Ether Mind

Are You F***ing Kidding Me? Part II

2009-03-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

"Professionals are realizing the prescribed path of a college degree leading to a lucrative job may no longer exist, as the volatile economy takes a toll on some of the soundest professions, such as banking and law." - CNN

Wh- wh- what?

It kinda goes without saying,

2009-02-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

but I'll never buy another American vehicle. I've had 2 Fords, a Mercury (Ford), an Oldsmobile and a Chevy so far... but since they've decided to ask for tax money rather than go bankrupt, my next car will be a Toyota.

Taking welfare? Fine. Fraudulently receiving welfare? Robbing the Treasury at gunpoint? Fine.

Voting for welfare? No.

To be expected

2009-02-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

Although my tax return implied that I would be getting an extra $300- you know, for the stimulus check I didn't get last year- I just got the deposit and it didn't include that. Oh well. I guess they denied it because I was supposed to get it last year. Including the return, I have enough for my student loan payment for this month.

I think I'll go apply for food stamps Tuesday.

Still unemployed

2009-02-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

I just typed my situation into Google and it came up with sites telling me how to kill myself. Thanks, guys. Well, there's one thing that I would like to say to all the fifteen year olds talking about suicide on livejournal...

Life doesn't get better. Your misery is a subjective experience that comes from your beliefs about the world, not from the objective experience of the world itself. Frankly, I don't think life is worth living either, but somebody has to pay taxes to support wars and welfare queens and the restriction of our various liberties.

Not that I pay taxes. I figure if I ever find a job I can make up to 70K before I run out of ways to evade.

But yeah, I got a degree in engineering last May. Had some cash saved up from my National Guard days, so I came to Houston, where people won't stop to let you cross the road. I prefer the combination of indifference, recklessness, and genuine friendliness of Texas to the culture or lack thereof elsewhere. Plus there's no state income tax, although the state is ranked poorly in business taxation.

So I've been reading, applying to jobs, and planning for the future, but I never got depressed about it all until a day or two ago. I think I've applied to every engineering job in Houston at least once, as well as a couple of drafting/admin etc. jobs. I've made this sign that I'm going to sit outside with. Also my resume and portfolio such as it is. Trying to decide between Greenway Plaza 24 and Sugarland for my first day.

I guess I'm depressed because my current assets are less than my current liabilities now. I can slide by with my financing genius for another few months, but it's time to seriously consider selling my car. The only good car I've ever owned. With my custom stereo painstakingly wired together by me. The 12" subs and crunch amp that have followed me through thrown rods, stripped gears and TSA searches. This is the third car they've been installed in, you see. I haven't decided how to fasten them down yet... Velcro(TM) would be good, but taking them out of the tubes and putting them in the rear deck would save space.

I guess the moral of the story so far is that I have an 05 Impala for sale in Houston.

Now, I can only blame myself for not applying to more jobs. 145 in 7 months is less than one per day on average. And anyway, I could start my own business. I could program iPhone apps. I could use my vast entrepreneurial knowledge to contribute to the economic recovery, instead of passively waiting for a bite. But the fastest route to billions would have been HVAC designer.

I'll fry me some cheeseburgers. That should... do it.

The one bright spot in all this is that my fiancee lives in Alaska and my being a bum is irrelevant. Course it also means I can't marry her or see her until I find a job. Well, she says she won't leave me. If an asteroid hits DC, then we should have an economic recovery within a year and all will be well.

Is that really my plan? Hit DC with an asteroid? (bitterly) Imagine all the jobs created by the reconstruction projects.

No one's been interested in my abstract and acerbic rants on philosophy, but whining is really popular. Maybe I'll make Instapundit.

Crazy people

2009-02-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

"But if I want to be honest with myself, I can remember plenty of times when I felt uncomfortable. And many of the earlier ones involved eating alone in the dining hall. I didn't eat by myself often, and when I did, it was usually a simple matter of conflicting schedules with my friends. But my unease sprang from my inability to convey that to the strangers around me. Honest, I'm not a loner. I had to learn to deal with the discomfort." - Neil Swidey

Is this... normal? usual? It's possible most people do eat lunch with friends or coworkers on a regular basis, but ehhhh????

Time to bend over and receive a Stimulus

2009-02-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

The peer pressure will be too much. This monstrosity was doomed to pass from the beginning, but I was hoping it would bog down congress for a while.

I just don't see them resisting the peer pressure much longer. The GOP has already been reduced to making their own ironically bad suggestions to amend the bill. Increasing the tax credit for buying a home? Really? Because a surge in real estate prices has never caused us problems before, has it? *looks around at global financial apocalypse* Oh yeah, huh.

They live in their own perceptual bubbles.

2009-02-03T15:23:00.000-08:00

As always, Andrew Sullivan links to outrageous BS.

"But there is a strong possibility now that we have seen our way through the worst of this situation and that Iraq may have a more peaceful, less tyrannical future. It also should mean that we can bring home our troops more quickly--maybe even in the next 16 months." - Joe Klein

The worst of this situation passed a year and a half ago. The current plan is to bring our troops home within 16 months (though that actually means leaving most of them there, since Obama has no exit plan). Exactly what the**** is Klein smoking? He's caught in his own narrative, as are most humans.

"b) The Obama stimulus bill gives the most money to the growing parts of the economy—health care and education.

If you guessed (b), give yourself a pat on the back. Despite all the talk of big infrastructure projects, the majority of increased spending in the bill goes to health and education. And that's a good thing." - Michael Mandel

Leaving aside the complete and utter ignorance of economics, which seems to be prevalent among the media, politicians and Keynesians, the only reason those sectors are growing is because they are already the recipients of government subsidies - paid for with taxes on the construction and manufacturing sectors. The rest of his argument is equally specious; you can't outsource construction, though you can travel overseas for education and healthcare, or have them delivered via UPS, youtube or telerobotics as the case may be.

That's a good thing? All of the subsidies are misguided, but you just spit in the eyes of the manufacturing sector. Let's see the Web 2.0 companies take off without computers or offices. Let's see a renaissance of high-quality local clinics without affordable cat scanners. Let's see doctors perform chemotherapy without nuclear material processing plants out there in the flyover states. As a matter of fact, without Boeing they would be walk-through states. You realize that- nevermind.

My life could have meaning

2009-01-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

but only if the stimulus bills don't hurt the economy too bad.

Of course, the intent is to "help" the economy, that great abstract conception of the sum of trillions of individual transactions, but it can't.

The problem is that macroeconomics- and hence the retarded Keynesian approach that perpetually f***s us all- relies on a fallacy that I'll call "macro-demand."

Demand for any given product is finite. The macroeconomic view seems to be that aggregate demand is the sum of all these lesser demand curves, but that's incorrect.

Total demand is... more or less infinite. It equals production, at all times, so long as we count totally useless production of crappy goods to be consumption.

The individual demand curves represent the desired allocation of society's productive capacity.

Fiscal policies that attempt to "boost demand" (which is already infinite in the relevant respect, ie in the amount of useless junk consumers want to purchase) simply results in a reallocation of production away from investment and "targeted" consumption to whatever random and usually stupid pork projects the politicians want.

This reduces output from a subjective standpoint and reduces economic growth.

'Office Space' Sucked

2009-01-25T01:23:00.000-08:00

Haha a red stapler lol.
WTF? It's a red stapler. It's not funny.

I imagine this post will be even less popular than the last. No matter; here are a few thingsAmericans love that actually suck.

The Black Eyed Peas, especially Fergie
Family Guy
American Idol
Surreal Humor
Barack Obama
Fiat Currency
SUVs
War
The 90s Batman Movies
Frank Miller
American Comics in General, except for The Watchmen
Beer
Arguing
Car chase videos
Stupid criminal videos
Lawyer, Doctor, and Cop shows
TV on average
MySpace
Starbucks
Toby Keith
Jazz
Comediennes
Stephen Colbert
iPhones
Halo (the video game)

Racism Banzai

2009-01-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

Ever since the election, I've decided to take advantage of the new post-racial America by being racist. You see, I once had a communist bastard history professor (haven't we all) who said that racism by minorities didn't matter because they weren't in power. He was black himself, so you'd think he'd be more apologetic, but any way.

Now that "the man" keeping us down is a "black man," it seemed like I (as a pure-blooded Gaelic Nordo-Franco-Anglo-Saxon) could now express my latent inner racist. The Left always says that we're racist, after all. I proceeded to answer all of my quasi-liberal friend's complaints with "It's because we elected a nigger president." He laughed from pure shock, but he told me each time I was racist. Soon, he told me that I should seriously stop.

But "Jason," says I, "I can't help my racism. I was raised in a racist society."
"Your girlfriend is black!" he says, which is totally beside the point.
"She hates black people too." As a matter of fact, she's only 39% African and 10% European.

That settled the matter nicely. It reminds me of the time in college when I greeted a Persian co-worker with "wassup, my nigga?" He found it hysterical, though we both looked around in fear of thought-police.

So I was at a really ghetto Minit Mart last week (run by Pakistanis) with my homeboy Dave and I waited in the truck so terrorists wouldn't jack it. When he returned, I told him about the fly honey he'd missed. He disappeared for a moment in the direction I indicated and returned, disappointed that she was a Negro. I really don't see how colored girls can be excluded from the group "fly honies," considering the Urban Youth wink wink origin of the phrase.

I may rap about this experience later.

UPDATE: I realize this post sounds as if I've lost my touch for satire, but these are true stories.

QFTD2

2009-01-21T00:48:00.000-08:00

Myrna, you see, believed that all humans living south and west of the Hudson River were illiterate cowboys or -- even worse -- White Protestants, a class of humans who as a group specialized in ignorance, cruelty, and torture. (I don’t wish to especially defend White Protestants; I am not too fond of them myself.) - A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Toole

QFTD

2009-01-21T00:40:00.000-08:00

"In spite of all to which they have been subjected, Negroes are nonetheless a rather pleasant folk for the most part. I really have had little to do with them, for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one." - ~~Vox Day~~ A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Toole

Tea Party

2009-01-20T16:03:00.001-08:00

This guy has the idea of protesting Congress's continuing disruption of the economy by mailing teabags to D.C. Eh. Do it if you're so inclined. The Republic will fall on schedule.

I would go for something more dramatic, in the vein of the original tea party.

Scientific Philosophy Rebuild

2009-01-08T11:20:00.001-08:00

All theories are just a curve fit to the available data; experiments are merely an educated guess at the best way to acquire new data.

According to this view, a theory that has been experimentally verified hundreds of times with new evidence, like the theory of relativity, is no better than one constructed after the fact.

Chronology- prediction, backtesting, whatever- is completely irrelevant.

This post is PG13

2009-01-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

"For example, many of the people who say they lost money in Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme were celebrity actors, writers, wealthy people -- people with abundant smarts." - CNN

Are you f---ing kidding me?

Heh. Hehehe.

2009-01-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

Glad to see that the new Congress is off to a good start.
-Blagojevich
--Burris
-Franken
-Richardson
-Panetta

And the depression that Obama is planning. When the next wave hits immediately after the next stimulus, will that be enough to end the quackery? I doubt it.

Updates

2008-12-30T04:25:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm no longer a child prodigy, but a bum in a pink bathtowel, I no longer feel the need to guard my identity so closely. I estimate that 14% of all libertarian bloggers are engineers or programmers.

Anyway, I invented a new form of irony today. I've been using it for a while, but only this morning did full understanding dawn upon me.

Essentially, you make a statement whose intended veracity is ambiguous. Is it meant to be taken seriously, sarcastically, whimsically, or is it sarcastic but secretly true for PC purposes? No one knows what you really meant, but the point of the statement is, like a koan, to make the audience reflect on the contradictions inherent in society's consensus truth.

Quote for 2008

2008-12-10T12:40:00.000-08:00

"The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not in a good way," - John Dugan, head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

What? You mean a single individual can't comprehend the economic activity of 300,000,000 Americans, 6 billion foreigners, and countless legal entities in their awesome totality, in real time, and then by a few specific actions redirect the entire system like some sort of Butterfly God? My goodness!

Pride goeth before the fall.

Neh

2008-12-02T15:11:00.000-08:00

Presumably none of the lost googlers stumbling through here are political junkies and manga fans, but here.

http://rapidshare.com/files/169668694/229286-KnAGolden_Boy_v05_Study35_v2.rar.html

This is why Japanese comics are better. Those of you who have no interest whatsoever in manga should also d/l it. What was I going to say....

Crisis

2008-11-24T06:05:00.000-08:00

I thought that a crisis was the moment when a number of trends suddenly converged to create a SHTF moment.

Apparently, the consensus definition of a crisis includes pretending that the problem isn't one of our making and that it can actually be fixed with stopgap measures, and then running about like chickens with our heads cut off.

Somewhat relevant Von Mises quote

2008-11-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

"The amount of money to be expended in every branch of profit-seeking business is determined by the behavior of the consumers. If the automobile industry were to treble the capital employed, it would certainly improve the services it renders to the public. There would be more cars available. But this expansion of the industry would withhold capital from other branches of production in which it could fill more urgent wants of the consumers. This fact would render the expansion of the automobile industry unprofitable and increase profits in other branches of business." - Human Action p. 309

Corporate Taxes

2008-11-21T15:26:00.001-08:00

Let us define three all-encompassing categories of resource usage: consumption, investment, and government services. Draw the lines wherever you see fit.

Ideally, the purpose of taxes is to shift resources from consumption to government services.

Corporations do not consume anything.

Ergo, taxing corporations shifts resources away from investment rather than consumption.

In an ideal (from a progressive* standpoint?) economy, this would be flawed reasoning; the corporations would simply reduce profits and the shareholders would reduce consumption by a corresponding amount. Investment would be unchanged.

In an ideal (from the standpoint of someone who understands basic economics, ie not a progressive) but simplistic economy, taxes would reduce consumption and investment by X and Y amounts, and the values X and Y would be constant no matter where the taxes were applied.

As models get more advanced, but maintain the pretense of superrationality**, various things happen. Corporations are by definition owned by people who devote a higher proportion of resources to investment. Thus taxing them reduces the ratio of investment to consumption even more than taxing wealthy individuals, many of whom are playboys, heiresses and dilettantes of various stripes.

Without perfect rationality, does the same amount of taxation on the same individual have a different effect if it is taken from the corporation rather than from dividend income? What is the effect? Do the corporations reduce profits solely or do they also reduce their own investment?

Would investment increase because of lower required rates of return? Unlike most of the absurdly simple things that politicians can't seem to grasp, this isn't immediately obvious.

At any rate, it's simpler just to soak the rich rather than indirectly soaking the rich via corporate taxes. Plus think of all the effort that it takes to do corporate taxes in the first place! There's like a million accountants working on them around the clock!

*What I've settled on as a name for American socialism

**Perfect information and perfect decisionmaking

Stereotypes

2008-11-20T14:59:00.001-08:00

Sometimes stereotypes are a historical ideal, the safest assumption, or the most likely value of some quality.

Other times, they refer not to individuals but to the behavior of the group as a whole. It doesn't matter if only 20% of the Huns are bloodthirsty warriors; a horde of them is dangerous.

As Von Mises said, selling lottery tickets is not gambling.

Skynet

2008-11-20T13:48:00.000-08:00

1) If we define natural rights as those rights which man would enjoy if he were alone in the world,

Then you can guarantee that his rights are never violated by destroying all other men.

//------------------------------

2) If one's only goal is to stop injustice,

Then the only course of action is to punish all injustice by death until only one man remains.

//----------------------------

No one would enjoy the second result. Although not quite reductio ad absurdum, this is a strong counterargument to the idea that we have a duty to prevent evil.

End of the world 2

2008-11-20T03:09:00.000-08:00

"Police say a dad encouraged two toddlers to beat each other and caught the fight on tape." - CNN

Of course CNN is making a bigger deal out of it than it is, which is a feat. I mean, it's obviously child abuse, and they should probably throw the father in the Octagon for a few rounds and then force him to go to parenting classes. But one incident is not going to psychologically scar the children unless CPS takes them, which I can only assume has already happened. They're not physically hurt either.

EDIT: Oh, and after showing the video for our amusement and CNN's profit, they say that it should never have been on youtube and only immature people would watch it. Ok, I know journalists are idiots, hypocrites, and liars, but how can you say that with a straight face? It's ok for CNN to show a video but not youtube? Are you aware that you just insulted your audience and yourselves? I couldn't say that with a straight face. I just couldn't.

Did I mention the father put it on youtube? He's f***tarded too.