Death Is Bad

While we’re on the subject of transparency, here’s another example: David Petraeus, the director of the CIA, resigned after an investigation uncovered that he had been involved in an extramarital affair.

Who gives a damn if Patraeus was having an affair? I don’t know enough about him to know if he was a good or bad CIA director, but I don’t think who he was sleeping with has any bearing on that. If everyone acknowledged their own sexual history instead of trying to bury it and feign piety this wouldn’t be an issue.

It was said that an affair makes him susceptible to blackmail. It wouldn’t if this had been in the open from the beginning.

There’s been some odd comments about “lack of judgment”. Really? He was the director of the CIA, and he had an long-term affair with a person he had a close relationship with. That says quite a lot about the quality of his judgment, in my opinion. As director of the CIA he could be banging three new women every weekend. THAT would show a lack of judgment. This? The only major issue is that he didn’t clear it with his wife first. And I can sorta forgive him for that – he got married 37 years ago, back in the sexual dark ages. Same way you can forgive a 57-year-old gay dude for being in the closet.

In a more sane society he’d just introduce the world to his mistress and go back to work. In a transparent society he wouldn’t even have to do that. Instead he’s forced to retire. /sigh

I went as Gaston for my Halloween costume this year. It probably says something about me that this got me thinking a lot about Gaston and where he went wrong in Beauty And The Beast.

Gaston had a pretty good thing going. It was established in song that he’s the best looking man in town. He’s young, tall, strong, and excels in most things he puts his hands to. He can provide a good standard of living, he commands the respect and admiration of those in town, and even successfully organizes them to march on an absentee landlord who’s turned to monsterism. He’s fairly well off, and he can sing. His only downside is that he’s a bit of an arrogant prat, but he’ll probably grow out of that, and that’s often considered attractive if it can be backed up with social status and charm – see Tony Stark. The only reason the viewer dislikes him is because they are supposed to – he’s mocked for being illiterate, which is low-status for the audience, but is simply how 95%+ of the population lived in his time period.

But in the end he becomes a villain – victimizing an old man so he can force his daughter into an unwanted relationship. Why? Because he can’t accept that not everyone loves him.

OK, Gaston, we get it – you’re awesome. But sometimes people just don’t click. When you make a move on someone and you’re rebuffed several times, you really gotta just shrug and move on. There doesn’t have to be any good reason for it. Maybe she’s into Furries. Maybe she just doesn’t like white guys. Whatever, let it go. Gaston had been told he is the most desirable so many times that he couldn’t accept it when someone didn’t have any interest in him. And that led to an escalation of mistakes that eventually led to his death.

It may have been a bit harder in his location, to be fair. In a village of a few hundred people, there may only be one optimal reproductive mate. And being rebuked like that after publicly stating your intentions can lead to a dangerous loss of status among the villagers. But seriously, they sang him a song to cheer him up and reassure him, and he had these girls as a fall-back option:

Sure, they’re blonde, but they’re still pretty damn good looking and probably very nice people. He could’ve had his pick, and probably had all three at once a number of times. People nowadays have even less of an excuse than Gaston – they take almost no social hit for rejection, and the pool of available partners is damn near inexhaustible.

So take a lesson from Gaston: Don’t be evil – move on.

Beating up people weaker than you – not funny.

Torturing small animals – not funny.

Humor is often used as a weapon. That’s what satire is. And like any weapon, it can be used to oppress the weak, or defend them. A weapon turned against people who harm others is a weapon used well.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-november-3-2005/mass–hysteria

A weapon used to hurt people who you consider lower status simply so that you can laugh at them is a weapon wielded by the bad guys. Therefore, just so we’re clear – this shit is not funny.

(“trolls posted a fake screenshot of a tweet by verified “Entertainment Tonight” that “confirmed” Justin Bieber had leukemia. [Fans] began posting pics and vids of themselves with their heads shaved in a global show of support”)

http://cheezburger.com/6707877120

You managed to exploited someone’s good will and love of music to ruin their hair and humiliate them. It’s vicious high school bullshit.

This is in the same family of crap as the Daniel Tosh rape jokes. Kicking puppies doesn’t get you laughs. It simply brands you as an asshole.

Another round of amateur verbal pugilism. The challenger is in italics, my replies in not-italics.

Higher cost items include a higher profit which can employ more people. For example, when I worked at a car dealer, a new base model jeep wrangler had $99 in profit for the salesmen. A fully loaded had $8,000 in pure profit. Therefore, a wealthier person choosing the fully loaded model gave more in profit to the dealer enabling him to support a greater staff, from mechanics to detailers to office staff.

You are assuming that money is the same thing as wealth. This is a common mistake, and it is wrong. The dealership charges a premium on luxury goods, so it’s able to extract more profit from the fully loaded model. However the difference in actual wealth between a fully loaded Jeep and base Jeep is very small. You are implying that a fully loaded Jeep is equivalent to 80 base Jeeps (as it is, in terms of profit-to-salesman). Are you actually claiming that society is as enriched by the production and use of one fully loaded Jeep as it would be by the production and use of 80 base Jeeps? If not, can you see where you went wrong?

It’s a two-part problem. The first being that a salesman’s ability to extract profit is not equal to the utility of an item. If we’re talking economics, it’s utility we’re interested in. The second is that the $8000 isn’t magically lost if it’s not spent on the Jeep. It would be spent in some other part of the economy, and thus would pay for someone else’s salary (maybe the ski resort employee, or the diamond miner). It’s an example of the Broken Windows fallacy.

Thats a curious way to mis-understand my statement. You are somewhat correct in stating that money is not the same as wealth, but wealth is not wealth unless it can be converted into a currency. I was also addressing A*****’s situation as she lives in Denver and not Detroit. As such, it matters little to her how many jeeps are created, only what is sold locally and only that portion of profit which is kept locally. For assuredly there is profit in the jeep for the plant, but that money is removed from the local economy and little of that will find its way back to the people of Colorado.

I also fail to see where I claimed that 8000 would be lost if it wasn’t spent on the jeep. Rather, I was pointing out that a wealthier person would be more likely to spend that additional money which would support more local jobs. It matters little on what that money is spent on, just that it is being spent. Be it Burger King, a week in Vail, a yacht, or popcorn at the movie theater. It all supports jobs. Some good, some not so good, but jobs none the less.

No, wealth is wealth. Wealth is what we want. Currency simply facilitates trade by making that wealth easier to exchange between arbitrary products/services.

The focus on locally-kept profit is interesting. It’s certainly the best way to approach the issue if your goal is short-term political or personal gain. From a more economic point-of-view, the most important fact is that we (as a society) created one more Jeep of wealth. Capturing the profits from its sale locally may be a business or political concern, but it doesn’t have much to do with econ.

Upon further reflection, it does pose interesting economic questions (I had to step away from the keyboard for a half hour). The salesman/dealership spent almost the exact same amount of labor transporting & selling both the base and luxury models. Society gets near the same utility from a base and a luxury model. Why are the salespeople compensated so much more for the luxury line? My own answer would have something to do with the diminishing marginal utility of a dollar and the accompanying inefficiencies of concentrating a lot of money into a small number of hands. But I have my biases. :)

You didn’t claim that the remaining $7900 would be lost, but it is implied with your statement of ‘that extra profit can be used to support a greater staff, etc’. The implication is that without that extra $7900, there wouldn’t be money to hire more people, and less jobs would be created. While that’s true *of the dealership*, it’s not true as a whole. The jobs would simply be somewhere else, where the money was spent instead. That’s why economics doesn’t focus as much on whether profit is captured locally (such as at the local dealership). Locality is relative. Overall wealth creation is the greater concern.

You claim that a wealthier person would be more likely to spend that additional money which would support more local jobs. This is actually the opposite of the case – typically the wealthier someone is the more they save, and the poorer someone is the more they spend immediately. But this isn’t a good argument for my side, since savings are largely re-introduced into the economy as investment. Mainly I’d like to see a bit more consistency. The “it all supports jobs” line in this comment is in opposition to the “ a wealthier person choosing the fully loaded model gave more in profit to the dealer enabling him to support a greater staff” line in the previous comment. Please pick a position.

All my life I had believed Isaac Newton created Calculus. I’d heard repeatedly that he was an unparalleled genius. Possibly one of the smartest men ever to have existed (if a bit of a dick).

Last week I learned that Calculus was created at the same time and independently by Gottfried Leibniz as well.

Which is not to detract from Newton’s genius, or Leibniz’s. Obviously they were fantastically brilliant. But it strikes home again how much depends on the environment. Once the groundwork is lain, an idea can come to fruition, and not before. But once the land is ripe and the soil is ready, the idea will spring up with force and push its way into existence. The history of invention (and much of science*) is littered with these simultaneous, independent discoveries of seemingly unique concepts.

This is both good news and bad news.

The bad news is that it seems we can’t rush advances we need NOW. Tons of background work has to be done first, the overall level of knowledge in the human race must reach a critical threshold first. No matter how much you need that wheat, you can’t plant it on Mars until you’ve done massive amounts of terraforming.

The good news is, you don’t have to be Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton to contribute to the advancement of the human race. The tree provides the fruit, but the soil bacteria are critical to the process. I can contribute to the general pool of knowledge in small ways to make the environment richer and more hospitable to the genius-level advancements that I don’t have the ability to produce personally. If you have the mental ability, pursue a career in the sciences. Become a researcher. You can work as a lab technician with little more than a high school degree and some training. Speak and vote for greater scientific exploration and funding whenever the topic comes up. Help spread a love of advancement and a knowledge of rationality. Help make this a world where scientists are rock-stars.

*Also art, but I’m not sure how applicable that is, since art is entirely about what people are ready for and doesn’t rest on knowledge.