Ours is an age of banality. Despite all the yammering about diversity and cross-pollination of cultures, we live in a bland, uniform time. I’m fond of pointing out that the typical American parking lot looks like something an East German planner would have imagined. In the 1960’s the most popular car colors were shades of green. One year turquoise was the top color choice. In 1972 the most popular color choice for the Corvette was orange. Imagine that. Today, black and silver account for half the car colors, followed by gray and white. You may think that does not mean much, but when was the last time you associated shades of gray with vibrant and interesting?

Anyway, that came to mind reading this very odd column. Milo Yiannopoulos is what passes for clever and interesting in London apparently.

You’ll think this is weird, but for three years now I’ve taken what might be described as a “data-driven” approach to my social life. Specifically, I’ve been maintaining a gigantic spreadsheet of friends and business contacts, updated with columns such as “Hotness Index,” “Income,” and “Strategic Value.” And I spend about four hours a week keeping it up to date.

Why? Well, it’s not because I’m east London’s answer to Patrick Bateman. At least, that’s not the only reason. No, the spreadsheet is simply the best tool I’ve developed so far for managing an ever-increasing contact list of interesting people I am anxious to introduce to one another, or with whom I want to spend more time.

Of course, not everyone makes the cut. As I write this, there are only 746 people in the database out of a possible 4,500 entries in my address book. Included and assessed on a variety of metrics are A-list celebrities, board members of multinational corporations, investors in my previous ventures, and people I went to school with. And, yeah, a few randoms from 2009 I sort of maybe might consider calling at 2am.

Reading his wiki entry, he passes himself off as some sort of taste maker and techno-culturalist. The fact that he wastes four hours per week cataloging his relationships on a spreadsheet certainly makes him uncommonly dull. Interesting people don’t waste valuable time on mundane tasks. They have people for that. In the Imperial Capital (Washington DC), powerful people, the real movers and shakers, don’t carry their own mobile phone. They have people for that. In my day, you could spot the status by the briefcase. A big overstuffed briefcase was a lawyer working in a staff job. A thin European briefcase was a lobbyist. No briefcase, but an aide with an overstuffed briefcase meant an elected official or presidential appointment.

I’m thinking a guy sitting at home on a Friday night tabulating his relationships is a nobody.

Present and past relationships appear in the database, as do family members and work colleagues; these days, most of us have heavily overlapping constituencies of work and play.

I won’t pretend I don’t get a frisson of childish amusement from “shorting” the “stock” of people who show up late for an appointment (I’m hoping to commission a mobile app so I can do that on the fly) or even demoting those who have annoyed me in some way.

But the primary objective of maintaining this information is to enable me to quickly and easily filter and rank contacts before I send out invitations for parties and suppers.

The image above gives you an indication of what the spreadsheet looks like. I rank pretty much everyone I meet that I might want to see again in a number of different ways: subjective cultural assessments, estimates of income and intelligence, how much they like to party, how much trouble they like to get into, and obviously, how physically attractive they are.

The scores are normalised across the whole group. This enables me quickly and easily to drill down and generate lists from which I can craft the perfect party. I can even engineer how the photos will look, since I have a column that covers personal style. Politics is covered by a simple “Pass” or “Fail.”

There’s a term, which I no longer recall, for the use (misuse) of field-specific words in areas outside the specific field. Today, everyone is trying to pass themselves off as a quant. Milo, according to his bio, has no science or math. He had some training in philosophy, which suggests an irrationalist inclination. His misuse of the word “normalize” suggests he just thinks it sounds cool. That’s the habit of the modern fake nerd. They pick up the jargon from statistics, mostly, and fertilize their language with it.

I’ve made some interesting discoveries about my social life. For example, people ranked closer to me (with a “Tier” of A or B) are more physically attractive, and have politics that align with mine. But there’s no correlation between a person’s income and how highly I value our relationship, unless there’s been romantic interest.

My close friends (Tier A) tend to have high IQs, but their partying, troublemaking, and strategic values don’t follow any patterns. All of which implies that I am attracted to pretty, smart people with sound politics, but I don’t particularly care whether or not they are wealthy or like to party.

Look, I know all this is a bit odd. And it must sound terribly calculating. I suppose there’s a reason I’m writing a book called The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley. Perhaps it’s what jacket blurbs refer to as “unique insight.” But the truth is, this is simply the best tool I have developed to help me navigate a complex environment.

Actually, it just makes Milo sound like a shallow dickhead. My bet is his “high IQ” friends are just mediocrities like Milo. Posers like this guy tend to be quite dimwitted if you can get past the act. His writing is clever enough, so maybe he is not a dimwit. I’m not familiar enough with his work to make many judgments on his reasoning skills. The small sampling here suggests he is just another hipster passing himself off as whatever is popular at the moment.

That’s something I keep coming back to. I’m old enough to remember when being a nerd was the opposite of cool. As a kid, the cool guys were tough and rugged, disinclined to intellectualize anything. They were John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Guys who wrote code and liked math were Jimmy Stewart. Guys who liked trouble were Lee Marvin. For Generation Onesie, John Wayne is dead and they can’t imagine that a Lee Marvin could exist. They have been insulated from that type of man. It is all Jimmy Stewart. Their masculine ideal is the sensitive Jewish guy who writes interesting code, dates a tough gal who looks good in spandex and has bromances with other sensitive guys in self-actualizing jobs.

[subscribe2]Here’s something almost everyone knows, to some extent. All of us have been trained for the last five decades or more to think self-denial at the table leads to good health. That’s really what most diet fads boil down to. We are told if we give up these tasty things we will live forever. In another age, food took on more magical properties and ever-lasting life was in the after-life for those who followed the rules in this life. The magical properties of food ideas are still popular amongst the organic crowd. They will harangue you all night over the benefits of organic or all-natural food, even though there is no science to support it.

Vegetarians may have a lower BMI and drink alcohol sparingly, but vegetarian diets are tied to generally poorer health, poorer quality of life and a higher need for health care than their meat-eating counterparts.

A new study from the Medical University of Graz in Austria finds that vegetarians are more physically active, drink less alcohol and smoke less tobacco than those who consume meat in their diets. Vegetarians also have a higher socioeconomic status and a lower body mass index. But the vegetarian diet — characterized by a low consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol that includes increased intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products — carries elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health disorders.

Vegetarians were twice as likely to have allergies, a 50 percent increase in heart attacks and a 50 percent increase in incidences of cancer.

The cross-sectional study from Austrian Health Interview Survey data and published in PLos One examined participants dietary habits, demographic characteristics and general lifestyle differences.

The most significant dietary habit difference between meat-eaters and vegetarians concerned their BMI and alcohol consumption – with both being higher for those who consume meat.

Many past studies have instead put an emphasis on the health risks associated with red meat and carnivorous diets, but this study points the other dietary direction. However, the researchers do caution that continuing studies will be needed to substantiate some of the rather broad dietary distinctions, associations presented in this current research.

Overall, vegetarians were found to be in a poorer state of health compared to other dietary groups. Vegetarians reported higher levels of impairment from disorders, chronic diseases, and “suffer significantly more often from anxiety/depression.”

Subjects who consumed lower amounts of animal fat were also linked to poor health care practices, such as avoidance of vaccinations and a lack of preventive care.

I’ve always suspected people are attracted to weird cults like veganism or even vegetarianism because they have mental health problems. I do know many healthy and happy plant eaters, but I also know quite a few who are neurotic and depressed. Their diet is a form of self-medication. That’s what these guys may be picking up in the study. It is not that plant eating makes you crazy. It’s that crazy people are more likely to go for plant eating as a way to self-medicate. That’s the theory behind the various “cleanse” scams running through the health food world.

Regardless, as a matter of science we know humans have evolved eating a range of foods. Meat, fish, dairy and wild greens were the primary foods for most of human history. Early man was living almost entirely on meat and fish. About 12,000 years ago humans started to figure out how to grow plant food and raise food animals. Man domesticated sheep, goats, cows, and pigs about 15,000 years ago. The opportunity to feed large numbers of people year round with plant food only goes back a few thousand years. That means humans evolved for almost all of its time as meat eaters.

That said, I’m highly skeptical of the wheat-paranoia and the gluten allergy stuff. Certainly some people are sensitive to gluten. Logically, northern people could be less capable of fully digesting plant foods like wheat. My people appear to have originated in the Baltic region where fish and game were the primary food stuffs. Widespread agriculture came late to that region. Therefore it would not be stunning to my body does a poor job digesting certain plants. On the other hand, people evolved where food is scarce may very well have highly efficient digestive systems. That would lead to obesity in times of plenty.

It’s not always obvious using simple deduction. What we know is humans are omnivores that were primarily meat eaters for 95% of our history. Removing meat from our diet is no more logical than weaning ourselves off oxygen. The underlying irrationality of vegetarianism is plain to see when you look at it through the lens of biology.

I saw this on American Digest, which has been pushing a lot of traffic my way. I get a fair amount of traffic from that site and the HappyAcres tumblr. I have no idea what either site does, but I’m grateful for the traffic. Anyway, I was a huge Babe Ruth fan as a boy. One of the first books I recall reading on my own was a short biography of him. It was one of those kids books where you read the first half, flipped it over and reads the second half. Before that, I only read what was given to me by parents and teachers. Reading for fun was alien to me until about the age of eight.

A former teammate of Babe Ruth’s once recalled him by saying, “You’ve got to remember, this guy wasn’t born, he fell out of a tree.” Ruth grabbed life by the throat (or maybe it was another part of life’s anatomy) and shook it up as it has seldom been shaken up.

Ruth spent the majority of his youth cooped up in St. Mary’s industrial school, listed as an “incorrigible.” After he was released at the age of 20, Ruth seemed to spend the rest of his life making up for lost time. He went through women like they were jelly beans.

Most men, even the greatest ladies’ men, have particular “favorite types” of women, subjective turn-ons, and particular traits they especially like in the opposite sex. Ruth seemed unusual in his complete lack of this quality. Ruth just simply loved women- of all types, sizes, races, and personalities.

It’s funny, but men do have certain types of women they prefer. That’s not something that gets discussed in public much at these days. I suppose women are attracted to certain men as well. I recall a study that claimed women are far less likely to date out of their race or be attracted to men of another race than men. That is, men will go with just about anything it it means sex. Given a choice, most men do prefer certain types. I guess Ruth was way over on the liberal scale in these matters.

Hardly a day passed during his baseball career (1914-1935) that he did not have sex with at least one woman. He liked women as much as baseball. Having no favorites, bedding tall women, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, beautiful knockouts, ugly rejects, socialites, film starlets, secretaries, other men’s wives, and hookers in every big city in America.

Ruth was a stallion in bed, once making love to a woman seven times in one night- and smoking a cigar between each encounter to boot. Ruth often went to the women’s homes, but sometimes he called them up to his hotel.

Ruth was crazy about prostitutes and loved frequenting brothels. Often during his career, St. Louis fans would be “touched” by the Babe as he told a St. Louis cab driver to take him to “the house of the good shepherd.” They assumed he was going to church. Little did they know, “the house of the good shepherd” was St. Louis’ biggest whorehouse.

Once Ruth took over an entire house of ill repute for an entire night. His goal was to go to bed with every woman in the house- and he did, one by one. In the morning he celebrated by eating an 18-egg omelet.

Ruth lived to just 53, but it seems like a miracle that he made it that far. On the other hand, his cancer was unlikely to have been caused by hard living. We like to think there is a direct causal relationship between sin and health, but there’s little evidence to support it. As the song says, I’ve known more old drunks than old doctors. Until Ruth got cancer, he was healthier than most men his age, even with all the boozing, womanizing and carrying on.

It is why one should always remember that life is for living. Put another way, we have a short time to live. While we live, let us live.

Sic transit gloria mundi

How doth the busy bee,

Dum vivimus vivamus,

I stay my enemy!

The last time I had any reason to “care” about Naomi Wolf, she was trying to explain bukaki to teenagers during the Clinton years. I put “care” in quotes because I was really just laughing at her and the rest of the feminist trolls for becoming living, breathing contradictions to everything feminism had asserted for fifty years.

Here you had Bill Clinton carrying on like the male chauvinist pig of feminist lore and everyone of these broads was not just excusing him, they wanted to be in his bukaki pit. There’s hypocrisy and then there is American feminism. They talk like Susan B. Anthony, but fantasize about being a naughty June Cleaver.

Anyway, this crossed my path the other day. I’ve noted that the Left seems to be entering the paranoid stage as this wave ebbs. Given that fascism and American liberalism have so much in common and their origins are so tightly intertwined, it seems odd that the Cult would be so fearful of their brother. There’s two theories for the American Left’s obsession with fascism. One ties back to the old schism in socialism that happened in the early 20th century in Europe. The other ties back to the FDR years when every good Progressive in the English speaking world thought Mussolini was the future. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

First, this from the biographical blurb deserves attention:

Naomi Wolf played a leading role in so-called “third-wave” feminism and as an advocate of “power feminism,” which holds that women must assert themselves politically in order to achieve their goals. She advised the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Western feminism has made some memorable theoretical mistakes; a major one is the frequent assumption that, if women held the decision-making power in society, they would be “kinder and gentler” (a phrase devised for George H.W. Bush in 1988 to appeal to the female vote). Indeed, so-called “second-wave” feminist theory abounds in assertions that war, racism, love of hierarchy, and general repressiveness belong to “patriarchy”; women’s leadership, by contrast, would naturally create a more inclusive, collaborative world.

The problem is that it has never worked out that way, as the rise of women to leadership positions in Western Europe’s far-right parties should remind us. Leaders such as Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, Pia Kjaersgaard of Denmark’s People’s Party, and Siv Jensen of Norway’s Progress Party reflect the enduring appeal of neofascist movements to many modern women in egalitarian, inclusive liberal democracies.

The past is prologue: Wendy Lower’s recent book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields adds more data to the long record of women embracing violent right-wing movements. And the rise of far-right movements in Europe – often with women in charge – confronts us with the fact that the heirs to the fascism of the 1930’s have their own gender-based appeal.

One obvious reason for the success of women like Le Pen, Kjaersgaard, and Jensen is their value for packaging and marketing their parties. Just as Bush sought to revamp the Republican Party’s “brand’ of cold-hearted elitism and hostility to women, so Europe’s far-right parties today must appeal to citizens by not seeming dangerously extreme and marginal. How dangerous can the movement be, after all, if women are speaking for it? Such parties come to be seen as more mainstream, and their appeal to traditionally harder-to-win women supporters receives a boost.

The word “alarm” is supposed to imply concern and even fear. You can be alarmed about a child molester moving into town. You can be alarmed about your kid hanging out with the potheads. One is not typically alarmed about gettting a bonus at Christmastime. Words have meaning and their use says a lot of about what’s on the writers mind. No one is alarmed about something they welcome. Alarm is supposed to imply fear and dread of something unwanted.

In this story from National Journal, the headline writer, at least, is making it clear she does not like the pale penis people very much.

The pipeline of students who will be tomorrow’s tech leaders is alarmingly vanilla.

According to a new analysis of test-takers, not a single girl, African-American or Hispanic student took the computer science Advanced Placement test in Mississippi or Montana last year. More than a third of the population in Mississippi is black.

In other words, a hugely disproportionate bunch of white guys took the test.

The lack of diversity is disconcerting because computer science is an industry hurting for qualified workers. That’s not to say that a student must take AP computer science to pursue a computer science career, but it’s an indicator of which young people have a degree of familiarity with the field. Tech companies have long lamented that they’ve had to look outside the domestic pool of students to find employees. Encouraging largely untapped demographics—girls, African-Americans and Hispanics—in high school to enter the field would only help.

But that’s not happening, at least successfully, right now.

There are 11 states where not a single African-American took the test, and eight states where no Hispanics sat for the exam.

We’re not talking here about people who passed or didn’t pass, either. We’re talking about people who simply took the test, which means African-Americans, Hispanics and girls aren’t enrolling in AP computer science classes in the first place.

Of the approximately 30,000 students who took the exam in 2013, only around 20 percent were female, according to the analysis, and a tiny 3 percent were African-American. Just 8 percent were Hispanic.

I love how she makes special mention, with a bit of venom, that it is not about passing or failing. It is about taking the exam. It also tells me she has no experience with Advanced Placement exams. You test into the class that prepares you for the exam. So if the test takers are all vanilla phallus types, that means they are the ones testing into the classes.

Of course, biology can’t possibly be the reason.

One reason there are so few students enrolling in the class and taking the test is that AP computer science courses are more common in suburban and private schools, Barbara Ericson, a senior research scientist with Georgia Tech who compiled the data, told the blog Education Week, and those schools tend to be less diverse than urban and public schools.

Another potential reason is that there are so few women, African-American and Hispanic instructors teaching computer science and so few working in the computer science field. Students are more likely to pursue a course of study if they have mentors with similar backgrounds to emulate.

College Board, which oversees the AP tests, has made diversity a priority in recent months, but clearly, there’s still a long way to go. And diversifying the pool of students taking the exam will require more than a push from College Board. Families, schools and community organizations will also play a crucial role in encouraging and guiding more girls and minority students toward computer science.

As usual, Steve Sailer was all over it and has some handy numbers.

Here are the pass rates (3 out of 5 or higher, equivalent to a C or better in a college 101-level intro course):

All test takers: 67%
Males: 68%
Females: 62%
Blacks: 36%
Black males: 38%
Black females: 27%
Hispanics: 45%
Hispanic Males: 49%
Hispanic Females: 31%
Whites: 66%
White Males: NA
White Females: NA
Asians: 70%
Asian Males: NA
Asian Females: NA

The religion of our ruling class, however, is not going to let getting the right answer be an obstacle to their plans to feminize and Africanize everything. This from Alpha the other day is worth remembering the next time you get a female voice from tech support.

It’s all about the semantics, apparently. This is a truly remarkable educational program, for varying degrees of remarkable:

With a three-step method, Harvey Mudd College in California quadrupled its female computer science majors. The experiment started in 2006 when Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician herself, was appointed college president. That year only 10% of Harvey Mudd’s CS majors were women. The department’s professors devised a plan.

They no longer wanted to weed out the weakest students during the first week of the semester. The new goal was to lure in female students and make sure they actually enjoyed their computer science initiation in the hopes of converting them to majors. This is what they did, in three steps.

1. Semantics count

They renamed the course previously called “Introduction to programming in Java” to “Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python.”  Using words like “creative” and “problem solving” just sounded more approachable. Plus, as Klawe describes it, the coding language Python is more forgiving and practical.

As part of this first step, the professors divided the class into groups—Gold for those with no coding experience and Black, for those with some coding experience. Then they implemented Operation Eliminate the Macho Effect: guys who showed-off in class were taken aside in class and told, “You’re so passionate about the material and you’re so well prepared. I’d love to continue our conversations but let’s just do it one on one.”

Literally overnight, Harvey Mudd’s introductory CS course went from being the most despised required course to the absolute favorite, says Klawe.

Translation: a woman who couldn’t hack either programming or mathematics herself despite majoring one of them came up with a program to retain the very weak students that traditional programs are specifically designed to weed out. This is great news from the college’s perspective, as it can now graduate considerably more female STEM graduates.

The bad news, of course, is that virtually none of them will be employable, as the program has been softened and dumbed down to the point that both men and women who were capable of hacking the original one won’t be prepared for post-graduation employment. But what does Maria Klawe or Harvey Mudd care? They got paid and they got their numbers up, which means they probably had a financial incentive to do so.

The Cult’s assault on the STEM fields has been going on for years now. The trouble they run into is they need technology to work as much as everyone else. When they need something fixed, they want the fixer to know how to fix it. Companies writing software hire programmers that can write good code. Engineering firms want engineers that can build bridges that don’t fall down. The demand for incompetent technical people with a vagina or brown skin is zero. The Cult has never figured out how to get around this problem.

That does not mean they will quit. History shows they are more than willing to murder a whole lot of people in order to get their desired result.

This story from Massachusetts is a nice preview of what comes next with ObamCare.

The family of Justina Pelletier, the 15-year-old girl at the center of a battle spanning two states and two prestigious hospitals, is devastated but defiant after a Massachusetts judge gave permanent custody of the girl to the state’s Department of Children and Families.

Speaking a day after Massachusetts juvenile court Judge Joseph Johnston issued a four-page ruling blasting Pelletier’s parents for being verbally abusive and complicating efforts to bring the West Hartford, Conn., family together, Lou Pelletier told Fox News Channel the Bay State bureaucracy has been aligned against his family from the beginning.

What exactly happened that caused the state to take this child from her parents?

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families took emergency custody of Justina on Valentine’s Day 2013 after doctors at Tufts Medical Center, which had been treating her for a rare condition, and doctors as Boston Children’s Hospital, clashed over the cause of her medical problems, which included difficulty eating and walking.

At Tufts, Justina had been treated for mitochondrial disease, a group of rare genetic disorders affecting cellular energy production. When Justina began experiencing some gastrointestinal problems, the Tufts doctor treating her, Dr. Mark Korson, wanted the girl to visit Dr. Alejandro Flores at Boston Children’s Hospital, according to the family’s attorney, Phil Moran. Flores had treated Justina in the past, Moran said, and Korson thought it beneficial for the teen to see a gastroenterologist.

What happened next was a “tragic nightmare” for Justina and her family, Moran told FoxNews.com.

Justina was taken by ambulance to Boston Children’s Hospital because she was in a wheelchair at the time and a heavy snow storm was blanketing the region. Because she arrived by ambulance, she was taken directly into the hospital’s emergency room, where a “resident refused to send her to Dr. Flores” and, “declared this was his case,” according to Moran. He said the unnamed resident then called upon a psychologist who diagnosed Justina with somatoform disorder — a mental condition in which a patient experiences symptoms that are real but have no physical or biological explanation. Justina was diagnosed with the disorder “within 25 minutes,” Moran claims.

The Pelletier family rejected the new psychiatric diagnosis and wanted to bring Justina back to Tufts, Moran said. He claims the hospital tried to force the girl’s parents to sign papers preventing them from seeking another opinion.

After tempers flared between the Pelletiers and staff at Boston Children’s, the hospital notified the state that it suspected the parents of medical child abuse.

The girl was kept at Boston Children’s psychiatric ward for nearly a year, but was then slated to be transferred to another state facility. Johnston said the family, which vented its anger in various media interviews, hampered efforts to have her placed as near them as possible. She is currently being held at the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network facility in Framingham, Mass.

There it is folks. In Nazi Germany, a good way to deal with a troublesome neighbor was to report them to the state. Poof! They ended up in “protective custody” at Spandau Prison. Health care and health expense will now be the catch-all excuse for the trampling of whatever right remain. But, when you put a communist Kenyan in charge, the results are inevitable.

You’ll note that the thugs responsible not only remain unnamed, they are immune from punishment. It is why ever government office should have a gallows placed at the door. That way every employee entering knows the ultimate end if they get too out of control.

I don’t watch 60 Minutes. I’m sure it is a fine program, but TV news is mostly about preaching the gospel and I’m not much of a believer. It is not just the cheerleaders for the Cult. Fox News is pretty much just agit-prop for the Republican Party. I get why they do it and that’s fine with me, but I’m not interested.

That does not mean I escape from the gaping maw of popular culture or current events. This was the talk of the office yesterday morning. My Marxist office manager was particularly worked up over it. But, even sensible people have a right to be upset. Wrong or right, everyone has equated the stock market with capitalism and the general economy. Everyone also has their retirement fund in the market.

Anyway, people who have been paying attention have been onto the the HFT scam for a while now. This post over at MR brought out some particularly oleaginous characters defending what is nothing more than a way to game the system. The idea is to use special knowledge to buy and sell equities in order to minimize losses and arbitrage imbalances in the market.

This has been the point of insider trading and self-dealing since knife money. In a completely honest and transparent market, the only way to make money is to buy and hold stocks. Trading, assuming fees are involved, is pointless since everyone knows what everyone else knows. There’s no chance to buy a depressed stock that is about to rebound or sell a stock that is about to collapse. Informational asymmetry, at least the belief in it, is what allows a market to exist.

What the HFT guys are up to is two things. One is they can process news that impacts share prices faster than any human. The algos can grind through a mountain of data by the time humans traders have buttered their toast. Bake in the right assumptions about how the humans will react to particular data and your algorithm will make perfect trades before anyone else in the market. Selling a stock that is about to drop 10% saves millions. Buying just as it heads up 10% and you make millions. Everyone else gets the scraps.

That’s the boy scout approach. The big boys like to play dirty. Here’s how. Let’s say there are 20,000 shares for sale at $10.00 and 10,000 shares for sale at $11.00. A buyer can have all 20,000 shares at $10.00. If you’re the guy looking to sell at $11.00, you may be willing to sell at $10.00 if you think there are no takers at $11.00. You can drop the price, but you still stand in line behind the guy selling at $10.00 until those shares are sold. That’s how it works. No line cutting.

The HFT guys beat this system by exploiting the relatively low cost to cancel. They can put sell orders out at $10 and see if demand is strong. They can cancel those sell orders, thus making the bit of the line in front of the $11 sell orders disappear. Humans can’t play this game, but robots are very good at it. In fact, cancel orders have rocketed up as more and more algorithms have sprung up in finance. Getting ten cents more per share may seem like peanuts, but not when you’re moving tens of million of shares.

The thing is, this is neither new or unexpected. A great book to read for anyone interested in the financial markets is called The Money Game, written fifty years ago. The author was a market insider when that meant something. He predicted the rise of machines in trading and the rise of crooks using machines to get an edge. Mencken, I think, said there are no new ideas, just new ways of saying them. That’s true of the HFT scams. It is just another way for sharps to fleece the squares.

Somewhere on this blog I posted a long tirade against the religion of economics. One of the things I wanted to include, but did not, was something on the lack of curiosity. The reason I left it out is I thought it might make for a good blog post on its own. This site does not write itself so I have to keep the ammo bucket loaded. That and it is not really peculiar to the monks in the econ department. It is a characteristic of all reformers and ideologues. Whatever the object of their concern, they never bother to ask why it is the way it is. If they do offer some explanation, it is always a self-serving one.

Homosexual marriage is the most obvious example. The advocates never ask why marriage has been boy-girl for ten thousand years. Instead they mutter some nonsense about religion, but that’s as far as they go. Libertarians are the worst offenders. When they start ranting about the state licensing marriage, they act like it sprung from nothingness. Their own ignorance is held up as if it were a mirror, reflecting a newly discovered hole in conventional wisdom.

This weird lack of curiosity leads to logical errors. A good example is in this post on Steve Lansberg’s site. The deliberate ignorance is right there at the start.

I have a question that has only provoked a lot of confused righteous indignation in other forums, and I wonder if TBQ readers might have more thoughtful responses, if we phrase it as a logic puzzle.

My question: I don’t see why it’s good policy to give criminal defendants a Fifth Amendment right to silence in their own trial, as opposed to giving them the same rights and obligations as third-party witnesses (who can be subpoenaed and required to answer questions).

First we get the victim act. That’s a topic for another day. What comes next is the weird admission that he does not understand basics civics. That would be fine if it were just an admission and a plea for help. Instead, it is wrapped in indignation, as if it is the fault of the rest of us that this guy does not know basic civics. The implication is that the Fifth Amendment is illogical because the author does not understand why it exists. The burden is now on everyone else to alleviate him of his ignorance.

This is a common trick from fanatics pushing some cause. They frame their own ignorance as a sort of universal ignorance that they have just stumbled upon. Having discovered this hitherto unobserved irrationality, they offer up an alternative and then challenge everyone else to 1) justify the current arrangements or 2) offer an alternative to their proposal that they think is better.

However, every time I’ve asked this question, people have reacted as if I was suggesting that the state should be allowed to torture people into confessing. Obviously that’s not what I’m asking. I just don’t see a principled reason why defendants can’t be required to answer a question that is relevant, subject to the rules laid out in paragraph 3.

He repeats the victim stuff in order to shift the focus from his own ignorance onto the reader. The use of neutralized logic phrases is particularly annoying. “Obviously that’s not what I’m asking” avoids the charge, without ever addressing it. It also makes it appear the invisible audience to whom he is referring is irrational. The poor guy is an island of rationality in a sea of mean spirited loons!

The funny part is that he is suggesting the state torture people into confessing. Maybe he knows that and that’s why he is shifting the focus from what he is suggesting onto straw men. If the state can punish you for lying to agents of the state and they can force you to answer questions, the honest answering of which could lead to punishment, the state is compelling you to bear witness against yourself. The lever may not be jumper cables to the genitals, but imprisonment with violent sodomites is no less compelling.

Anyway, the comments are worth reading. Comment #6 takes the author’s tactic and turns it around on him. Clever.

You’ve done a good job of comparing fifth amendment rights to the ability of the state to subpoena third parties. It makes perfect sense to me that if it’s acceptable for state to subpoena third parties, it should also be acceptable to subpoena the accused. I hold the position that the state should NOT be able to subpoena the accused OR third parties though. To convince me, you’ll need to provide good reasons why the state should have this particular coercive power in the first place.

I don’t think it is intentional. This sort of sophistry is so common, people do it without even knowing it now. All logic expressions imply a set of conditions that would make them false. For instance, all men are human is a logical expression. To falsify this, we would need a man who is not human. That does not mean it can be falsified. It is the legendary flaw in Popper. There are scientific fast that cannot be falsified, because they are fact, as eternal as 2+2=4.

What the modern sophist does is insert taste or opinion into the search for truth. “Vanilla ice cream is the best” is not true statement. Everyone knows that, I hope. All swans are white, however, is a logical statement. Bolting on “you have to convince me that all swans are white” invalidates the logical expression. Of course, it sets up a standard that can never be met.

Putting it together you get what looks like a deductive examination of an existing rule, law or custom. What you really get is ignorance framed as a question and a petulant demand from the questioner. it is not an affirmative argument or even a logical expression. It’s a temper tantrum.

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Way back in the olden thymes, I was at a pub getting loaded with some friends. Somehow I fell into conversation about computers with a woman. All these years later she is just a cave drawing in my mind’s eye, but I recall something she said. She called herself a “Mac Snob.”

This was the mid-90’s when Apple was close to bankruptcy. Amongst the tech community, Apple was just another sad victim of the winner take all world of Tech. If giants like Wang and DEC were getting crushed by Microsoft,  a pipsqueak like Apple had no chance. Still, her weird emotional attachment to a brand stuck with me.

By now it is obvious that Apple is a cultural movement. You see it in this Blackberry story.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a bit of a BlackBerry basher. The struggling smartphone, once at the epicenter of our nation’s gadget addiction, feels like it’s all but gone the way of the 8-track in recent years. While far from extinct, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone walking down the street talking, texting, or taking a selfie on one. My few friends who still carry a BlackBerry primarily use them for work, while opting for an iPhone or Android as their personal phone.

So why are we still talking about it?

And yet … just when you think it’s time to say goodbye to the good ole’ CrackBerry for good, it seems by many cautiously optimistic accounts that the embattled company could be on a path to making a comeback.

On Friday, CEO John Chen, a noted turnaround artist, reported good news, by way of an earnings showing a fourth-quarter net loss of $423 million. While most of us have a hard time wrapping our heads around how Chen could be “pleased” with that result, industry and financial analysts expected it to be a lot worse. Chen said that BlackBerry’s most recent financials are “on track and slightly ahead” of expectations, and re-asserted that BlackBerry will return to profitability and growth within little more than a year.

So what does all this mean for BlackBerry loyalists who swear by the devices flagship security and productivity features? While the company pivots back to its core strengths — securing mobile devices on the internal networks of corporate and government clients such as MasterCard, Daimler AG and Airbus Group — there’s a new line of handsets on its way for die-hard keyboard lovers. While smartphones won’t be the main focus, Chen said that BlackBerry plans to introduce high-end smartphones that cater to keyboard aficionados in the coming 18 months.

Is BlackBerry worth considering?

Recently, I gave BlackBerry’s all-new Z30 smartphone a spin. I used it for three weeks, and it was a lot better than I expected it to be. Here are three things it did better than my iPhone 5s:

– It lasts a lot longer on a single charge: My iPhone usually poops out after about 8 hours, but the BlackBerry stays awake for some 25 hours.

– It’s easier to type on: The built-in predictive text feature doesn’t just finish the word you’re typing, but it can predict the next word based on your past writing patterns. It saves time and tapping.

– It’s a better organizer: The notification hub puts all your messages, notifications, and calls in one place. Its clean layout is easy on the eyes and perfect to glance at when you have just a few seconds.

But those bonuses also come with a few drawbacks that will keep me from switching to BlackBerry for the long haul:

– The lack of apps: I want Netflix, and I want it on my phone — and I don’t want to take extra steps to get it. To say the marketplace just isn’t as robust as the competition, is a major understatement, and app lovers will suffer. Sure, you can switch some apps over (using the Device Switch App) or download Android apps from a handful of places like the Amazon Appstore, but these extra steps are a pain when you’re used to having everything you want right at your fingertips. If you’ve grown accustomed to the iOS, or even Android ecosystem, this feels like you’re just going too far back.

– It’s out-of-sync: iOS’s ability to automatically populate photos, notifications, and messages across all my — and my family’s — devices is something I just can’t give up. Sure, there are apps that will do it for you, but taking that extra step is just too much of a pain.

– The “cool” factor: I want my main gadget to be an extension of my personality. BlackBerry says “business,” when the phone I want to carry around also needs to denote “pleasure.”

There’s the issue. I’ve often noted that the best selling Apple products are their mobile products. No one buys their servers and PC’s. They tried hard to make their laptops a fashion statement, but people resist a $2,000 fashion statement. The cheap stuff like music players, phones and now tablets, on the other hand, are relatively cheap ways for the Sneetches to slap a star on their belly.

I suspect this wanes now that Jobs is dead. His revivals were a big part of how the MacCult kept itself alive. The lack of a cool new mobile devise is another problem. Apple has squeezed all the juice out of the multi-use mobile platform. There’s nothing else to do there. The silly little bimbo who wrote this USA Today article will be moving onto some other cool thing eventually.

Blackberry has real products with real value. Their security is second to none. They also have hooks into the car business. That cool information center in your new car is most likely running on a Blackberry OS. They have a real business with real value, as long as they get their costs under control. Apple is a toy maker. They make fashion toys for people lacking real computer skills, who want to pretend to be the smartest kid on the block. In the long run, that’s a tough business to maintain.

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Every Sunday I head off to the market for my supplies. I’m somewhat of a cheap bastard so I bring a lunch every day.  It is not just the expense; it is the quality of food. I can’t keep my weight down without preparing my own food. I’m not sure what it is, but I can’t seem to judge the calorie content of restaurant food. I know restaurants load up their food with salt so maybe that has something to do with it. I don’t know. All I know is I would weigh 300 pounds if I went out for lunch every day…

At the market the checkout girl was a short little gal with a nose ring. It is the ball ring type, which almost always means lesbian. She also wears boys pants, another sign of being a dyke. Her causal hostility to the penis people also suggests she is a dyke. I’ve been on earth for a long time now and I have never met a dyke who was cheery. Even the pleasant ones seem to be struggling with rage or depression.

Homosexuals have a significantly higher rate of mental problems, as well as drug and alcohol abuse.  Lesbians struggle more than homosexual males so perhaps that’s why I notice the angry/depressed dykes. Women, by design, are more expressive than men. Their unhappiness seems odd, though. Straight men find male homosexuality to be disgusting, while no one really thinks that about female homosexuality. But, maybe the cause of female homosexuality carries a high incidence of depression as well…

I’m fond of pointing out that the easiest way to refute libertarian arguments about market genius is to go to a market. Today, I saw a dozen or so couples, with small children, at the market. That’s common. It is also is entirely irrational. They spend a lot of time and energy bundling up the kids for the trip. The kids are a hassle in the store. Nothing about what they are doing is rational, yet they are always there. Worse yet, they are spreading their irrationality because the kids and the giant carts they use slow down the rest of us…

This trend of making mundane tasks a family event is new. When I was a boy, parents rarely took their kids to the store. Mothers during the day would drag pre-school kids around on errands, but that was it. It was considered inappropriate, for example, to take kids to the hardware store or to the furniture store. Today, people expect the rest of us to help mind their kids. Everywhere you go there are kids running wild. Home Depot has carts shaped like race cars for the kids to ride in while mom and dad shop….

People believe all sorts of weird things about food. It is because we are programmed, I think, to accept direction from authority. When Food Inc. or Uncle Sam says something is good, people believe it. An example of this was in the cereal aisle. I rarely eat cereal. Health-wise, it is no different than ice cream. As a treat it is fine, but not as a meal. That includes the healthy stuff. Carbs are carbs.

I’m looking for something and I hear a couple debating one form of Kashi to another. All of it is crap, but you can see from the website why moonbats like it. They have all the buzzwords and tribal chants packed into their marketing. The couple truly believed that stuff is superior to a bowl of Fruit Loops, which it is not. They would be better off snorting a bowl of sugar…

A commenter mentioned his conversion to a low-carb diet. When I wrestled, our coach called this an athlete’s diet. In wrestling, the goal is maximum strength and stamina at the lowest possible weight. Wrestlers are always cutting weight and are obsessed with their diet. You have to be. Our coach preached a diet of chicken, turkey, eggs, green vegetables and fruit as a snack. When I hit my middle years I went back to that diet and lost most of the weight I gained in my 30’s. I eat a dozen eggs a week and all the meat I can stand. My cholesterol is low so my doctor tells me to stick with it…

Another commenter complained that I ignored the real issue facing our electric grid when I went off on that fat tub of goo, Newt Gingrich. Here’s the thing. There’s nothing we can do about the electric grid. The chances of someone getting a nuke here and setting it off are infinitesimally small. Even if they manage it, the chances they do so in a way that wrecks the grid is equally low.

I’m old enough now to have a few scares under my belt. Every one of them comes with hands out demanding cash from the public till. In the fullness of time, all but a few were shown to be scams. Air pollution from cars is a notable exception. Lead in gas is probably another. Given Gingrich’s habit of selling his opinion to the highest bidder, we should assume he is being paid to lie in an effort to scam money from Congress.

My advise here is simple. Never trust a dishonest man…

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