We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
These guys will play you for money. Many of them prefer speed chess - 5-minute or even one-minute games. It's a wonderful thing, excellent mental exercise. I hear that these guys are savvy players.
There are a few checkers guys too, but isn't checkers too much like tic-tac-toe? If you start, you win or draw unless you make an error.
A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.
"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand
"He loves nature, in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
"He has Van Gogh's ear for Music." - Billy Wilder
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
We will plant Dad's ashes next to Mom's at the Congo church cemetery in the Massachusetts Berkshires in a week or two. I have some ancestors buried there, but the older ones were buried on the farm's own adjacent cemetery because the church and its burial ground were not built until 1817. I have always appreciated the olde epitaph:
Behold my friends as you pass by As you are now, so once was I As I am now, soon you shall be Give thyself to God and follow me.
Cash registers were invented to prevent stealing by store clerks. James Ritty invented it in 1884. They were not mainly adding machines, but registers of sales so the owner could keep track of what was going on. In those days, any clerk could add quickly anyway. Paper receipts were a later improvement.
They were complex mechanical machines (still are, but not mechanical). The old National Cash Register Co. (NCR) is still in business. IBM's Tom Watson started out there.
I spent a few minutes trying to find out how they were designed, but gave up. The Wiki entry is quite lame. Disappointing.
The days of the ka-ching are long gone. The purpose of the ka-ching noise was to let the owner or manager know that a sale had taken place.
We learned an excellent lesson from from clearing out my parents' house.
Attic, basement, storage rooms. We have felt inspired in a strange way by it all, and have begun to work on clearing out our own spaces. Lots of our stuff we have not used in years seems quite desirable and useful to our Mexican immigrant helpers.
The rest of it goes to the dumpster. "Might want it someday" means "never."
Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to have high academic aspirations. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree (13 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls). By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. During the same period, the gap between girls and boys earning mostly A’s nearly doubled—from three to five percentage points.
This gap in education engagement has dire economic consequences for boys.
As I have said before, all boys have some ADD. The best male students have some OCD to compensate.
Took the BD daughter with her special friend to birthday brunch near her new place in Hell's Kitchen. We brought her cookies from Verona, and she brought us condiments from Tokyo from which she had just returned.
It's not hell anymore. Hopping neighborhood. We went to 44X10 (corner of 10th Ave. and W. 44th). Did Alicia Keys really grow up there?
The wait staff wore t-shirts saying "Heaven in Hell." Rule of thumb: Always make reservations.
I can remember when this area was Irish and black gangland, creepy. When you see this many gay fellows, you know it is gentrifying. I had scrambled eggs, grits, and sausages. The others had better stuff: Eggs Benedict with Crab Cakes, etc.
Gears are ubiquitous in the man-made world, found in items ranging from wristwatches to car engines, but it seems that nature invented them first.
A species of plant-hopping insect, Issus coleoptratus, is the first living creature known to possess functional gears, a new study finds. The two interlocking gears on the insect's hind legs help synchronize the legs when the animal jumps.
Burrows and a colleague captured the gears' motion using high-speed video. As the young bug prepares to leap, it meshes the gear teeth of one leg with those of the other, like cocking a gun. Then, the insect releases its legs in one smooth, explosive motion.
Learn somethin' new every day.
Bite me, Darwinists!
Of course, not everyone might agree. My own post on the 'How we got here' question is here.
The first of these is a location story, the second is the ol' online-vs-retail story. Both make the same point while coming at it from different angles.
About five years ago I needed a tire for my Firebird. The guy who owned it before me apparently wasn't a very good parallel parker and the right-front was all chewed up.
Being on a Firebird, it was a pretty hefty piece of meat, so I knew it was going to be a little pricey.
I first called a Cuban buddy of mine up in Miami and asked him if he had any buds in the biz, which he did. I gave him the size, he did some inquiring, and his buddy's best price was $135. Given that the local Goodyear place wanted $168, that sounded like a winner.
But then I figured I should probably call the local tire shops and ask them if they had any 'specials' going on. You never can tell. I called two of them.
"Hi, got any specials going on?"
"Nope."
"Okay, thanks, bye."
Then I noticed some tiny place called something like "Bill's Tires". This time I didn't ask about any specials, just explained what I needed. Ol' Bill fumbled around in the catalog for a minute.
$89.
The shop was a block away.
Bought the tire, it looked just the others, worked perfectly.
When it all began, I would have bet you that $89 that (1) the most expensive quote I'd get would be here in our exclusive little tropical island paradise hideaway, and (2) my buddy's buddy, who owned a tire shop up in Cubantown, would have the cheapest.
$89 instead of $135. One block away.
It pays to shop around.
And, given what we've seen in past online-vs-retail stories, this next one is a little bizarre.
My attention was drawn to this article recently, though it is several years old. An intriguing method of balancing desires and scarce resources. I am reminded of my youth and music, playing a record I enjoyed over and over again until, at some point, I just didn't want to listen to that great song or album anymore.
I doubt I would have employed Ayn Rand's rationale if asked to choose my toys when I was young. Delayed gratification isn't something most of us understand until later in life. Today, however, I take a very different view about how I employ things I enjoy. I realize my enjoyment can wear thin quickly, so I tend to not 'overplay the record'.
Fifty years ago, psychologists played a cunning trick on a bunch of American four-year-olds. They were given a marshmallow and told that if they waited for 20 minutes before eating it, they could have another one. Most cracked within seconds, but about one in three held out and – with suitably smug expressions, no doubt – got two sickly confections when the experimenter came back into the room. Their careers have been tracked to the present day, and the goody two-shoes among them (I am sure I would have scoffed the sweet at once) seemed to be healthier, to do better at school, and to have more controlled and perhaps happier lives than those who gave in.
Austrian Economics is deeply concerned with 'time-preference' and its impact on the market, because choosing between immediate and delayed pleasures are part of what drive the market. This explains, to some degree, the general opposition to Keynesian stimuli.
That conclusion should be obvious. Roughly 48 percent of our college graduates are in jobs that the require less than a four-year degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the future looks worse: growth in the number of graduates in this decade is likely to be nearly three times as great as the projected number of jobs requiring such degrees. Despite incredibly lax standards (the typical full-time student spends about 30 hours a week on academic matters) and rampant grade inflation, well over 40 percent of entering students fail to graduate within six years.
That conclusion should be obvious. Roughly 48 percent of our college graduates
are in jobs that the require less than a four-year degree, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the future looks worse: growth in the number of
graduates in this decade is likely to be nearly three times as great as the
projected number of jobs requiring such degrees.Despite
incredibly lax standards (the typical
full-time student spends about 30 hours a week on academic matters) and
rampant
grade inflation, well over 40 percent of entering students fail to
graduate
within six years. - See more at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/08/too_many_people_are_going_to_c.html#sthash.MdCB3djG.dpuf
That conclusion should be obvious. Roughly 48 percent of our college graduates
are in jobs that the require less than a four-year degree, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the future looks worse: growth in the number of
graduates in this decade is likely to be nearly three times as great as the
projected number of jobs requiring such degrees.Despite
incredibly lax standards (the typical
full-time student spends about 30 hours a week on academic matters) and
rampant
grade inflation, well over 40 percent of entering students fail to
graduate
within six years. - See more at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/08/too_many_people_are_going_to_c.html#sthash.MdCB3djG.dpuf
That conclusion should be obvious. Roughly 48 percent of our college graduates
are in jobs that the require less than a four-year degree, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the future looks worse: growth in the number of
graduates in this decade is likely to be nearly three times as great as the
projected number of jobs requiring such degrees.Despite
incredibly lax standards (the typical
full-time student spends about 30 hours a week on academic matters) and
rampant
grade inflation, well over 40 percent of entering students fail to
graduate
within six years. - See more at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/08/too_many_people_are_going_to_c.html#sthash.MdCB3djG.dpuf
Shopping for electronics at Best Buy already feels like some kind of hidden camera prank, with staff who never want to help and rarely know a thing about the gear they're selling. But an artist who refers to himself as Plastic Jesus took things one step further by secretly stocking Best Buy displays in LA with a useless plastic box complete with a description of the non-existent product.
And then there's the "useless" empty plastic 'Project Box' from Radio Shack, just waiting to be stuffed with batteries and switches and relays and all kinds of fun electronic goodies:
Best of all, compared to the Best Buy price, the $14.99 Radio Shack wants is a steal!
Knowing the full-truth that unites the human race, and not teaching all is deathly guilt, learned carpenter Jesus from Mason Rabbi Hillel! But Marx, innocent grandson of 2 rabbies, learned only half truth! As Mao wrote in Redbook 51: Marxist-Communism, once in power, is utterly unworkable, has less value then cowdung. Its power is the gun! What an apology we Rabbis owe Israel, Marx, Mao, all mankind, for not teaching Astronomy's great All-One-God-Faith, that with just 6 words eternally unites the human race! As teaches African-shepherd Astronomer Israel for 6000 years, LISTEN CHILDREN ETERNAL FATHER ETERNALLY ONE! For on God's Spaceship Earth, with Bomb and Gun, we are All-One or none! All-One! All-One! All-One! Exceptions eternally? Absolute none!
Got that? It's deep and makes good sense (if you are on an acid trip).
It's the hippy soap, Dr. Bronner's. It's organic, whatever that means. When I saw the bottle, I remembered this stuff. Knew a hippy-styled girl in college who used it.
On the top of Maggie's Farm, we seem to reject being subject to the efforts of do-gooders. Is the road to hell paved with good intentions? Do-gooders always seem to either want my money, or want to control me.
In just eight dense pages, Prof. Oakley covers a lot of ground and goes far beyond the Law of Unintended Consequences. She touches on psychology, science, medicine, philosophy, and politics. It's a remarkable paper which indeed pulls enough threads together to represent a potential paradigm shift. One quote:
The bottom line is that the heartfelt, emotional basis of our good intentions can mislead us about what is truly helpful for others. Altruistic intentions must be run through the sieve of rational analysis; all too often, the best long-term action to help others, at both personal and public scales, is not immediately or intuitively obvious, not what temporarily makes us feel good, and not what is being promoted by other individuals, with their own potentially self-serving interests.
Indeed, truly altruistic actions may some-times appear cruel or harmful, the equivalent of saying no to the student who demands a higher grade or to the addict who needs another hit. However, the social consequences of appearing cruel in a culture that places high value on kindness, empathy, and altruism can lead us to misplaced "helpful" behavior and result in self-deception regarding the consequences of our actions.
THE IDEA THAT VIOLENCE in human society has decreased over time invites scepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger. It hasn’t been a smooth decline – and it isn’t guaranteed to continue – but it is a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children. The human mind predisposes us to believe that we live in violent times – especially when stoked by news media that follows the watchwords: “If it bleeds, it leads.” We tend to estimate the probability of an event based on the ease with which we can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.
No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough to fill the evening news. This disconnects our impressions of violence from actual proportions. Also, distorting our sense of danger is part of our moral psychology: no one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that the world’s becoming a better place.
One purpose of The Moral Sense was, as Wilson put it, “to help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality.” The other goal was to trace the origins of human morality. Summoning an array of anthropological evidence, Wilson elaborated on the idea that our moral sense is innate, acquired not through learning but through evolution. These sentiments do not spring to life fully formed; instead, they are cultivated within family and society. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson had advanced the idea of inborn moral affinity but Wilson enlarged upon it, proposing that the moral sense rested upon four foundational pillars: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.
Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica, by T J Clark, review: "When Picasso was asked
why he had painted so few landscapes, he replied that he had never seen any."
As far as the old-style rationalists were concerned, any desire to ritualise death and remember the dead was a sign of a failure of nerve, and an inability to grow out of religious indoctrination – especially all that Christian stuff about personal survival, arraignment before a divine judge and consignment to heaven or hell. But in fact Christianity does not speak with one voice when it comes to death and dying. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus issued a severe reprimand to a disciple who wanted to give his father a proper funeral: get back to work at once, he said, and “let the dead bury their dead.” The rebuke may seem like an enlightened anticipation of 20th-century rationalism, but it is also perfectly consistent with some main doctrines of Christianity: if the body is just a temporary home for an immortal soul, and a perpetual temptation to sin, then the sooner we shuffle it off the better.
Any age has its darkness, and the age of modernism was decidedly not an exception. Kramer pointed out that even Eliot had "illustrated the apparently unavoidable paradox that the advent of modernism brought with it the seeds of its own perpetual renovation." This "perpetual renovation" had the potential for decadence as surely as it had the promise of fresh insights into the particularities of modern life, and no one knew this better than Kramer. Much of his life as a critic was spent exposing the humbuggery and snake oil that is often gathered under the label of "postmodernism" (or of "modernism" for that matter).
Cash registers were invented 
The first of these is a location story, the second is the ol' online-vs-retail story. Both make the same point while coming at it from different angles.
Knowing the full-truth that unites the human race, and not teaching all is deathly guilt, learned carpenter Jesus from Mason Rabbi Hillel! But Marx, innocent grandson of 2 rabbies, learned only half truth! As Mao wrote in Redbook 51: Marxist-Communism, once in power, is utterly unworkable, has less value then cowdung. Its power is the gun! What an apology we Rabbis owe Israel, Marx, Mao, all mankind, for not teaching Astronomy's great All-One-God-Faith, that with just 6 words eternally unites the human race! As teaches African-shepherd Astronomer Israel for 6000 years, LISTEN CHILDREN ETERNAL FATHER ETERNALLY ONE! For on God's Spaceship Earth, with Bomb and Gun, we are All-One or none! All-One! All-One! All-One! Exceptions eternally? Absolute none! 