Quotulatiousness

August 5, 2018

Zim Tzu returns

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:03

I’m only just getting caught up on reports from Minnesota Vikings training camp (now in Eagan, MN rather than Mankato as it had been for half a century). This is why I didn’t catch the first meditation from Zim Tzu until just now. Take it away, Ted:

The Vikings Warrior Poet Coach dispenses his words of wisdom

ED NOTE: This has bad words. None of the other things we write on here do, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles — Ted

Every great warrior poet has his comeuppance. Napoleon had his Waterloo, Patton slapped a guy in Sicily, Rommel got routed in North Africa. Even Robert E. Lee had his Appomattox.

When you are handed a humbling humiliation, you can do one of two things. You can either slink back in to the corner and become a footnote in history, or you can reflect, rebuild, and try to re-conquer. Because reflection is for the weak, and rebuilding your Army and starting a new campaign is what warrior poets do. Because fuck those horse shit eating douchebags, that’s why.

Because you are Zim Tzu, The King In The North, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.

When you re-assemble your Army after such a humbling defeat, you must grab their attention, and let them know you mean business. How do you do that? With language that hits home, right between the eyes. Only, when you speak so publicly, you gotta go through Mexico to get to Canada when you’re making your point. Because although you need to set everyone straight, The Great Unwashed can’t handle such auditory brutality at point blank range.

So that’s where we come in here at The Daily Norseman.* We take Mike Zimmer’s verbal artillery, water it down to some something a little less powerful than snakes and sparklers (because what the hell with fireworks being illegal in Minnesota and shit),** and it comes out on the other side fresh and clearly understood.***

*By ‘we’ I mean ‘me’. I tried to talk the new guys into taking the fall for this, and even they weren’t dumb enough to sign on for this.

**Like seriously, not even fucking bottle rockets? Lame. As. Shit. Homeland.

***It’s all utter bullshit. I make everything up, kind of like Jameis Winston explaining his side of the story.

For those of you that are new to the ways of Zim Tzu, we take his official press conference transcript, look at what Mike Zimmer actually said, and then translate what he said into the real meaning right below.*

*Seriously, I make it all up, if you can’t tell five minutes into this.

Rockets – Blinded Soldiers I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 4 Aug 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time! Indy talks about rocket usage in WW1 and how blinded soldiers were rehabilitated.

Poverty

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Walter Williams on how most American can and do avoid falling into poverty:

Poverty is no mystery, and it’s easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here’s the road map: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen.

How about some numbers? A single person taking a minimum wage job would earn an annual income of $15,080. A married couple would earn $30,160. By the way, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 4 percent of hourly workers in 2016 were paid the minimum wage. That means that over 96 percent of workers earned more than the minimum wage. Not surprising is the fact that among both black and white married couples, the poverty rate is in the single digits. Most poverty is in female-headed households.

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign garnered considerable appeal from millennials. These young people see socialism as superior to free market capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t do well in popularity polls, despite the fact that it has eliminated many of mankind’s worst problems, such as pestilence and gross hunger and poverty. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the nonexistent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared with a utopia, will not fare well. Indeed, socialism sounds good but, when practiced, leads to disaster. Those disasters have been experienced in countries such as the USSR, China, most African nations and, most recently, Venezuela. When these disasters are pointed out, the excuse is inadequacies of socialist leaders rather than socialism itself. For the ordinary person, free market capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

A quirk of the US statistics is that the poverty rate is measured without taking into account any of the various welfare measures that other countries would include (for example, the EITC, Section 8 housing vouchers, Medicaid, or SNAP (food stamps)). So the people whose relative income is raised above the poverty threshhold are still counted as being below it. This results in a much higher number for people living below the poverty line than actually exist. See for example, here or here.

On The Far Side

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Today I Found Out
Published on 9 Jul 2018

Check out my other channel TopTenz! https://www.youtube.com/user/toptenznet

Never run out of things to say at the water cooler with TodayIFoundOut! Brand new videos 7 days a week!

More from TodayIFoundOut

What Ever Happened to the Creator of Calvin and Hobbes?

In this video:

For 15 years, Gary Larson took millions of readers over to the Far Side. Using anamorphic animals, chubby teenagers, universal emotions, a simple drawing style and a really bizarre, morbid sense of humor, The Far Side became one of the most successful – and praised – comic strips of all time.

Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…

QotD: Risk aversion

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

… let’s step back and ask ourselves what insurance is for. Classical economics has an answer: people are risk-averse, which means that they will pay good money to reduce the variability of outcomes they face. If home insurance guards against the loss of a million pounds when my house burns down, I’m happy to buy the insurance even though the insurance company expects to make a profit from it.

But this risk aversion emerges from the fact that money is worth more to poor people than to rich people. Gaining a million pounds would make me rich but losing a million pounds would make me poor. I should not gamble a million pounds on the toss of a coin, because the million pounds I might lose is more precious to me than the million pounds I might gain.

As so often with classical economics, this is an excellent description of how we should behave. It is not such an excellent description of how we actually do behave. Risk aversion can only explain why we insure large risks. It cannot explain why we insure small ones. This is because risk aversion turns on the idea that an extra pound is worth more if you are poor than if you are rich. But having to replace a phone is not going to make the difference between poverty and wealth.

In one of my favourite economics articles, written in 2001, the behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Matthew Rabin point out that anyone who rejects a 50/50 gamble to win £10.10 or lose £10 — apparently a reasonable enough taste for caution — cannot possibly be doing so because of risk aversion. (The degree of risk aversion necessary would mean that the same individual wouldn’t risk £1,000 on the toss of a coin for all the money in the world.) Risk aversion simply cannot explain why anyone would turn down that fractionally favourable gamble. And it cannot explain why anyone would insure a mobile phone.

A better explanation is that we tend to view risks in isolation. Rather than telling ourselves “a lost mobile phone would lower my lifetime wealth by 0.005 per cent”, we tell ourselves “it would be so annoying to have to pay for a new mobile phone”. Isolating and obsessing about risks in this way is arbitrary and illogical. But that does not mean we don’t do it.

Tim Harford, “How insurers keep the money-pump flowing”, TimHarford.com, 2016-09-21.

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