Training for the MS150 in September. Tonight was not my best night, but I have a lot of time to get up to snuff.

Too Stupid To Realize You're Stupid?

According to science we really do get what we deserve in the form of leadership.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

Or, as it was succinctly put in another article from the Life's Little Mysteries site: incompetent people are too ignorant to know it.

According to this study you can get 1.9 billion dollars! worth of software for free. Free. Nada. What's the catch? Well, there really isn't one. The license of the software itself is designed to grant the user certain freedoms, in marked contrast to many commercial licenses. So do yourself a favor - head on over to the Debian website and download a billion dollars.

We're gonna need a bigger boat

I stumbled across this article while researching the Fedora /usr merge/move and have to say it really funny. It's geek funny. But it's still funny.

Best Pr0n Viewer Evah

This Privacy Monitor Hack is one of the better uses of recycled 3D glasses I've seen. Wonder if there's a market for pre-made privacy monitors? Hmm.

You can get anything you want ...

Georgia Judge Dennis Blackmon has rejected a petition from U.S. Bank to throw out a complaint from a homeowner whose mortgage the bank refused to modify, without explanation. The judge didn't mince words on his opinion of the bank's motion: 

I have to say a judge that starts his opinion with "apologies to folk singer Arlo Guthrie. . ." is a jurist after my own heart. Thank you Judge Blackmon. Further info is here:
Judge exercises extreme sarcasm on US Bank « Boing Boing

Lest we forget

I was reminded by this piece in Forbes of a conversation (more of an argument) I recently had with some acquaintances. They were insistent that the real cause of the financial crisis in 2008 was a law passed in 1977. When I called them on that (how can a law passed in 1977 cause a crisis in 2008? Shouldn't it have kicked in before that?) they changed the meme. It was passed in 1977, but it was changed in 1997.

So it wasn't Carter's fault, it was Clinton's fault. I was beginning to sense a pattern, as they skipped over all POTUS with (R) following their names.

When the raw math (see the piece in Forbes for starters) was presented to them, they then said the amount of lending didn't matter. Regulations on the financial market caused those involved in said markets to develop a mental block. Regulation causes stupidity. Not short-term greed. Regulation.

These folks with no connection whatsoever to the derivatives industry were convinced they had insight into the psyche of that industry, and claimed to be able to divine the motivation of random bond traders they have never met.

It was an amazing bit of cognitive dissonance - no matter what, it was the fault of a) Democrats and b) Government. No amount of evidence confirming the greed and stupidity of Wall St. caused them to examine their beliefs, rather it just pushed them further down the road towards daft conspiracy.

Wash, rinse, repeat

I just finished reading about Our Oil-Constrained Future and was struck by the following statement:

If this model is accurate—and if the ceiling on global oil production really is around 90 mbd and can be expanded only slowly—it means that every time the global economy starts to reach even moderate growth rates, demand for oil will quickly bump up against supply constraints, prices will spike, and we'll be thrown back into recession. Rinse and repeat.

So our economic future, perhaps the global economy going forward, depends upon alternative energy. You'd think the leaders in Congress who are most concerned with economic growth might be in favor of this?  You'd be wrong.
They have more important constituents to look after.

Starbucks CEO to DC: You've been cut off

Starbucks CEO to DC: You've been cut off

I am imposing a one week personal moratorium on mocking or otherwise deriding the Buckys. Well done, sir. Well done.

Big Trouble

The latest from Weathervane Music's Shaking Through Volume 2 is big fun powerpop from Ridgewood, NJs Big Troubles. Enjoy, listen, download, contribute.

Rand Paul doesn't care about his constituents (or the deficit)

I mean, you knew that already, but this pretty much proves it.

"Every regulation doesn't save lives," Paul said in the hearing, later adding that the regulations so far have done a “pretty good job” of reducing black lung. "There is a point or a balancing act between when a regulation becomes burdensome enough that our energy production is stifled. We have to assess the costs of regulation and whether they save lives."

Except in this case, they do save lives. Provably, empirically, they save lives. Rand Paul's constituents lives, since Eastern Kentucky is coal country and his constituents are still dying.

But Rand Paul clearly values campaign contributions over constituents lives.

Candidate	Office	Amount
Manchin, Joe (D-WV)	Senate	$178,848
Blunt, Roy (R-MO)	House	$145,253
Portman, Rob (R-OH)		$128,025
Maynard, Elliott (R-WV)		$112,300
Paul, Rand (R-KY)		$99,627

What does this have to do with the deficit? According to The Hastings Center:

The mortality of chronic lung disease is predicted to decrease at a rate of 1.5% a year until 2030, and yet the cost of treating it is predicted to more than double from $176.8 billion in 2006 to $389.2 billion in 2011 and to reach $832.9 billion in 2021. The reason for this skyrocketing increase is a 31.1% increase in the number of diagnoses predicted by the Milken Institute.
Medicare spent over $8 billion on respiratory disease, excluding pneumonia, in 2006, a figure that is bound to increase tremendously in the next decade.

 Wouldn't someone trying to cut the deficit want to prevent expensive, chronic disease?