Cliff May via TigerHawk via NRO:
I give Gore credit for keeping his speech short and to the point. But the idea, articulated by his worshipful Hollywood supporters, that it somehow takes courage for a member of the political class to ask Americans to cede more power to the political class so they can deal with “the crisis of climate change” is ludicrous.
PS: Al’s handlers need to get him on a diet and pronto.
Things don’t seem to be getting any better in the land where Z$500 is worth less than a sheet of toilet paper. Inflation is up to 1,600 percent. Bread is becoming unaffordable. And “[t]he 450-odd junior doctors who run the hospitals are in their eighth week of a strike. So are about a quarter of the 100,000 teachers. The civil service is mooting similar action.”
So what is a corrupt dictator to do in such dire times? Why throw a party for himself of course. And the Z$300 million needed for it can easily be found by “deducting money from civil servants’ wages and bullying near-bankrupt businesses for donations.” (Although he deserves credit for not just printing the money needed.
But maybe his printing presses just can’t keep up?) And because its his birthday, 83 year-old and spry looking Robert Mugabe also “imposed a three-month ban on political rallies and demonstrations across large parts of Harare” because of his love for his people.
What a guy!
Hey, when you are the “Most Consistent and Authentic Revolutionary Leader” you get to do what you want.
If you’ve ever thought, “I’m going to ride an industrial laundry basket down some stairs,” then I hope you plan better than these guys.
And since it’s winter time, let’s look at some sledding accidents:
Last night I learned that the coffeemaker in my office, one of the small 4-cup variety, can safely use filters for 8-12 cup coffeemakers.
I’m tellin’ ya, life. is. good.
I think the common perception is that white people aren’t subjected to (racial) profiling. Stop me if I’m wrong.
But I was watching Cops last night, and I saw a guy get pulled over. I thought “he looks like a criminal.” Maybe I was biased because he was on Cops. But I think if I saw him on the street I would think “he looks like a criminal.”
And he was white.
He was pasty, skinny, wearing baggy clothes, and had a really stupid looking beard. In other words, he looked like white trash and/or Kevin Federline (who strangely enough looks like he is more fit to have custody of his children than his ex-wife).
So I was left to wonder if there are subsets of the white population that receive the same types and levels of profiling as other ethnic populations.
I’ll have to work on that.
In the last week, I’ve managed to finish two books and I am proud of myself to say the least. They’re the first two books I’ve read since some time last spring when I cruised through Howard’s book. Now I’m going to subject you to my thoughts on the both one of them.
Fooled by Randomness was a quick read for me. That means I found it sufficiently entertaining to cruise through ~260 pages in three days. The book was written by a guy who studied uncertainty and randomness in grad school and went on to become a very successful Wall Street type. The book is meant to be a light read, so it is lacking in rigorous proofs underlying the concept. But the concept is simple: we are often fooled by short-term patterns in a world that is more random than we care to admit — or may even be able to realize.
As the author says a few times, you have to learn to separate the signal from the noise.
To him, history is the signal while news and current events are the noise. This actually fits in with my elasticity of truth hypothesis. The idea is to then mostly neglect the news since it is probably inaccurate enough as to not be useful.
This also plays out in the simple task of watching your investments. He proposes a situation where an investor is setup for 15% annual returns with 10% volatility (noise). The probability of seeing gains is highly related to how often the investor checks for them. If he checked every minute, there’s only a slight better than 50% chance of seeing progress. Whereas yearly checks are about 95% likely to provide progress. And if you let “bad” results affect you disproportionately more than “good” results, as humans are wont to do, then too much sampling of noise can trick people into abandoning good strategies.
But in the grand scheme, one should always be wary that one’s success is due mostly to luck — or being uniquely fit to take advantage of a unique, time-limited situation — which is bound to run out.
Overall, I thought it was a pretty good read.
