now is campaign gimmickry, not serious policymaking.
I can’t live in Tijuana Norte.
Women still fighting the abortion wars. It's over, and has been for a long time.
Did The "War on Women" Campaign Actually Kinda Work?
Works on low-info voters
Election Advice To Dems That They Will Never Ever Take
Obama to send 1,500 more troops to Iraq as campaign expand
Why is the US involved in these ancient tribal disputes? There is no winning.
Hamas attacks Fatah with bombs
Top US general: Israel protected civilian lives in Gaza
Palestinians' "Car Intifada" and Obama's Peace Process
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Shelley (1792-1822) led one heck of a rebellious life - a classic poet's life full of tragedy,
unconformity, love, and pain.
Friday, November 7. 2014
A conversation with F. Roger Devlin. One quote:
The liberal system will collapse of its own weight: debt, over-centralization, anti-natalism, all the perverse incentives it creates. As our old sources of national strength quietly dry up, the regime is distracted with exotic trivia like gay marriage and the search for new forms of discrimination to combat. Competition from China alone is going to put an end to this ideological navel-gazing in the not-too-distant future. We must position ourselves to present the public with a credible alternative when the crisis hits. This is my focus, not the shadow-boxing of Republicans vs. Democrats.
Thursday, November 6. 2014
People voted "for an agenda very different from what they want and need."
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Quite different, perhaps, from what his poor Vermonters "need and want" which seems mostly to be free stuff, no jobs, single mothers on welfare, and plentiful meth and heroin. Thank God for our moral and intellectual superiors. We would be lost without them, just like the Pilgrims and the American pioneers were.
How to Lie With Statistics was the first book I was required to read when I was studying for my Master's in Economics. The book wasn't designed to show us how to lie, but to make a point. It's easy to lie with statistics. 100% of the time. 60% of the time, lying works all the time. It's all about positioning. Al Franken cut his teeth by showing how Republicans lied using tricky graphing techniques, then started using his own special brand of lying to continue to hoodwink his constituents.
The book was really designed to get students to think about context. When I present data, I never present just data, I present context. It's not enough to say that Man-Made Global Warming correlates with the reduction in pirate activity. We all know correlation is not causation, the context of why the lack of piracy is causing Global Warming is critical.
I recently posted about why interest rates won't rise. Part of that discussion continued on in the comments section, regarding inflation and savings. Normally, interest rates are slightly higher than inflation (positive real interest rates), and typically fall below the rate of inflation when the economy is in a rut (negative real interest rates, when people spend more than they save, driving up inflation but eventually causing interest rates to rise in order to attract savings). Yet we have not seen a general rise in inflation or interest rates in the last few years. There are many reasons for this, and those reasons are helping to keep real interest rates negative and low. If we knew the truth, we'd probably see more consumers behave differently, and it's likely the Fed couldn't continue engaging its policy of printing more money. But hiding inflation is exceedingly easy to do. Especially if you utilize hedonic adjustments, which is one of many methods used to delude the populace.
Hedonic adjustments can be justifiable. For example, if a regular banana costs $1, but a banana that keeps you full all day and meets your minimum daily health needs is only $5, it would appear the 'cost' of a banana is 400% higher than it should be, if you want to live. However, if it takes 10 regular bananas to match what you can get from 1 $5 banana, then you've actually realized a 50% decrease in price! Hedonics DO make sense,when in the realm of productivity gains for the consumer.
However, as the linked article from Zero Hedge points out, you can use 'enjoyment quality' to make a 400% increase actually appear to be a 7.1% decrease. You get no real additional value out of a 42 inch plasma TV that you didn't get from a 27 inch LCD. But the government can quantify and justify that the price you paid was actually LESS for the big screen plasma, even if it wasn't. Voila! You've saved money by spending more! Looking at the list of areas where hedonic adjustments are applied show a variety of useless of price decreases, simply so the government can imply regularly that you are spending less than you really are. It helps our politicians maintain "the money illusion." This benefits them, allowing them to engage Keynes' famous quote, “Lenin (the founder of the former communist Soviet Union) was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose”.
So yes, technically our inflation rate has been far higher than you realize, and the Fed has been making your savings worth less and less each year. No, it probably won't end well, so enjoy it while you can, and remember to try and find the contextual support for any government data. There usually isn't any.
At Neoneo:
What Democrats said to Republicans when Democrats were in charge of Congress: We don’t have to listen to you any more.
What Democrats will say to Republicans now that Democrats are no longer in charge of Congress: Bipartisanship forever!
Bipartisanship to get what "jobs done"? Oh, it's about "progress." Althouse:
I'm uneasy at the word "progress." It assumes the existence of a road and knowledge of where it leads. I see no reason to believe in President Obama's idea of "progress." America rejected it yesterday.
When progress means more Federal money, power, control, and force, it's not progress: it's regression towards feudalism. I have some ideas about "jobs to be done" on the federal level which would mean progress to me:
Fix tort law, install a universal flat tax with no deductions and maybe a negative tax for the very poor and hopeless and helpless (or should that be left to the states?), secure the US border, deport illegals and be more welcoming of valuable legals, revise Obamacare to voluntary with a meaningful mix of options, eliminate the useless Federal Dept of Education, eliminate Death Taxes, make unionizing federal employees illegal, get rid of the failed war on drugs, eliminate the Dept of Homeland Security, shrink the EPA back to its original purpose, eliminate all farm subsidies including the ethanol scam and the sugar scam, eliminate all federal subsidies for flood insurance, eliminate the Dept of Commerce (except for NOAA), eliminate the ATF, tighten oversight for Disability, quit funding the UN, put a tight leash on the NSA, ban all government drones domestically along with banning the militarization of police, put NASA back in space - or privatize it, find a way to felonize crony capitalism, eliminate the Dept of HUD, restructure Social Security, get our military out of Europe and Japan and let them fend for themselves, get the federal government out of the mortgage market entirely, eliminate corporate taxes and make the US a corporate tax haven for the world (economic effects would be amazing), shut down the Fed and let markets work freely for better or worse without central efforts at control...and that's just for starters.
Let's get all those jobs done in a nice bipartisan way, ok? If there was ever a time to reach fearlessly, it's now. It might be a narrow window for real progress.
Scott Ott: No, Sen. Reid, Americans Don’t Want Washington to ‘Work Together’, ‘Get Things Done’?
What progress is on your wish list, my fellow Americans?
Wednesday, November 5. 2014
It's a difficult subject to study because people are not likely to reveal their more taboo fantasies. Furthermore, in my field we tend to believe that most of our fantasies (sexual and otherwise) are kept safely beneath our own awareness.
As a Psychiatrist, I can tell you that quite normal people commonly contain all sorts of aberrant and "abnormal" fantasies which they would never act on or tell even their spouses about.
For what it's worth, Sexual fantasies: Are you normal?
Addendum, There Are Very Few 'Uncommon' Sexual Fantasies:
The study found that one of the most common sexual fantasies, after the five “typical” ones, is submission, with approximately 65 percent of women and 53 percent of men fantasizing about being submissive. More men than women fantasized about dominating their partners. Still, there remains a distinction between fantasy and reality. Of the women who fantasized about being dominated, half said that they wouldn’t want to actually be dominated in real life. Reading 50 Shades of Grey, for example, could be an outlet to imagine these fantasies without acting on them.
We were fortunate not to have sustained any property damage to our family's summer place in the Sierras.
Here's a story about September's King Fire: 1600 YARDS TO FREEDOM
Like some of you, I've been reading about the election from all corners of the web: Left, Conservative, MSM, etc.
One take-home I get from it all is that the Dem core, on which they rely for votes and/or money, consists of single women, billionaires and multi-millionaires, "old money", crony capitalists, Wall St. millionaires, unionistas, Hollywood and its allies and sycophants, black Americans, government-dependent Americans, and urban white Liberals (including nice gentry Liberals, and academics, students, and college townspeople).
That's not news, but I just find it interesting. I can't really relate to any of those bloc-voting components.
The other take-home I get is that those people have an incomprehensible hatred and contempt for ordinary hard-working and entrepreneurial people like me. Why? I do not hate them, and it is unlikely that they would hate me if they met me. I happily work 14-hour days to build our business and to employ and supervise the new people we need.
Our major challenges to continuing growth are competition (good) and government (bad).
Tuesday, November 4. 2014
We're told regularly that, at some point, Quantitative Easing will end and interest rates will rise. Zero Hedge provides a window as to why this is unlikely to occur in any meaningful way.
It's not uncommon to hear Fed officials and politicians deny that we are monetizing debt. Technically, we are not. We issue debt, the debt gets purchased, and the Fed (which is essentially a private institution, though it's really a quasi-governmental institution) buys it back. Normally government debt is held by the public, which is why economic analysis of the old "crowding out" problem was so prevalent.
By keeping interest rates low, and repurchasing debt, the appearance of private ownership is maintained, but it is a roundabout method of monetizing debt. Allowing rates to rise to any meaningful degree will have severe negative impacts, in the short term. Since we are in a politically driven economy, this cannot be allowed to occur, so interest rates must remain artificially low.
Of course, the long term ramifications of monetizing debt are inflation (followed by deflation) and severe misallocation of economic resources. In other words, bankruptcies, unemployment and a financial morass. Not to mention the end of an expectation of comfortable retirement (how can you retire on a fixed income if interest rates are below 1%?).
Don't expect interest rates to move up any time soon, and don't expect any reporting of realistic inflation. Just vote for the guy/gal who will shovel the most tax money toward you.
Except in the small ways (eg the color of a moth's wings, or different kinds of finches), I am a skeptic about evolution, possibly because I do not really understand the theories behind the theories. I do get the part about development of related species, but I do not get the adaptive advantage of an elephant over a bacterium or an algae colony. I am told we live in the Age of Bacteria, a world in which bacteria are the largest (by volume) and most populous organisms, and thus the most successful and best-adapted to current times (and for multi-cellular critters, the bugs win). Thus it is difficult for me to view humanity as the new, improved crown of creation any more than elephants.
No, I am not talking about intelligent design and all that. Also, I understand that evolutionary theories (of which there are several) say nothing about "progress," just adaptation to current conditions. It's just that I find the science and the logic of it all puzzling.
So did the fine essayist Stephen Jay Gould. I enjoyed this, but had to read it twice: Challenges to Neo- Darwinism and Their Meaning for a Revised View of Human Consciousness
 About a book: Your God is Too Small
From Salon, The sad, twisted truth about conservative Christianity’s effect on the mind - "Some religious beliefs may alter brain function, making us more prone to anxiety and depression"
Good grief
22 Vintage Adverts That Would Be Banned Today (h/t SDA)
What A 1951 Photo Tells Us About Modern Women’s Loss Of Power
It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and one you probably never heard about
Harvard University To Teach Students How To Have Anal Sex… Yes, Really…
I thought that was taught in grade school nowadays
Shocking Report: Colleges Want more Government Money
What It’s Like To Face The LGBT Inquisition - Dare to question the new moral majority, and you will face an LGBT Inquisition. A bisexual son of lesbian parents speaks up.
Broadcast networks cover Kochs 22 times more than election’s top funder Steyer
Why If It Damages America, It's Good for Democrats
A new young batch of Conservative women
House Republicans could see their first black, gay members in years
Dear Chairwoman Yellen,
This is an open letter urging you to stop money printing immediately. It has created worse economic inequality and tremendously hindered the economic recovery from the longest recession in history...
Rand Paul courts the black vote
I like Rand. For political figurehead purposes, it's too bad he's a little dude who looks like Harpo
From Race and Reaction
We who have never been racist, and who will still not be racist, are beginning to wonder why we shouldn’t adapt to this new reality and accept the fact that perhaps we are not all alike in our desire for peace, that we do not all want the same things, and that what is wanted from us is our surrender and conviction for crimes we have not committed. What is being lost is the heretofore beneficial presumption that we are more alike than we are different.
That's a wow. I have never seen any racial discrimination in my personal life, or any racial tension either so I suspect politicians and media gin it up to keep an old narrative looking alive.
Obama Calls Republicans ‘Un-American’ In Late Election Appeal to Black Voters
Does the president really want black people to hate me? That is sick.
Ben Stein: Obama ‘Is The Most Racist President There Has Ever Been’
Disparate Impact Rebuked By Federal Judge – Court Rebukes The Next AG Nominee, Tom Perez and The Social Engineering Construct He’s Pushing…
Reflections on the Closing of the Russian Mind
Italy’s in terminal decline, and no one has the guts to stop it - Everything that’s wrong with France is worse here
Great place to visit, though - wonderful in every way
Taliban trying to destabilize region beyond Afghanistan
Below via WUWT:
UN Climate Panel: Phase Out Fossil Fuels ‘Almost Entirely’ by 2100
They are insane. Most people pray for some global warming, but it never arrives.
Leading Climate Scientist Bemoans Chicken Little Green Advocacy
Monday, November 3. 2014
Do not vote unless you understand the issues at hand. Too many low-info voters in the USA who should stay home.
I will vote, although I know my small vote makes no difference. I enjoy seeing my neighbors at the polls at 6 am, with my Dunkin in one hand and my photo ID in the other.
Related, the NYT wants to suppress your vote. In fact, they do not want a vote available at all.
Related, Don't 'Vote for the Candidate'
"Voting for the candidate" is plain ignorant
Related: Surveys on playing the race card at election time
Related, Political ignorance around the world
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Here.