Quotulatiousness

March 4, 2015

The FCC is merely a symptom

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Taxicab Depressions, Taxi Hack offers a few thoughts on current events:

If you have read my post The Pig Trap, you know of my absolute bewilderment at the current state of our country. Our government is utterly lawless, just making shit up as they go along, creating regulations and executive edicts to bypass the Congress and the Constitution, committing crimes in the furtherance of those goals, and nobody ever gets in trouble, unless he screwing someone he shouldn’t be, and nobody ever loses their job or goes before a judge, and most importantly, nobody seems to give a fuck. Everything is just fucking dandy, as long as we can binge-watch Girls and Entourage on HBO GO and Katy Perry’s next single doesn’t suck and that hot chick from Club Plush texts me next week…

I wake up every day around two or three in the afternoon, make a cup of coffee and turn on the news, just waiting for the day when it finally happens, the day that something finally snaps, and I am listening to Sheppard Smith breathlessly trying to describe shaky video of a mob of 500,000 or 800,000 pissed off taxpayers that has invaded Washington and are lining every street in D.C., armed to the teeth, and erecting scaffolding on the National Mall.

Actually, that’s not how I think it is going to go, but I promise you… what can not go on, will NOT go on.

A couple days ago, a five member panel of unelected bureaucrats called the FCC voted 3 to 2 to seize control of the internet for the Federal government, without so much as a “by your leave” to the Congress. It’s not like your Congressman or Senator did this, these were three UNELECTED political appointees, all DEMOCRATS, which I think is worthy of mention, and they just decided that they have the power to regulate what you say and what you view on the internet, without asking you what YOU think about that. They came up with a big fat Rule Book For The Internet that they would not show to the public before the vote, and now that they have deemed they have the authority to do this and voted to institute their new Rule Book For The Internet, they STILL won’t show the public their new Rule Book For The Internet.

How is that not a Joe Biden-sized Big Fucking Deal for you? THREE PEOPLE you never heard of and certainly never voted for just took over control of the internet for the government, and they are not showing the public what the new rules will be. Does that mean websites will have to get a government “license”, like radio stations? And will they have a list of bad things they can’t say, or they will be fined and maybe even LOSE their license? Nobody knows, because they will not show the public the rules they are creating.

Free speech on campus

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 2 Mar 2015

Time to stop indulging privileged militant “progressive” puritan student bigots.

How many colours do you see?

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

How many colours do you see

On LinkedIn, Professor Diana Derval posted this image with an explanation why different people will see significantly different numbers of colours:

You see less than 20 color nuances: you are a dichromats, like dogs, which means you have 2 types of cones only. You are likely to wear black, beige, and blue. 25% of the population is dichromat.

You see between 20 and 32 color nuances: you are a trichromat, you have 3 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green and red area). You enjoy different colors as you can appreciate them. 50% of the population is trichromat.

You see between 33 and 39 colors: you are a tetrachromat, like bees, and have 4 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green, red plus yellow area). You are irritated by yellow, so this color will be nowhere to be found in your wardrobe. 25% of the population is tetrachromat.

You see more than 39 color nuances: come on, you are making up things! there are only 39 different colors in the test and probably only 35 are properly translated by your computer screen anyway 🙂

It is highly probable that people who have an additional 4th cone do not get tricked by blue/black or white/gold dresses, no matter the background light 😉

H/T to ESR for the link.

The odd secular religion of Corporation Theology

Filed under: Business, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Megan McArdle on the weird things some people can believe:

I got a lot of responses to my post last week on Wal-Mart’s decision to raise the minimum wage many of its employees earn to $10 an hour next year. One variety of response stood out: the folks who said “Wal-Mart is doing this because it’s good for its business.”

It stood out because it is almost right, but not quite. The correct statement is that “Wal-Mart is doing this because it thinks it’s good for its business.” Never ignore the possibility that Wal-Mart could be completely wrong.

I remark on this because some of the arguments I saw verged upon what I’ve come to think of as “corporation theology”: the belief that if a corporation is doing something, that thing must be incredibly profitable. This is no less of a faith-based statement than the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Yet it is surprisingly popular among commentators, not just on the right, but also on the left.

[…]

This left-wing writer was evincing considerably more faith than I have in the American corporation. Corporations do dumb stuff all the time — for decades, even. Moreover, advertising has multiple purposes. It can of course induce you to consume more of a product, but frankly, no matter how much Pepperidge Farm advertises, it’s probably not going to dramatically increase America’s consumption of prepackaged cookies. So why does it advertise? Because it wants you to choose a Milano instead of an Oreo or one of them newfangled biscotti.

This is corporation theology. Of course, you also see it on the right — arguments that if some product were good or desirable, a corporation would already have provided it. The entire history of human progress argues against this theory.

As these two examples suggest, corporation theology gets trimmed to personal and ideological convenience, as all theologies often are: A liberal is capable of simultaneously believing that market failures abound in industries he or she would like to regulate, and also that Costco knows how to run Wal-Mart’s labor policy better than Wal-Mart does; a conservative, the inverse. Both are wrong. Corporations, like all human institutions, are great engines for making mistakes. The only reason they seem so competent is that companies who make too many mistakes go out of business, and we don’t have them around for comparison.

QotD: The macroeconomic insights of MMO gaming

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Video game communities, social economies, give us something that we never had as economists before. That’s something of an opportunity, a chance to experiment with a macroeconomy. We can experiment in economics with individuals. We can put someone behind a screen and experiment on the subject, and ask him or her to make choices and see how they behave.

That has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics requires a different scenario. You conduct controlled experiments with a large economy. We are not allowed to do this in the real world. But in the video game world, we economists have a smidgen of an opportunity to conduct controlled experiments on a real, functioning macroeconomy. And that may be a scientific window into economic reality that we’ve never had access to before.

Yanis Varoufakis, talking to Peter Suderman, “A Multiplayer Game Environment Is Actually a Dream Come True for an Economist”, Reason, 2014-05-30.

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