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I love humanity but I hate people.
And to think that Edna St. Vincent Millay (who is quoted as having said this first) and I have something in common…
Historic low in NYC, Chicago homicides
“Chicago and New York are about to close out 2007 with the lowest number of homicides in more than 40 years, while cities such as Baltimore, Atlanta and Miami have seen killings go up because of what police say is a surge in guns and gang violence. New York City reported 488 slayings as of Friday, versus 596 for all of 2006. The city is on track to have the lowest number of killings since reliable record-keeping started in 1963.
Homicides in New York reached an all-time high of 2,245 in 1990, making the city the nation’s murder capital. Since then, the numbers have plummeted, and experts attribute the decline in part to computerized tracking of crime trends and the practice of strategically flooding high-crime areas with police officers instead of spreading them evenly through the precincts.
Chicago is on track to have the lowest homicide toll since 1965, when police reported 395 killings. The city had logged 435 slayings through Dec. 26. In the early part of the decade, police often reported more than 600 a year.”
After many years, today I watched an episode of Cosmos.
It had been so long that I didn’t quite remember Carl Sagan’s voice. I was astonished to realize after few seconds that his voice is exactly the same as… Agent Smith.
Of course, I was not the first to notice:
Assuming this was not a coincidence, I wonder what the Wachowski brothers were trying to say. That Carl was an agent? Or that Agent Smith was a scientific genius?
According to the Iraq Coalition Casualties website, so far in these 24 days of December 17 soldiers have been killed in Iraq, a daily average of 0.71.
This is the lowest number since the war started in 2003. In December 2006, 115 soldiers were killed.
For all of those who criticized the surge and announced with total confidence that this was a new Vietnam, this is quite a change and possibly bad news.
For all the others like me, who could not care less about the political aspects of this and just want the suffering to stop, this is a great Christmas gift.
I am not a big Huckabee fan. I think he is a bit iffy on market policy, taxes, and too harsh on immigration.
Now, sometimes I feel tempted to support him just because of all the absurd things people say about him. I mean, what in the world is wrong with this Christmas message?
You got to be really crazy to start talking about floating crosses and messianic messages. Even if he had a cross there, IT IS CHRISTMAS! Christ birthday! You either stop commemorating this or be quiet about “religious undertones”!
This is not happening just with Huckabee. Today I saw Giuliani being interviewed by Stephanopoulos and the guy would not shut up about religion. Rudy tried to go back to real issues but it was simply impossible.
Democrats love to cry about how radical Republicans are about religion, but at the end this is all political fodder. They want you to believe that Republicans are all about religion. They will never stop and say “wow, 3 of the 5 main Republican candidates are not that into religion. One is a Mormon! That must mean something.”
At the same time you have Obama in black churches every week, Clinton talking at all Baptist Churches in Iowa and nobody cares.
Can you imagine the brouhaha if something like this would happen to a Republican?
Since it’s Bill, that is all funny and light. And that was supposed to be helping Hillary!
Ah, the press…
People love the concept of freedom.
I am not sure however, whether people really understand all the implications of a free society. I am not talking about geo politics, war and peace, nothing of the kind. I am talking of personal freedom.
Alex wrote this post, where among other things a friend of his describes “how it is to be an American earning a bit more than poverty level income”. The guy has a blog too, so you can read the original.
The point of the original post is that not everyone is rich in the US and that living on a 40k income with a family of 5 is not easy. I don’t doubt that, but I think some things need to be noted since we are talking about anecdotes here. Some years ago, my income was pretty close to 40k. I didn’t own a house. Heck, I didn’t even own a car (I was leasing one). I didn’t have internet cable. My wife and I chose not to have more kids. We didn’t go out to dinner that often. Things were not easy, but we never considered ourselves “poor”.
However, the point I really have a problem with is the one that Alex makes about how being poor is “un-American” and how things are oh so much easier for poor people in poor countries.
He even says that “there is no worse place in the world (US) to be poor”.
Alex was probably going for style here, but this is really a stupid thing to say in any circumstance. You just need to look at what poor people from warm paradises like Mexico and Cuba do to get here. I would expect more respect from such a socially concerned person with the suffering of these folks.
But the issue I want to talk about a bit more is the concept that “being poor” is just something that happens to Americans.
—x—
The real question people need to answer is: Do you understand what freedom means?
I could just walk out of my house right now, enter a dealer and buy a beautiful brand new Mercedes Benz. Furthermore: I would probably be able to pay for it and enjoy it very much.
The word here is probably. I could also lose my job tomorrow and have used up enough money that could be used to buy food for my kids for the next 3 years in a stupid car.
Who rewards me for making the *right* decisions in my life? Will anyone write a book about the guy who saved money all his life and was prepared when the shit hit the fan?
Are the decisions made by someone who earns half of what I do that different than mine? Is choosing to have another kid when you earn 40k a year any different than buying a car that is just too expensive?
Should we force people to follow a certain path?
Yes, life is risky, and the US is an especially risky society. Remember that whole thing about “pursuit of happiness” that you learned at school? Do you ever wonder why the founding fathers didn’t say “pursuit of a house, car and 3 children?”
Would you like if someone told you that your happiness is to have a house, a car and three children? Worse: what if someone told you that you would not be allowed to have those things until you earn X dollars a year?
Would you like that?
—x—
Liberals tend to focus on the hardships of poor people, never how they got poor in the first place. It is not even clear if liberals want to bring people out of poverty or if they want to make poverty more comfortable. To help people out of poverty would require looking at people’s choices and even worse: it would require telling people what they should and should not do.
It is always easier to picture poor people as having extremely bad luck or somehow being downtrodden by society’s worse. A legion of hard working people who get screwed by another legion of scrooge like bosses who despise children and sleep in pillows made of 100$ bills.
Alex mentions the horrendous Ehrenreich book “Nickel and Dimed”, which describes how difficult it is to have a low level job in the US. I don’t think there is any doubt that working at Wal-Mart is not a dream job. What Ehrenreich doesn’t mention is what she really wants to have done to “fix” this situation. Does she want the government to force companies to pay more? Maybe she wants government welfare so these people don’t need to work! Should we force these people back to school? You are never sure.
So they want to give people freedom to make bad choices but want society to pay the bill when things get tough.
I am all for the government helping people who got the shortest straw. But should we really feel bad for people who just made bad decisions?
—x—
I came to this country with nothing but a job and a half good education. Had I lost that job, I would have to leave empty handed. It wasn’t even a fun or well paying job by the way. I had no help from government or family here. Still, I didn’t prosper because of my last name or because of the color of my skin.
The point is not that things could have gone bad for me and my family. This would be the norm in pretty much every other country in the world. The real point is that things worked out. There are very few places on earth where this is actually possible.
I don’t get mad when people bad mouth the US because I am a crazy patriot who thinks Americans are god chosen people who are superior to the rest of the world. I get mad because this country is the closest you can ever get to this crazy idea of freedom. The idea that you are free to choose your profession, how much you want to work, where to spend your money, how many kids you want to have, and even if you want to stay in this country at all.
I get mad because I started from zero, chose my own path and got to a point where I am today.
Lula falando sobre a Bolívia:
“Num país onde 80% da população é de índios, não pode ter governante de olho verde que fala inglês”
Imagine se alguém usasse essa lógica nos EUA, com os brancos e o Obama.
Pior: Imagine se esse alguém fosse o Bush.
First, Alex showed (based on Congressional Budget Office numbers) who paid for the Federal government:
“The remarkable finding is that the rich and especially the very rich bear by far the largest share of the federal tax liability. The top 10% of households by income, for example, pay more than half of all federal taxes and the top 1% alone pay over a quarter of all federal taxes.”
Then, based on many responses to that first post, he showed who benefits most from the government services:
“Thus in a generous accounting the rich get 26% of the benefits of federal spending and pay 68.7% of the costs. In percentage terms the rich get about 37 cents on the dollar.”
Comments in both posts are all very interesting, well worth the time.
Here is what Charlie Stross thought about Japan. Indeed, Tokyo feels like the future. If that is what awaits us, I love it.
Here are some of my favorite pics (click for bigger size):
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My other posts about Japan:
Viva Tokyo!
Japanese Technology
Japanese Society
The Capitalism gene
You got to be kidding:
Greenspan Urges U.S. to Help Those Facing Foreclosure
I experienced first hand the so called “abuse” of lenders. You want to know what it is? First, they don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining how a loan works. You HAVE to do your homework. Second, they want to convince you to buy a bigger house. If you follow their lead, they will help you to lie in your loan application.
During the “boom” years, I had a chance to buy a home twice and refinanced each house once.
My first loan was a mess, mostly because I didn’t do my homework and therefore had no idea of what I was doing. It was a 100% financed loan (I suspect it would fall into the “sub-prime” category) and it was basically a 3 year variable rate. I lost my job soon after and almost lost the house. I refinanced it as soon as I could. I sold that house when I moved and bought another without a problem. The lender was pissed that I didn’t want a bigger house but I simply told him to back off and that was it. I later refinanced because the rates were so much lower that it was worth it.
So I understand how people fall in these traps… but I can tell you with 100% certainty that this is completely avoidable. To compare this with a natural disaster is a total and complete lunacy.
What do you think will happen if the government hands out this kind of help? Do you think these people will say “wow that was close! Let me read some material so I don’t make the same mistake next time!” or do you think they will just say “good! I knew I didn’t have to worry about buying more than I could afford. Now let’s go to Best Buy and get that 42 inch plasma! Pay only in 2010!”
Of course I understand this utilitarian view that the economy will suffer more if people default, and that mortgage based securities will fall all over the market and bring my retirement savings down, etc, etc.
But listen, for once we should all pay the price for that. If my retirement saving goes down, I will find the stock funds that bought those damn MBS packages and drop them. This way they would learn their leasson too!
We shouldn’t be talking about freezing rates or handing out money. We should be talking about having huge government ads and manuals being print at this moment telling people how stupid they were and where to get information so they don’t do it again. That’s it!
I see this kind of crazy mommy government thinking as the main threat to the world economy, especially the industrialized countries.
Capitalism works because is logical and deterministic. People only understand their mistakes when they pay for them. To think otherwise is to profoundly ignore human nature.
According to Mankiw:
• The right sees large deadweight losses associated with taxation and, therefore, is worried about the growth of government as a share in the economy. The left sees smaller elasticities of supply and demand and, therefore, is less worried about the distortionary effect of taxes.
• The right sees externalities as an occasional market failure that calls for government intervention, but sees this as relatively rare exception to the general rule that markets lead to efficient allocations. The left sees externalities as more pervasive.
• The right sees competition as a pervasive feature of the economy and market power as typically limited both in magnitude and duration. The left sees large corporations with substantial degrees of monopoly power that need to be checked by active antitrust policy.
• The right sees people as largely rational, doing the best the can given the constraints they face. The left sees people making systematic errors and believe that it is the government role’s to protect people from their own mistakes.
• The right sees government as a terribly inefficient mechanism for allocating resources, subject to special-interest politics at best and rampant corruption at worst. The left sees government as the main institution that can counterbalance the effects of the all-too-powerful marketplace.
• There is one last issue that divides the right and the left—perhaps the most important one. That concerns the issue of income distribution. Is the market-based distribution of income fair or unfair, and if unfair, what should the government do about it? That is such a big topic that I will devote the entire next lecture to it.
This news about how human evolution is speeding up is really fascinating.
The most interesting article came from Time:
“A genetic analysis of human evolution has shown that rather than slowing to a standstill it has speeded up, with different pressures on different populations pushing racial groups further apart. Scientists behind the findings suggest that European, African and Asian populations grew genetically more distinct from each other over several thousand years, as their environments took them down different evolutionary paths. This would call into question the popular scientific view that race has little or no biological meaning, as the genetic similarities between ethnic groups greatly outweigh differences.
While this remains true – all humans share more than 99 per cent of their DNA – the new work indicates that variations tend to differ between races, and that these became more, not less, pronounced.”
The so called “popular scientific view” mentioned could also be mentioned as a liberal view of race. The view that we everything and everybody is exactly the same, and therefore there is no better or worse. This means ignoring certain obvious things, like the fact that certain races and cultures deal better with our current world challenges than others.
Now, I understand how crazy dictators or whatever evil force could use this kind of info in a racist or genocidal way.
But we are supposed to be scientific here, right? If one is honest about this race issue, it has to admit that there are clear differences between races. How that will impact our lives is completely up to us. But lying about it doesn’t really seem the way to go about it.
The Greenest Hypocrites of 2007
“I’ll believe (global warming) is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. That clearly hasn’t happened yet.”
Senate Approves Peru Trade Agreement, Sends to Bush
Not even the Democrats could go against this one (vote was 77-18). I guess free trade is not in such a free fall after all.
Very interesting article about how kids react differently to challenges and how they view intelligence differently.
“Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.”
My personal experience shows that this is THE most important trait regarding success in life.
Short but to the point editorial about this next UN Global Warming Conference:
“A high number of United Nations officials — always ready to help mankind if they can do it with unlimited expense accounts and first-class benefits — will be scurrying off to Bali next month to save the planet. They will be attending a conference on climate change.To show their deep concern about the fate of the planet, shouldn’t the representatives fly commercial? They could jet-pool to cut down on all the pollution.Nope. Many, if not most, of the delegates will be arriving by private jet.
In fact, “the management of Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport are concerned that the large number of additional private charter flights expected during the UN Conference will exceed the carrying capacity of apron areas,” according to a Bali news report.
But all those private jets will be spewing out global warming pollutants. Isn’t this akin to bulldozing trees to build a center that will host a conference on deforestation?
To quote University of Tennessee Law professor Glenn Reynolds, “I’ll believe (global warming) is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. That clearly hasn’t happened yet.”
More about the subject here and here.
Another valid question is: Why in the world are these people meeting in Bali? Don’t they have enough tourists there? Why not try to bring UN dollars (i.e. mine and yours) to some poor and isolated place?
Vocês podem pensar que o rebaixamento do Corinthians é fruto de anos de corrupção e incompetência.
Pobres analfabetos funcionais!
A verdade meus amigos nunca é tão simples e aparente. Vou arriscar tudo (eu sei que eles estão olhando) e explicar para todos a verdadeira origem da tragédia corintiana.
Tudo comecou em 1999. Lembram da Hicks Muse Tate & Furst Incorporated? Sim, naquele ano eles tinham comprado o departamento de futebol do Corinthians. E quem era o dono da HMTF? Tom Hicks, um grande amigo da família Bush!
Bush estava atrás de influência na América Latina. Qual alvo melhor do que os clubes de futebol mais populares do continente? Era um plano perfeito.
Tudo ia bem até que em 2002 a “parceria” entra em crise a acaba rapidamente. O que mais tinha acontecido em 2002, hein amigos?
Sim, Lula arquitetou pessoalmente o fim do acordo com a HMTF. Bush tentou processar o Dualib por US$ 45 milhões, mas o governo brasileiro agiu e matou o processo.
Lula (corintiano) deu o troco em Bush, de tabela ganhou a amizade de Chavez e aumentou o anti-americanismo no continente.
Logo depois em 2004, veio a afronta ainda maior: uma nova parceria com a MSI, que nada mais era que uma front para a mafia russa de investidores iranianos. O dinheiro da MSI não somente trouxe jogadores como tambem resultados (o título de 2005 foi claramente comprado).
E quem era o astro desse time de 2005 ? Tevez. Da onde ele veio ? Boca. Quem é o maior idolo do Boca ? Maradona “I love Che e Chavez”!
A conexão comunista/islamo/nazista estava feita. Foi ali que a CIA entrou novamente em cena.
Primeio, compraram os conselheiros corintianos (que apoiaram Duablib por 14 anos!) e derrubaram de uma vez só o velho Presidente e a MSI. Até armaram uma armadilha para pegar Dualib declarando que US$ 10 milhões salvariam ele e o time (ele já sabia o que estava por vir).
Depois, comecou a desmontar o time. William, único bom jogador do Timão em 2007, vai para um time totalmente desconhecido da Ucrânia… Pais com qual Bush tinha assinado uma parceria estratégica em 2005!
O Inter, que entregou o jogo ontem para o Goiás, foi roubado do titulo em 2005. Mas esse ano recebeu de volta Nilmar, um dos simbolos da MSI, com a ajuda de “um grupo de empresarios” (não preciso dizer da onde), e teve a chance de dar o troco no rival. O coitado do juiz de ontem nem precisava ter mandado voltar o pênalti duas vezes de maneira tão bizarra… A vitória verde era garantida.
Sim meus amigos. O que aconteceu nesse domingo foi o mais uma armação da CIA e do homem mais odiado que Nero.
George W. Bush mandou o maior time do Brasil para a segundona! Ah, e no mesmo dia em que Chavez perdeu sua primeira eleição na Venezuela.
Coincidência? I DON”T THINK SO!
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