MyATMPinIs1234

Disaster

In a blatant attempt to lower morale and increase the attrition rate to avoid layoffs, my employer has started blocking blogger.com and facebook. Blog posts and status updates will be sporadic for the time being.

Why I'm Not In Charge

"They" say that obesity is the biggest public health problem since smoking. Of course, most of the problem stems from the fact that the FDA, medical community, and diet industry are most likely completely wrong on what is a healthy diet. Gary Taubes points out many counter examples to the orthodoxy's hypothesis that eating less and exercising more is the answer, in this amazing video.

As a quick aside, the NYT has a ridiculous article about a girl who can't afford to go to fat camp. This puts the establishment weight loss theorists in the untenable position of saying this girl is too poor to eat less!

Whatever. I know most of you can't get past the massive cognitive dissonance inherent in what you think you know about the subject, so I would like to propose a way to answer the question once and for all.

It, like many of my ideas, involves prison. Why not take several prisons, divide the populations in half, and put half the population on a typical american diet, and the half on Zone /Atkins /Primal / Weight Watchers / Special K / etc diets.

Resolving this would benefit society immensely. Prisoners owe society. Prisoners would have 100% compliance. It's a no f-ing brainer.

There are some of you who will probably have a problem with experimenting on prisoners. To that I say, first, fuck you, and second, do you think it will be hard to convince them to voluntarily give up prison chow for a year?

The only problem I see is that the weight watchers prison will have to be a women's prison, because no man in his right mind would do that diet.

The bar manager did a great job printing out, laminating, and posting the sign in the bathroom instructing patrons to hold the handle down until the toilet flush is complete. Of course, it would've been faster to just replace the $.50 gasket and fix the problem. Nice clip-art on the sign though.

Success!

I can chalk up another victory in my quest to cherry-pick data that confirms my previously held beliefs on climate change. We already know that the climate models conform to reality worse than Halo 3. Now it turns out that even the actual temperature numbers have to be tortured to show the dramatic warming in the IPCC report.

So, to recap:

1) We really know next to nothing about the future of the climate.
1a) Including, btw, whether any climate change would cause net harm or good.
2) Even if we did know, it would really not be possible to fix the problem without returning to an agrarian society or solving cold fusion.
3) Even if we could fix the problem, it would probably be way less expensive to mitigate the result.
4) Even if we wanted to spend the money to mitigate the result, it would be much more cost effective to solve other problems first, such as child immunization and nutrition.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. True, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and got DDT banned, she did save about 14 birds. But then a couple million African children died from Malaria. Oops.

User Interface Fail

Someone recently asked me to take a look at a post on this website. I will not comment on the site content, but the major innovation here seems to be that you read posts from left to right (like a book! it's so natural!).

Except for the fact that since I switched from Gopher to the WWW in 1992, my internet perusal muscle memory has been conditioned to down-arrow/Pg-Dn when I wish to obtain additional content from a website.

Not that I'm a Luddite or locked into a particular navigational methodology. A few years ago I added the mouse scroll wheel to my repertoire. Which is useless on this website. It's pretty rad when your website design cripples standard input device hardware.

But lest anyone say my criticism is not constructive, I have a recommendation (other than the obvious, rm -f /). Trap the keypress event for spacebar and automatically scroll right to the next post.

The escalator in my building isn't broken. But its functionality has degraded gracefully to a staircase.

When you purchase something, you are trading something of value, namely money, for some good which you value even more. It’s called your consumer surplus. The person selling the item is in the same situation, making the trade a win-win for both parties.

Except, apparently, when it comes to the purchase of foreign oil. That particular trade is described by the media and politicians as a “wealth transfer,” and it is seen as being harmful to one of the parties (Americans). Jerry Brown says that “we must stop the hemorrhaging of our national treasure, and we need to do it now (WSJ, 8/11/2008, p. A15).” I find it odd that we would voluntarily enter into a transaction that makes us worse off, and I don’t recall seeing Saudi warships forcing us to buy their crude.

Maybe people think it’s not fair because they just pump the stuff out of the ground. This fails to recognize the incredible technological expertise this requires, as well as massive amounts of capital expenditures. And that is no different from any other thing manufactured and sold, which involves the application of technology to transform a country’s natural resources into something useful which can be sold. Besides, when America sells billions of dollars of Kansas wheat abroad, is that a wealth transfer?

Not surprisingly, the solution to the so-called problem also requires the willful disregard of economics. It’s called energy conservation, and if you’re not in favor of it, you will never get laid again. I am a strong proponent of it.

Although I do recognize that when implemented as government standards for automotive, appliance, and building efficiency minimums, you are reducing the consumer surplus, by forcing people to accept a higher initial purchase price and lower level of quality in exchange for a theoretical future reduction of operating costs. This is known in the economic journals as the “thanks to government water rules I now have to flush twice when I take a shit so my water bill isn’t even lower” theory of efficiency by fiat.

"Wehner and two engineers, Lenny Oliker and John Shalf, also of Lawrence Berkeley, have proposed perhaps the most powerful special-purpose computer yet. It is intended to model changes in climatic patterns over periods as long as a century. Specifically, it should be able to remedy today's inability to model clouds well enough to tell whether their net effect is to warm the world or cool it (IEEE Spectrum, Sept 2008)."

But other than not knowing how clouds work, the climate models are perfect.

I'm no hedge fund manager like T. Boone Pickens, nor a venture capitalist like Al Gore, but seeing as how both of these gentlemen are proposing to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by changing our vehicle fleet to use natural gas/electric, I have one [two-part] question for these economic luminaries.

What will happen to the price of oil if we reduce global demand by 25% or so, the amount currently consumed by the US, considering the average yearly change in demand is only 1.2%? If this change in demand were to cause the price of oil to crash back to $12 a barrel, where it was last time demand was that low, do you think this might complicate your ability to convince Americans to stick with your plan?

Today's List of Pet Peeves

1) Not sure if you heard about this feature, but my phone has a missed call log, so if you leave a voicemail saying, "Hey it's Allan. Give me a call" you have provided no new information and wasted everyone's time.

2) You found the most hysterical article on Salon.com and want to forward to everyone. Instead of sending the URL, or copy/pasting the article into an email, you use the built-in "send this article" feature whereby you enter all your friends' email addresses into some shady database somewhere. There is a reason I have a separate junk account I use to enter into web forms, and I would appreciate it if my webtard acquaintances didn't screw up my legit address. I don't care if it's the NY Times. Pretty soon at the chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation auction they will be selling the NYTimes mailing list to the highest bidder.

3) I can't believe that I can't think of a third one. I remember being pissed off several times this morning. Oh well.

I was alarmed to find out recently that wearing flip-flops is now contraindicated for foot health. They apparently do not have the proper cushioning and support that is required when the human foot makes contact with the ground.

Which makes me very glad I was born when I was. Because before the 1980's when the Nike Air was invented, shoes had very little cushioning and support, and people must've been constantly getting injured. And before the 1920's, when the first real sneakers (keds and chuck taylors) came about, walking and running must've been next to impossible.

It's quite a wonder our species survived at all. Because for 250,000 years, from the time modern humans emerged, until 1979 when Nike invented the modern athletic shoe, we would've had no choice but to just sit there and let lions eat us, because we were apparently unequipped to run until recently.

Some of you might be thinking that this can't possibly be true, that the need for shoes with cushioning and microchips, must be something we've been conditioned to believe because of the thousands of hours of shoe commercials we've all seen.

But the historical record bears this out. The one person who ran before modern times, Pheidippides, died immediately after running from Marathon to Athens, undoubtedly from massive foot trauma.

And how glad am I that I'm not a podiatrist? With all these advances in the past 30 years, they must be right around the corner from curing foot pain forever and putting all of those guys out of business. Well, in America at least.

There is an article in today's WSJ (page 1) about suicide bombing in the war in Afghanistan, containing this nugget:

"Suicide attacks were virtually unheard of in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. That started to change after the U.S.-led occupation in 2001."

Perhaps my inference mechanism has gone haywire, and they never outright state it, but it seems they are implying that there is something about our country and our prosecution of the war that enrages people enough to blow themselves up. That we are somehow worse than the Soviet invasion.

But I think this is more a statement about how effective our military is. During the Soviet invasion, they didn't have to blow themselves up, because they were fighting a demoralized conscript army with mediocre equipment and tactics. And they had CIA backing.

Today they are facing well trained and highly motivated special forces soldiers who are one radio call away from having an A-10 Warthog pour down depleted uranium shells on an enemy. Suicide bombing and IEDs are their only options now, so it's no surpise they are way up.