Wasting Natural Resources

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Youth is wasted on the young. — George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw's bon mot might have focused on his wistful recollection of opportunities squandered on superficial objectives, especially in the physical prime of life. But it is my opinion that there is much more waste of opportunity through failure to recognize one of its prime resources: the living repository of lessons learned in the school of hard knocks — our senior citizenry.

I think that in large measure such negligent avoidance of senior guidance is a gross waste of one of our enduring resources. The culture that disparages words of empirical wisdom as "old wives tales" or the mutterings of geezers is doomed to repeat the inanities of youthful foolishness and the excesses of mid-life crises. Sadly, such cultural shortsightedness appears to be universal.

I think the blame for such waste is widespread as well. Young people have a natural tendency to rebel against the "old ways", and they give much more credence to the unschooled opinions of their contemporaries than their contemporaries' general lack of experience deserves. Their parents are too busy scrambling for solutions to problems self-imposed in the processes of their own rebellions. And the grandparents, who have knowledge of at least some general purpose solutions to certain recurring problems, are often tired of trying to convince the younger generations that they have something of value to share.

And so the human comedy keeps on keeping on, down through the generations, as each new generation re-invents the wheel of self-inflicted adversity. To err is human. To keep on making the same age-related mistakes? Well, that seems to be the human condition, too.

Now hear this, young people: Barack Obama — very bad medicine. Trust me. I'm a muttering geezer.

Post 1,726 Wasting Natural Resources

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This Week's Best of Rule 5

 Image via ru-foto.livejournal.com

Post 1,725 This Week's Best of Rule 5

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Fairness Redux

Image via Wikipedia

This again?

Scott Adams' post (excerpted below) reminds me of my own post of four years ago, which I decided was worth re-posting in its entirety (below the Adams excerpt).

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Related source » Fairness Again:  'via Blog this'
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“As I've said far too often, fairness isn't an objective feature of the universe. It's a concept that was invented so children and idiots can participate in arguments. […] I don't have an overall conclusion in terms of tax fairness because fairness isn't a real thing. People simply do whatever they think will maximize their benefit, give or take some irrationality. Fairness is just the marketing spin. All I'm saying today is that any discussion of tax rate fairness needs to include a discussion of who gets the most benefits. A more complete discussion of fairness, as I'm suggesting, will still be ridiculous, because fairness is an illusion. But for some reason I can't settle for half an illusion. I like my absurdities in full servings.”
— Scott Adams Blog: Oct 26, 2011 (dilbert.com)

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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2007

Not fair? Define fair!

by TheBigHenry • LABELS Life (and Other Concepts)

"It's not fair!" "Yes it is!" "Ain't so!" "'Tis too!" "No!" "Yes!" ...

The above exchange can be overheard just about any place you happen to be. It is a shouting match between two people, neither of whom likely knows what he or she is talking about. Because I'll bet dollars to donuts neither of them has bothered to consider what they can agree on as a definition for fairness.

Let's take a very familiar example to demonstrate what is fair under certain circumstances. Consider the usual process that will determine which team will kick off a game of football. The outcome is based on a coin toss, and it is fair because, presumably, a fair coin will be tossed by the referee. What makes a coin fair? Clearly it is a coin that is not biased in favor of either of the two possible outcomes, heads or tails. From this we can conclude that an important, arguably the most important, attribute of fairness is a sense of equal treatment of participants whenever multiple participants are involved in a process that lends itself to a fairness assessment.

Let's take another example, much more complicated than the above, but also near and dear to every American with an income, namely, "What makes for a fair income tax structure?" Here we have a much more complex situation than the above, for several reasons. First, we want to define equal treatment for all participants, but with the added complication that there are many significant differences (read inequalities) among the huge population of income earning participants. Another set of complications derive from the complexity of the need for an income tax. The Government requires the income tax to generate funds that in turn enable the Government to function. How to proceed?

Frequently, it is easier to work backwards, which in mathematics is sometimes referred to as the adjoint approach. To begin with, the Government must raise some minimum amount of tax revenue in order to perform its functions for the citizenry. Given the required amount that must be raised, how to apportion the burden on individual taxpayers that would be fair in some sense? First and foremost, it is obvious that every increment of income should be taxed at a specific (though possibly different from other ordinal increments') rate. This insures that every taxpayer's increment of income is taxed fairly, because every ordinal increment of income for every individual taxpayer is taxed identically. Now all that would be required is a formula for specifying the tax rates of ordinal income increments that would guarantee the tax revenue so generated will be sufficient for the Government's needs.

The formula will doubtless have to be specified such that the tax rate will increase with increasing ordinal income increment because that will satisfy the sense of fairness based on the recognition that the ability to pay taxes without exceeding an individual's ability to survive the burden so imposed increases with increasing ordinal income increment. But we must also bear in mind an individual's primary motivation for earning additional income: There aren't many people willing to earn income unless some of it can be kept. Hence, the maximum tax rate must remain below 100%.

At this point we have almost reached the end of our definition of a fair income tax structure. There remains the need to specify an algorithm for calculating an individual's income tax. Ideally, an algorithm would correspond to a graph of Tax Rate[%] as a function of Income Increment[$] that begins at a point in the neighborhood of ($0,0%), and monotonically increases toward ($Gates-Highest-Increment,Max%), such that, for each individual taxpayer, his own last increment of income corresponds to his own highest percent tax. The overall constraint would be that the total of all taxpayers' payments met the Government's minimum revenue requirement.

Each taxpayer's payment would correspond to the area under the tax graph of Tax Rate[%] versus Income Increment[$], between the income limits of zero and final dollar earned (by the individual). This computed area is expressed in units of "%$", which is equivalent to "$" because "%" is a dimensionless (i.e., scalar) quantity. Computation of such an area is equivalent to mathematical integration. It is commonly approximated numerically by summing a histogram of contiguous tax brackets.

I believe that the crucial consideration of fairness, which is at the heart of most controversy, concerns the specification of bracket boundaries and their corresponding tax rates. These are the free parameters that are most likely to be based on political and pragmatic considerations. In order to introduce at least a perceived spirit of fairness in choosing these parameters, a requirement could be imposed that each bracket contains an equal portion of the total area under the tax curve. In so doing, each bracket of income would, in principal, contribute an equal share of the tax burden for each individual taxpayer. This might satisfy the demands of those who require that everyone pays his "fair share" of tax revenue.

The final bow to fairness is necessarily arbitrary to the extent that the area calculation is only approximate, though the approximation can be made as precise as desired by using as many tax brackets as required. In a very real sense, there is a trade off between the degree of "fairness" and the degree of the individual tax preparer's burden. Considering that tax preparation is already so harrowing that it prompted Albert Einstein to quip 'The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax', my guess is that about a half dozen tax brackets is all anyone can handle before they would be persuaded to blow their own brains out.

Post 1,724 Fairness Redux

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Far Above Cayuga's Waters

My article "Far Above Cayuga's Waters" was first published October 23, 2011 at 2:18 pm on the Technorati web site. I am reproducing it here today, in accordance with Technorati's cross-posting policy.
 — TheBigHenry (AKA Henri LeGrand)

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Far Above Cayuga's Waters - Technorati Politics: 'via Blog this'

View of Cayuga Lake from Cornell Campus
(Image via Wikipedia)

Cornell University is one of the eight official Ivy League schools, one of two in New York (the other being Columbia University). All of the Ivy League's institutions are located in the Northeastern United States, and they are widely acknowledged to be among the top academic institutions in the world. I am an alumnus of both New York Ivies, having earned my BS at Cornell and my MS and PhD at Columbia.

I suppose my academic credentials would suffice for admission to the self-anointed American intelligentsia. But like Groucho Marx, I would never accept membership in any club that would have me as its member, especially not one that was self anointed. The American intelligentsia has a penchant for telling other people what to do and how to do it, presumably because their academic achievements entitle them to know with certainty what is good for their less-well-educated compatriots. As Nobel Laureate I. I. Rabi quipped in connection with the discovery of the muon, "Who ordered that?" It was certainly not the Founding Fathers of our great meritocracy.

Barack Obama is perceived to be an American intellectual, having putatively earned degrees from Columbia University and from Harvard University, the latter being often viewed as the creme de la creme of the Ivies. Where Obama and I part ways, however, is that he relishes the idea of telling everyone what is good for them, even though he has displayed on occasion a glaring expression of deer-in-the-headlights about the workings of the world around us.

I wonder if the American electorate, the vast majority of whom do not belong to the class of people who require life-instruction emanating from an ivory tower of presumptuous pomposity, will acquiesce to four more years of such meddling in their lives and their livelihoods.

Post 1,723 Far Above Cayuga's Waters

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Home on the Rage

Where the dear ignoramuses play …

 Image via Theo

Related source » Works and Days » Rage On—and on and on…: 'via Blog this'
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“In sum, there is panic. Obamacare, near-zero interest rates, more environmental and fiscal regulations, government take-overs, bailouts, and stimulus, nearly $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion in annual deficits, vast increases in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and hectoring the private sector—all that and more did not restore prosperity. […] All Obama in 2012 is left with is the old trifecta of ‘Bush did it’, ‘they’ will cut your Social Security, and a subtle racism fuels all opposition. […] Instead, we are left with an energy-poor country sitting on energy riches, a moribund economy with millions in the private sector piling up cash rather than investing or hiring, and cohorts of young, flat-broke, indebted, and politically prepped but poorly schooled students wondering where is the good life and why does a Wall Street fixer, or computer nerd, or company man civil engineer make so much more than they, the anointed, do?”
— October 23, 2011 - by Victor Davis Hanson (pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson)

---

That so-called "writing on the wall" is not all it's cracked up to be. It has stood for whatever should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense. Unfortunately, our disaffected (but not disinfected, unfortunately) youth, having paid for (with their parents' money or via huge sums of personal debt) degrees that aren't worth the paper they're printed on, can't even read with comprehension that proverbial writing on the wall. So they do what they used to do in college when confronted with assignments deemed too difficult and/or too boring to deal with — they "party!"

Back in the day, the college kids of my generation also "partied", though the expression we used was "panty raid". Moreover, though such group activity did tend to get rowdy, we ordinarily confined our exuberance to the vicinity of the girls' dorms. As you can surmise, "back in the day" for me means before co-gender dorms and before the dumbing-down of college degrees to the level previously occupied by high-school diplomas, being mindful that a high-school diploma was then, as it still is now, essentially free of charge.

So what is it that the OWS crowd doesn't get? In essence, they, and as a consequence their parents and other creditors, have been had. And what is worse, they don't even understand that they've been had, because they simply haven't had the type of education that would enable them to think and figure things out for themselves. They have paid enormous fees for the privilege of being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark about how the real world works and fed bullshit courses like "Black, Latino, gender, green, film, gay, peace, or leisure studies", all marinated in leftist propaganda by the overwhelmingly "progressive" university staff.

So these losers, not that it's all their own fault, though losers they are, nevertheless, party/rage against "those" who committed them to an adulthood without the necessary skills to make a go of it in our twenty-first century socioeconomic environment. And when the harsher seasonal weather sets in, they will have to find a more comfortable venue for expressing their grievances. For the time being, it will most likely be in their parents' basements. And what then? Well, then, there is always more hopey-dopey, mofo.

Post 1,722 Home on the Rage

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A "Sophie's Choice" for Israel

Gilad Shalit    (h/t Theo)

Laden with happiness and tears   …

Related source » Sophie's Choice (novel) - Wikipedia: 'via Blog this'
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“A "Sophie's Choice" is a tragic choice between two unbearable options.”
— From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (wikipedia.org)

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What can one say about such a dilemma that hasn't already been analyzed and re-analyzed in excruciating detail by legions of people? In the novel by William Styron the diabolical choice confronting the eponymous heroin of the story was thrust upon her in Auschwitz at the beginning of her internment. The kidnapping of the young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, by Hamas terrorists presented the State of Israel with a similar dilemma. I can only express my emotional response upon hearing the news that this unfortunate young man was given another chance at life after years of captivity under what must have been a daily torment for him, his family, and for the Jewish people of Israel.

I have read all the objections to the final agreement that won release for Gilad in exchange for more than one thousand convicted terrorists from Israeli prisons. Considered soberly and dispassionately, one can not deny the legitimacy of such objections. But from my perspective, I can not imagine considering such a choice dispassionately. Gilad is a flesh and blood individual known to many who love him and cherish his existence. That other (as yet unknown) individuals will likely pay with their lives for Gilad's return is horrible to contemplate. Nevertheless, at this moment in time, my heart goes out to Gilad and his loved ones. At some future time, I will mourn those whom the released-by-Israel murderers will kill.

I think such decisions must be made ahead of time, before a known individual is kidnapped. In a sober moment, before any real individual victim is identified, the State of Israel must adopt an official and unambiguous policy that will automatically resolve its response to any such incidence of kidnapping. The official policy of the State must not include any wiggle room; the abominable choices are impossible to make rationally after the fact.

And, god help me, the official policy must include the most extreme retaliatory measures. I know that it is Israel's inclination to take the high road under most circumstances. But diabolical actions by one's enemies sometimes preclude all manner of "high roads". If I had the power to establish such a response policy, I would not exclude consideration of retaliatory decimation of terrorist prisoners.

Post 1,721 A "Sophie's Choice" for Israel

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Unification At Last!

From the ridiculous to the sublime …

Related source » Great news: OWS now endorsed by both Communist and Nazi Parties « Hot Air: 'via Blog this'
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]  h/t Theo

“Just yesterday, Barack Obama asserted that Martin Luther King, Jr would have supported the Occupy Movement. […] In its statement on Sunday, the Westland, Mich.-based Nazi party wrote that the Occupy Wall Street protests are “TAYLOR [sic] MADE for National Socialists, as well as WN [White Nationalists] who are serious about DOING SOMETHING.” […] Occupy Los Angeles protester: “Patricia McAllister, I’m here representing myself but I do work for the Los Angeles Unified School District. I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve — which is not run by the federal government — they need to be run out of this country.” […] Now the White House has apparently decided to align itself with Communists and Nazis, at least for the political benefit: President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.”
— POSTED AT 8:45 AM ON OCTOBER 17, 2011 BY ED MORRISSEY (hotair.com)

---

Being of a certain age I have seen some crazy shit in my day. And every time I have thought that I had seen the limit, I have been surprised to see that limit exceeded.

h/t dailymail.co.uk

There is no accounting for the inventiveness of the no-accounts when it comes to demonstrable and/or willful ignorance. The envelope of our social contract appears to have unbounded elasticity, which in the latest stretch permits public defecation on municipal property, documented and made publicly available on the web, but not prosecuted. Perhaps this latest flaunting of rudimentary public decency is just the latest offering at the alter of political correctness. Perhaps the defecating ass-hole was subjected to harsh toilet-training when he was a younger child. Perhaps his training wasn't harsh enough. Who can say?

Hopey-dopey, mofo. Yes we can!

Post 1,720 Unification At Last!

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This Week's Best of Rule 5

 Image via Theo

Post 1,719 This Week's Best of Rule 5

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State of Quiescence

Steve Jobs, Feb. 24, 1955 – Oct. 5, 2011  (Image via Theo)

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(Image via Theo)

Post 1,718 State of Quiescence

Let's not get ahead of ourselves …

Image via Wikipedia

"Big Al was wrong, once — back when he declared that his inclusion of the cosmological constant was a blunder." — TheBigHenry

"99.999…% of the time, if you bet against Big Al, you lose." — TheBigHenry

"Only two things are certain, taxes and Big Al, and I'm not sure about the former." — TheBigHenry

Related source » Gone in 60 nanoseconds
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light. […] The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. […] It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong. The fundamental axiom of Einstein’s theory of relativity is the absolute prohibition on speed faster than light. Einstein’s predictions about how time slows and mass increases as one approaches the speed of light have been verified by a mountain of experimental evidence. As velocity increases, mass approaches infinity and time dilates, making it progressively and, ultimately, infinitely difficult to achieve light speed. Which is why nothing does. And nothing ever has. Until two weeks ago Thursday. […] Not that there aren’t already mysteries in physics. Neutrinos themselves are ghostly particles that travel through nearly everything unimpeded. (Thousands [more like trillions — TBH] are traversing your body as you read this.) But that is simplicity itself compared to quantum mechanics, whose random arbitrariness so offended Einstein that he famously objected that God does not play dice with the universe. […] But if quantum mechanics was a challenge to human sensibilities, this pesky Swiss-Italian neutrino is their undoing. It means that Einstein’s relativity — a theory of uncommon beauty upon which all of physics has been built for 100 years — is wrong. Not just inaccurate. Not just flawed. But deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong.” [emphasis added]
— Charles Krauthammer, October 6, 2011 (washingtonpost.com)

---

"Wrong" — an absolute term that is frequently and, sometimes, absurdly misapplied, as in Mr. Krauthammer's breathless account (above). Charles is a learned man (MD) as well as a syndicated political columnist (and a fervent baseball fan, to boot). But in this instance, he allowed his columnist's enthusiasm for the spectacular to get the best of him.

Conventional wisdom has it that any new scientific theory, which purports to accommodate some new scientific findings, completely invalidates its predecessor scientific theory. In most cases, however, it does no such thing. What it does do is extend scientific explanations for physical phenomena into new regimes of energy, momentum, and/or scales of distance and time. Thus, Einstein's special and general theories of relativity did not invalidate Maxwell's electromagnetism nor Newton's gravity. Relativity extended the earlier classical theories into new scales or regimes of measurement.

Our current theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and the “standard model” of subatomic particles are not in danger of becoming "deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong" as Charles Krauthammer gushes in his article. Nor is "everything we know about the universe" about to be labeled "WRONG". That is just plain wrongheaded and at least mildly hysterical thinking.

Quite possibly, the ongoing experiments by the LHC at CERN have (or will have) encountered never-before witnessed phenomena, in view of the ultra-high-energy regimes being investigated there. The apparent violation of the lightspeed limit by neutrinos, which are thought to have negligible albeit non-zero (positive) mass, is clearly an anomaly that at present can not be explained in traditional terms. But the explanations that will eventually be forthcoming will most likely not require our abandonment of "everything we know about the universe".

For example, neutrinos were originally postulated to exist in order to satisfy the long accepted physical conservation laws of energy and momentum, in lieu of relinquishing the latter laws themselves. Subsequently, neutrinos were further characterized with slightly positive mass and, furthermore, 3 flavors (electron, muon, and tau, with successively greater mass for each flavor). Most recently, neutrinos have been observed to have the ability to oscillate between flavors, which, in turn, not only supports the proposition that their mass is non-zero, but also the proposition that they have the ability to alter their mass (by way of oscillating between flavors)!

This interesting anomaly-in-need-of-explanation might be explained without resorting to substantive modification of special relativity. One possible conjecture, though perhaps outside the realm of "everything we have learned thus far about the laws of our universe", is that neutrinos have the ability to transform themselves or oscillate not only between flavors having different positive mass, but also between one or more of the known flavors and a tachyonic flavor, however briefly (in terms of real time), which would prohibit them (in that guise) from slowing down to subluminal speeds! Highly unlikely and grossly speculative, you say? Of course it is, and I am not entirely serious in proposing it. But compared to a bona fide violation of special relativity, it could happen …

In any case, whatever the ultimate explanation for this anomaly turns out to be, it is not likely to invalidate everything we already know, but only to add to it.

---

 h/t Theo

Post 1,717 Let's not get ahead of ourselves …

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Junk food may be favored by the poor …

… butt a fat ass is not proof of poverty.

One of these things is not like the others …
h/t ZION'STRUMPET

Related source » The 'Hunger' Hoax via Blog this
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another. […] Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less. The political left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But […] [b]urgers, pizzas and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. […] Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don't find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. […] An arrogant elite's condescension toward the people -- treating them as children who have to be jollied along -- is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening a society. […] We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck. Why are such people called "poor"? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality. Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in "poverty" to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.” [emphasis added]
— Thomas Sowell, 2011/10/05 (/townhall.com)

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Related source » Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? via Blog this
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home. This is just plain wrong.” [emphasis added]
— By MARK BITTMAN, Published: September 24, 2011 (nytimes.com)

---

OK; I'm biased. I prefer skinny-assed women. Butt everyone is entitled to their own ass-preferences.

I am not a nutritionist; nor do I cook, aside from a rare left-over pizza-slice (which I am adept at nuking). But this business about how all those poor fat-assed women can't help their condition because, you know, they are forced to eat nothing but burgers, nachos, and cat-food is, according to people who do know a thing or two about nutrition and food prices, is bullshit.

Such women are, in most cases, fat-assed because they love to eat cheeseburgers (extra cheese and extra burger), washed-down with super-sized barrels of high-fructose corn-syrupy soft-drinks. And, despite what urban legend and leftist politicians would have you believe, it is not cheaper than healthy home-cooked meals. It is just more fun to eat that junk. I know; I love it, too. But my wife only lets me indulge my sinful pleasure when my begging gets on her nerves, and during the High Holy Days.

Post 1,716 Junk food may be favored by the poor …

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This Week's Best of Rule 5

 Модель: Катя via ruphotography.ru

Post 1,715 This Week's Best of Rule 5

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Why …

… did the chicken cross the road?

Related source » Pic Dump
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

Post 1,714 Why …