For those still supporting Romney…

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

Much as I detest Obama, Romney is way worse than the evil bastard we have in office now. Read this article (yes it is long, but then, dammit, he is currently 50% likely to be our next President, so take the time!) and think about what it would mean to have this man at the top of our political hierarchy. Here is just one notable quote:

Thanks to the tax deduction, in other words, the government actually incentivizes the kind of leverage-based takeovers that Romney built his fortune on. Romney the businessman built his career on two things that Romney the candidate decries: massive debt and dumb federal giveaways. “I don’t know what Romney would be doing but for debt and its tax-advantaged position in the tax code,” says a prominent Wall Street lawyer, “but he wouldn’t be fabulously wealthy.”

Vote Obama: at least he gives you lube when he fucks you!

It is amazing how much science already knows, if it just had the wit to search for it

I started reading this Cracked article:

The 6 Cruelest Science Experiments Ever (Were Done on Kids)
http://www.cracked.com/article_19993_the-6-cruelest-science-experiments-ever-were-done-kids.html

The first entry, “#6. Put Kids in the Wilderness, Make Them Go to War” was interesting enough for me to click on the link to the source (http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/war-peace-and-role-of-power-in-sherifs.php). While the Cracked article is interesting, the PsyBlog article is even more so. As the PsyBlog article states, the three versions of the experiment produced three radically different results (which tells me that the experiment is pointless), but discussion surrounding the results is most instructive if you draw parallels to the US government’s endless meddling in international affairs. I don’t think my reader(s) need (or would appreciate) a dissertation on why I think the three experiments on children are so relevant to the US’s behavior to its fellow governments, so I will just suggest they take the time and read at least the first Cracked bit and the PsyBlog article.

It is more than a million, of that I am sure!

How Can One Million People Be This Dumb?
http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2012/08/22/how-can-1-million-people-be-this-dumb/

I have been exposed to the MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) industry for most of my life. My parents were quite into various such organizations over the years and I admit to trying my hand a time or twain. In principle it is not a bad thing and legitimate businesses (Amway, for example) are sustainable. To me the major caveat is that it boils down to your sales ability: how good are you at convincing people to buy something from you? If you are good at that then I suggest you can make much better incomes by moving into grander sales environments. If you are not so good, you won’t make much in the way of money and your equivalent hourly rate for the effort you put in will be well below any alternative available to you. It is a great scheme for the company doing the marketing, they get a huge sales force that they pay commission only. The biggest danger is that it is a hugely faith-based approach and if you damage the faith your sales force has in your company or your products then you can be out of business practically overnight.

MLMs (and Ponzi schemes, the difference basically boils down to: can you make more than the person who recruited you, if so, it is an MLM, if not, then Ponzi (and thus illegal)) tend to grow very quickly in the beginning and I have seen quite a few people who make it their mission in life to promote each new MLM to the people in their previous organizations and create, at least for a few months, the Ponzi equivalent. Thus, the Johnny-come-latelys get in just as the growth of the organization plateaus and as a consequence find it nearly impossible to make any significant money (significant, to me, is always measured against your alternatives; if you can make more flipping burgers than you can pushing your wares, then you are wasting your time and money). The ‘smart’ ones keep pushing the new latest thing on their organization and it seems to me that the average person who gets hooked will sign on for several such rounds because they can see the results of success so close (in the person who serially recruits them).

Of course, the person attracted to the MLM/Ponzi to begin with tends to be the person who eagerly seeks the magic bullet that will allow them to achieve wealth without effort (surely this attitude isn’t unique to America, but it seems like it was patented and perfected here). Nothing is free, either you need money and connections (something that requires being born to the right parents), money, connections and huge amount of luck (something that generally also requires the right parents), extensive perspiration, money, connections and huge luck (something that increasingly needs the right parents, but a generation ago was realistic), or win the lotto (but ya gotta play to win). However, people seem very eager to continually believe that they can get something for (next to) nothing without any consideration for what that means. If there is some resource that is available for next to no cost (say, breathable air), then it tends to have next to no value because why pay for something essentially free? In order for anything to be of value there must be some barrier to obtaining the resource and that barrier must be such that someone on the other side will pay to bypass the barrier (too bad you can’t somehow pick your parents!). Ironically, to me, the barriers to knowledge acquisition has dropped so much with the advent of the Internet that I would have thought every one would know everything about everything, but it seems that the desire to know something is not the same as engaging in the effort (no matter how trivial) to obtain it. Of course, along with our anti-science bias it seems we are developing an anti-knowledge bias as well and people are even more likely to believe in something like these Ponzi schemes.

You know it is bad…

When the Economist doesn’t support the GOP candidate:

So, Mitt, what do you really believe?
Too much about the Republican candidate for the presidency is far too mysterious
http://www.economist.com/node/21560864

Nothing shockingly new here, except for the source. Seeing something like this on Mother Jones or Salon wouldn’t even be worth a comment, but the Economist?

Still, there is a whole lot of money behind Romney and with past elections as gauge, whomsoever spends the most wins the office and in any case, the vast majority of Presidential elections are decided by the economy and nothing else.

Well said…

Too bad there is no chance in hell of it being implemented…

How To Fix The Economy… In One Simple Chart
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-fix-the-economy-in-one-simple-chart-2012-8

This is a fairly short document (and has lots of graphs), I so strongly encourage my reader(s) to take a look. While I pretty much agree with everything in the article, the realist (pessimist?) in me has to snort “Fat Chance!”.

A different take on the power of the elite

The closing of American academia
The plight of adjunct professors highlights the end of higher education as a means to prosperity.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html

Just like there is the GOP complaint toward the Democrats (and Beatles refrain) “tax the rich until there are no more rich”, here we have a case where we jack up the cost and cut back the compensation of education so far that the only people who can now afford to get degrees and then teach are the monied class. The GOP likes to babble that the liberals have flooded the education system and are teaching their children nothing but nonsense, but imagine, if you will, where the only place to get an education is one designed so you can only get knowledge approved by the elite oligarchy. Talk about pouring cement around our nascent feudal system!

Oh well, it isn’t like there is any single thing wrong with our society, it is all symptoms of the same thing feeding back on itself. I was thinking just yesterday that had I been mentored at some point and not been left to fend for myself I almost certainly would have slipped into the elite class (and mindset) without any conscious thought. Not that that realization means dick since my capacity to influence events at this point is so close to zero that it is indistinguishable.

Data porn

Making Data Work
Researchers pursue analogy between statistical evidence and thermodynamics
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/343207/title/Making_Data_Work

I am far, far from schooled in statistics. The one class in my MBA program and much of the lecture sounded like static and jumbled words. However, one thing I did get out of the class was the incredible fact that the vast majority of experimental results are based on false statistical relevance and the vast majority of people reporting these results incorrectly are totally unaware that they are, in effect, lying. Looking back over many of the experiments I did in the lab I was able to conclude that the magnitude of the differences between the test group and the control group were such that I was comfortable that my conclusions were correct, but I wasn’t able to do that in all cases. Lies, damn lies and statistics and people wield statistics with abandon. As I discussed earlier regarding radiation, it is very simple to make an assumption and produce ‘statistically significant’ data to support your assumption. It could be as trivial as selection bias where the researcher unknowingly ignores data that conflict with his or her assumption. When stated to baldly one would be pardoned if one were to think that all scientists are frauds, but designing experiments to produce useful data is a challenging thing and something that is (at least in my experience) not taught but is learned through mentoring. Sometimes until one has performed a certain number of inconclusive experiments one simply lacks enough information to design an appropriate experiment. Unfortunately, sometimes deadlines refuse to leave enough time for people to be wrong enough to learn to be right and publish what is really bogus results in desperation. Once a certain critical mass of this has become mainstream then the entire mentoring system has been contaminated by people who have been poorly mentored, yet are now mentoring themselves.

I really like the approach the target of the article is taking, but I am not sure that it really will lead to the rigor we need. Thermodynamics are based on huge numbers of individual entities (billions on up), so any measurements are based on large averages. Indeed, lots of interesting science has been recently discovered because of the often dramatic change in behavior when you go from the macro to the micro scale. Since most scientific data is at the micro scale, it seems very plausible to me that making conclusions can be incredibly challenging unless you have a huge signal-to-noise ratio (in many of the experiments I did I measured radioactivity so literally I was looking at signal compared to background; I tended to throw out my stock compounds when the signal dropped to less than 10x background because the results would start to get too noisy).

People who engage in experimental research should be required to take at least a years of statistics and should be required to take courses on experimental design. I am sure that would drive out a lot of students, but I am not sure that a lot of the ‘data’ that has been collected over the last few decades is worth the resources spent on it, so the world might not lose anything if these people turn away from science.

I wonder if non-science people (members of the sheeple class) can feel these statistical lies at an unconscious level. It might help explain the rampant anti-science attitude that is permeating our society today.

Radioation and the paucity of risk assessment

The Panic Over Fukushima
Japan’s nuclear accident was a great human tragedy, but its long-term health effects have been exaggerated—and the virtues of nuclear power remain.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772404577589270444059332.html

I have trouble explaining this topic to friends and family, I post this hear to help me the next time the subject goes up. I know from extensive personal experience that human beings are terrified of radiation (radioation from a (very old) Robin Williams recording: “Wow, man, why can’t you say da damn word? I don’t know, Tommy… I’m on liquid-wrench, and I’m feeling really mellow.”), way past the point of rationality. This article does an excellent job of putting the ‘horror’ in perspective even before we consider the author’s comments about Denver’s higher radiation yet lower cancer rate. Any organism on Earth is bathed in a sea of radiation. If we were unable to cope, we never would have come into existence! Indeed, there are certain organisms that are so resistant to radiation damage that they basically stopped evolving hundreds of millions of years ago. If we (as organisms on Earth) _hadn’t_ developed sensitivity to radiation (and the mutations that result), we would be limited to some single-celled goo on the surface of the planet and certainly no humans would have evolved. Thus, the sensitivity to radiation we have has been a hard won artifact that allowed us to evolve in the first place!

It is very reasonable to assume (but is rarely thus assumed) that there is a lower bound of radiation below which there is every reason to expect that our natural resistance provides immunity. Therefore these rather idiotic extrapolations wwwaaayyy below any measured effect are totally bogus and are creating a huge cost to society as a consequence. Sort of like the whole asbestos folderol. Based on my reading the _only_ people who ever had any health consequences were people working in the mines _without_ respirators. Guess what? Coal miners working without respirators got ill and died also, just not from cancer. Of course, now that there is a massive industry that makes huge bucks off of ‘remediating’ asbestos there is no hope of any sanity returning there. Still, even if we go with the idiotic assumptions, the scary increase in cancers is never put into perspective. 194 additional cancer cases sounds hugely scary in isolation, that is, until one reports that the ‘normal’ rate of cancer in the same population would be 4,400 (with the whole population being 22,000). Keep in mind that this is 194 additional cases over the population’s _lifetime_, not annual, decade or generation. When presented with all the relevant information most reasonable people (yes, I acknowledge that there aren’t very many of them) realize that the threat is way over blow and maybe, just maybe, this information can be ignored.

Of course, I have no expectation that any explanation of the vanishingly small ‘danger’ associated with typical radiation will get any traction. Just like I am sure the article that triggered this post will get no traction. Much like our idiotic Presidential race, 99% of people have already made their minds up, facts be damned.

The greatest good for the greatest number

As promised, I produced a writeup detailing my thoughts on what constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number. It seemed too long to post directly here, so I put it on my ‘Book of Keith’ site:

http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/bok/GGGN.html

I would appreciate any feedback you care to provide. It isn’t quite as polished as I had envisioned and I sort of ran out of steam (one of the reasons why it took so long to complete it, I kept hoping I would get ‘steamed up’ if I worked on it the next day). I hope I got my points in the document, but if you think I have skipped something or what I said doesn’t make sense, I can tweak the article.