Cheap labour is the way of the future and has been for the past 3000 years. It's also referred to as trade, growth, and prosperity.

This is not to say that America hasn't made some blunders. American manufacturing was in the catbird seat until Detroit happened. Want a small, fuel-efficient car that doesn't fall to pieces the minute your service contract expires? The Japanese will make one (eventually). Detroit could have matched the Honda Civic while the Civic still sucked, but they had their heads up their ass-hats. It would have cut into selling overpriced and oversized cars you really didn't need. Why sell utility when you can sell dreams.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Jap-Crap. Jap-Crap with a plan. Jap-Crap planning to kick your ass.
Oh, yeah? You and who else?

It takes a real genius to spin the globe and miss China. Well done, Detroit, well done.

If it weren't for Asia, America would still be making oversized shit that breaks like clock-work. Outside of high tech, that's mainly what America was good at. We don't bring out our A game until we have a trillion dollar sustainment program on the boondoggle warpath.

The golden era of high domestic wages and low productivity was paved by the global petroleum monopoly. Did the Arabs really want to sell us all those barrels for half the net proceeds accruing to what we could manufacture by its consumption? Hint: they didn't have many great choices.

Knock, knock.
Who's there.
F18.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
OK, let's talk business. Name your price.

But go ahead and spin your weird little protectionist narratives.

With the F35 we're now balanced on the knife edge at the post-knock knock end of history.

Until it has ass recognition, it will remain blind to Freemasons everywhere.

The whole skin colour / gender thing is a red herring. The difference between living in America and Africa is not. If fifteen elite athletes from North America and Europe cross the finish line in a clump on their titantium carbon-fiber wonderbikes and then some Congolese kid crosses the line a few seconds later on a second-hand paper bike how do you score the merit function? The African boy has nothing but guts and determination. No world-class coaching, no decent bike. Useless.

One has to step back from merit to at least look at what a person a accomplished on the foundation of what they've been given.

I count an Ethiopian Ruby developer who writes a small Ruby application to manage the coffee trade as worthwhile diversity, even if far less competent as a Ruby specialist than other available speakers. I really don't give a damn if he or she is black or any other pigment.

The main difference between men and women has nothing to do with aptitude. It has to do with the higher willingness of men to immerse themselves in their expertise at the expense of everything else in their lives. He who sacrifices accomplishes more. And this derives directly from reproductive variance. Low status males face the worst reproductive odds. It's just not possible for a woman to squeeze other women out of the gene pool the way Ghengis Khan squeezed out a quarter of the men in all of Eurasia.

Merit-based promotion doesn't encourage balanced lifestyles. It tends to mainly reward fanatics. Women complain about this, and well they should, but it's no trivial matter to decide which man who sacrificed more should be excluded to the benefit of a women who sacrificed less, but did so within a rich and balanced lifestyle (raising children, being active in the community, etc.)

I also think that if you don't invite people from around the fringes to participate, the fringes tend to stagnate.

There are other risks run by the whip-snappers of inclusion. Statistically, small conferences run more risk than large conferences of getting busted by the diversity police.

Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success

So they did something seemingly very logical â" they looked at which schools have the highest test scores. They found that the schools with the highest scores were small, which makes some intuitive sense because of smaller class sizes, etc. But this falls into a sampling trap. The next question to ask is: which schools have the lowest test scores? The answer: small schools. This is exactly what you would expect from a statistical viewpoint since small samples have large variances. ... This is more than a case for a statistics class. Education reformers proceeded to spend billions of dollars reducing the sizes of schools.

If the book is anywhere near as good as his interview, everyone rush out to buy a copy. (I'm no shill. Try to find an imperatively worded endorsement in my previous 1000 posts here. There might be one, but I can't think of such an occassion.)

Far too often social thinking is bad thinking.

There's something not quite right about these benchmarks. A huge margin in FFTE is completely reversed on Apache. Often you can normalize this a bit by knowing which chip has how many cores and whether the floating point unit sucks or doesn't suck.

This discrepancy is more extreme than normal. Usually you find out that one chip or the other was hobbled by software indigestion, then the discrepancy dissipates in subsequent rounds.

The last time I installed Windows over an open source operating system for my own purposes was to play the first version of Quake.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and tap myself on the shoulder. Look dude, Quake rocks, but the skills you could be learning in Linux or BSD will serve you forever. I also quite liked Age of Empires at the time.

Dual booting wasn't a viable option. Around that time I think I paid $600 for a 6GB SCSI disk drive, thinking it would pay for itself in time saved in my software development work. Maybe it did, but I suspect it didn't.

The other problem is that you could install Windows on some cheap ass disk drive, but the installation process was long and tedious, and you had to ask what value you placed on your immortal soul sitting there feeding borg cookies into the 3 1/2" borg infection port.

I seemed to recall NT never told you about the mistake in your LUN assignment until digesting _all_ the borg cookies. More cookies, please!

But even then I had a deal with myself that I would multitask cleaning the bathroom with every large Microsoft application installed (or re-installed). Dev Studio kept my pipes clean. DLL hell polished my chrome.

I'm older and wiser now. I can clean the bathroom just because it needs to be done.

There was a girl in my class in middle school who was first rate at figure skating, and never got picked on at all. There were kids who were good at art and other things ... no hassles. Precious athletes, for the most part, exempt from the social tax on excellence.

There was a girl hideously deformed in the jaw and neck who showed up one day. No one said a word for two months, then the dam burst. I'd been in a children's hospital down the hall from a burn unit. I wasn't having any of it. Most of the adults who came to visit were so green around the gills to step onto that ward you almost needed a bucket in the hallway.

Sam Harris says we grant religious beliefs too much automatic deference. I think this also extends to our little rotters. There's something terribly vicious in young children that we neither discuss nor study to the extent warranted by their appalling capacity for social cruelty.

Not my little angel! Well, I suspect your little angel has become adept at emulating attitudes learned at home.

The social violence of little angels should be news. Today and every day. Do people think it just goes away, or does it merely mutate into more mature forms? I'm not trying to stamp out scorn or derision. That's a fact of life, man. But I do think that the use of "gay" as a generic adjective of derision should get the little rotters shuffled onto a short bus for the social learning disabled.

High time "gay" went the way of DUI, where nearly everyone looks at you funny, like you're charting a life course for a wall-mounted chrome toilet with no lid.

Borrowing from the newest story, I'd have to add the 16 pixel image of MACS0647-JD to this discussion.

Back when DTMF dialing was a newly introduced technology, Bell Canada in Ontario, where I was a student, had three different rates for basic service: the incumbent rate for existing pulse dial phones with a dial, a higher rate for new-fangled DTMF phones with a keypad, and a higher rate still for hybrid pulse dial phones with a keypad.

It hadn't been all that long that the consumer could buy their own phone from the local discount mart. If your phone generated DTMF phones, it wouldn't work without paying Bell more money for the "advanced" service. But you could buy a phone with a small micro-controller where you dialed with a keypad, but it pulse dialed over the line to impersonate the old phone you used to have. Usually there was a small slide switch on the bottom to select the dial mode. Of course, DTMF completed the dialing a little faster than the pulse setting.

Bell had no way of knowing that you had a keypad phone generating pulse dialing on the line, but if you allowed their technician into the house and they caught you with such a phone, they would convert you to the highest basic service rate of all. It was like another $5/month, which for a student, was super annoying.

Bell PHB: this is new fangled so we have to charge more, but it saves us money to deliver the service by allowing us to retire the old and slow and decrepit line cards, so we need to promote moving people to the new technology as fast as our bean counters can waggle their abaci, while also simultaneously incentivizing the change-over with higher fees.

If I made 50 calls per month at 4 bytes per call, it worked out to something like $5 / 0.2 KB or $25,000 / MB.

Russ Roberts has been trying to sell me on the Hayekian virtues of the private sector for about 150 episodes now. But I remember Bell Canada, and I know the private sector will charge you more for the benefit of saving them money at the drop of a pin, if they can get away with it.

Oh, yes, the solution is to deregulate. I got the memo. That's why I'm presently so much in love with my cellphone service, and I bet you are too.

and we are left wondering, would proprietary companies that get broken into so forthcoming?

No, we are not left wondering (unless one thinks that FreeBSD has a patent on especially leaky SSH developer keys) so instead we pretend that we are left wondering to justify hanging around and scribbling on the bathroom wall.

If Apple can't keep their mitts on an iPhone prototype and Google can't keep their mitts on a Nexus prototype, do you really think these butter-finger organizations have any better control over their developer's SSH keys?

The US government spends 19% on defense, and refunds 19% on social security and 20% on healthcare to recipients among whom many have past contributions in excess of benefits received in total. (This is the nature of insurance, you know. Insurance is a communist plot.)

Wait, I lie. The government probably takes a 20% management cut on the 40% refunded to tax paying Americans, maybe it's closer to 32%. The private sector would refer to such a management cut as a healthy value-add. The same overhead in government is 100% waste. (Not a single private sector corporation has ever wished to misspend revenues received from the government and been obstructed by a beady-eyed civil servant actually doing his job. Every one of them, parasitic to the core.)

But just keep counting every dollar as it crosses the government turnstile as if there isn't any difference, if stupid floats your boat.

If I show up on slashdot and finger dump my scorn and derision for ten frantic minutes to clear the pyschological slate to continue wrangling with aramid gloves the glass shards of a fragile technology stack (lets say Meteor on top and OpenCL on the bottom) for another long six hour half-day and in my flurry to vent I end two sentences in the same paragraph with "rapidity" I consider myself to be in bad form.

But I can understand the male psyche permuting the words "frightening rapidity" over and over and over again. Really, I can.

Other words: aspiration, modest, abject failure, carpal tunnel nightmare, scream market acceptance, tighter integration, abandon[ment], gushing, clueless, intransigent, and myopic

Carpal tunnel. That's so true. If you can't perform, your wrists take a beating.

I just hate it when you start tugging up your pants, then you immediately realize with the shift in abdominal pressure that there's more to squat than you suspected.

I'm reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. While I don't find his presentation compelling in every paragraph, I'm reserving judgment as yet of the big ideas. He lays out early his belief that our propensity to take the environment into our own hands is the only our species survives in this hostile biosphere. Who among us survives for long in naked solitude? Mainly the chronic sociopaths. He who survives naked is only fit to live naked.

This stupid fascination with eugenic sentiments seems to dovetail with our deep suspicion that taking the environment into our own hands was a suspect venture right from the get go.

And it's true. With every decade arrives whole new classes of threat. The drone build-out on continental America. The escalating capacity for government surveillance (and our distressing capacity to sell our intimate particulars to scratch a prurient itch). Privatization of the warehousing of social misfits, undesirables, and activist hippies (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother).

This whole mastery of circumstance digression in the proper unfolding of our rightful evolutionary destiny is a perpetually suspicious business.

We tend to think of progress as extending into the future like a ribbon beneath our feet and ignore how much progress leers at us from our six o'clock. Always a new face, hatching a new plot.

One more thought ... on a purely statistical basis, the solution to the decline of measured IQ is to measure everyone's IQ and the erase the bottom quartile or thereabouts, being careful not to measure IQ again, lest you discover how quickly the distribution regresses to the norm, discounting test score inflation, which would run rampant. Sardines at $300/lb? Extract of rhino horn is a wank irrelevancy when the guillotine has your name on it.

Greek theories on eugenics

With the recent developments in the Human Genome Mapping Project and the new technologies that are developing from it there is a renewal of concern about eugenic applications. Francis Galton (b1822, d1911), who developed the subject of eugenics, suggested that the ancient Greeks had contributed very little to social theories of eugenics. In fact the Greeks had a profound interest in methods of supplying their city states with the finest possible progeny.

I guess it's true. Every good idea, the Greeks had first.

But the ancient world loved eugenics; in fact pretty much everybody in every time period loves the idea... right up until it gets implemented. After that only the rulers and their lickspittle toadies love it.

That's so true. How intensely the weakest link seems most brittle and undeserving when it's not you.

At any crowded poker table there is a lamb. Everyone knows about the lamb. And there is also the lamb elect. Only the sharpest players realize how thin the boundary is between lion and lamb elect.

Completely fresh install (new virtual machine setup) this time selecting "Debian 64" instead of "Ubuntu 64" as the base version. Same disk space and memory selections.

This time, another installer crash, much sooner, but with a traceback. It's running in ubiquity/debconffilter.py and I've got "OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory".

Maybe 512MB of vbox memory is not enough. Another attempt with 768MB is now swimming along, rather tediously.