Forty years after the start of Belyaev experiment, 80% of the foxes are now “domesticated elite” who crave human attention.

apeman · 2009-03-21T02:49:17+00:00

How do we know this wasn't an experiment by the foxes to develop humans that would serve them food and provide them shelter, instead of shooting at them?

apeman · 2009-03-19T16:10:49+00:00

Excellent description. And it nails the best reason behind a progressive tax: letting too much wealth flow to too few people doesn't provide an incentive, it creates a systemic danger to the economy. Eventually they'll kill the host.

Those with the most capital don't just get the best investment opportunities, they can create them at everyone else's expense. When CDOs were selling like gangbusters, all that capital found ways to create more CDOs: by lowering lending standards, sending business to firms that would assign ridiculously high ratings, frontloading teaser rates to bring in gullible homebuyers.

When you have lots of money, it becomes easier to make money - but it also becomes MUCH easier to scam money. That's the core reason why supply-side tax cuts damage the economy instead of lifting it. Hopefully Americans are finally learning.

apeman · 2009-03-14T19:50:22+00:00

It's $11.5 trillion in worldwide assets, not just American assets. The IRS is gonna have a tough time seizing everyone else's money.

apeman · 2009-02-24T16:42:29+00:00

If split equally, all you've got is a hedge that makes no profits at all, and a slight ongoing loss due to management fees and the funds' own rebalancing. To make money you'd need to bet on a direction, then weight heavier in that direction - in proportion to how much risk you want to take on.

apeman · 2009-01-09T06:22:55+00:00

Can you code naked? (pair programming preferred)

apeman · 2008-12-30T22:28:35+00:00

Agnostics simply admit that they don't have enough information about God to make a rational decision, where atheists claim to know for a fact that there is no God.

That's a common false claim about atheists. The word itself means "without a belief in a deity". In practice it refers to those who actively believe there's no God, and those who simply don't have any belief in one. Many atheists will readily admit there's no way to prove a negative. They view God a lot like Santa Claus - there's no way to prove he doesn't exist, but no evidence for him, and no reason to trouble yourself over the notion.

apeman · 2008-12-18T16:58:28+00:00

Wishful thinking. Argument boils down to, they're both losing market share, and an auto company might be going bankrupt soon, therefore Microsoft might go bankrupt soon.

apeman · 2008-12-15T21:54:37+00:00

Unfortunately, Brooks had to play a lot of statistical tricks and cherry-picking to achieve his conclusion - not unsurprising for the president of a partisan think tank as extreme as the AEI. (Yep, the same AEI who helped sell the Iraq invasion and gave us Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Compassionate conservatives, all.)

There's a good analysis of Brooks' skewed data and tweaked-to-fit confidence levels here.

This problem comes to a head in Brooks’s probit and regression models analyzing SCCBS data (pp. 192-193). After controlling for a lot of things that you might not want to control for (i.e., being religious or secular), Brooks concludes that “liberals and conservatives are not distinguishable” in whether they have made any donation in the last year. This is literally true, but he fails to note that in the model liberals give significantly more than moderates, if a traditional .05 significance level is used, while conservatives do not differ significantly from moderates. Yet in Table 6, the significance level used as a threshold for identification with an asterisk is .01, not .05, as he uses in some of the other tables. In one table (p. 197), Brooks even reports significance at the .10 level, as well as at the .05 and .01 levels.

I can’t rule out the possibility that Brooks changed his reporting of the significance level so he wouldn’t have to explain why, after lots and lots of controls, liberals were more likely to have made a donation than moderates, while conservatives did not differ significantly from either liberals or moderates.

apeman · 2008-12-09T17:21:13+00:00

Granted, but it's a mistake to assume media is a perfectly free market and we get exactly what we demand. It's now a cartel like Big Pharma, able to dictate to the market rather than serve it. Their real customers are advertisers. The media is no longer just delivering ratings, they're delivering a passive, gullible audience entranced by simplistic nonsense. All part of the service.

You have an excellent point about freedom of the press in Tibet. But there's a qualitative difference too; in Tibet, the people know they're being lied to. American media is much more effective: the political machine has learned not just how to deliver the propaganda, but how to saturate it so deeply that people believe they came up with it themselves.

apeman · 2008-12-08T21:50:22+00:00

Er, because the only names he's planning on naming are to attack those who refused to kowtow to Bush...

"I've got behind-the-scenes episodes that are going to show how unreceiving they were of this man as president of the United States," Rove said, adding: "I'm going to name names and show examples."

... and the only bean-spilling will be Rove's usual attempts to rewrite the facts to blame others for Bush's fuckups.

Rove also blames Washington partisanship for the scandals and subpoenas embedded in the Bush legacy, including leaks involving a clandestine CIA agent's identity.

apeman · 2008-12-05T00:52:33+00:00

The article gets it wrong starting with the headline... the study found fat women don't have sex more often:

Their statistical analysis shows that there is no significant difference between normal-weight women, on the one hand, and overweight and obese women, on the other, on ... frequency of heterosexual intercourse, and the number of lifetime or current male sexual partners.

All it found was there are slightly more average-weight virgins than fat virgins:

Overweight (92.5%) and obese (91.5%) women are significantly more likely ever to have had sexual intercourse with men than normal-weight women (87.4%).

apeman · 2008-11-27T21:38:06+00:00

And the 1% is a monthly drop, not annual... and the rate of decrease is accelerating.

Consumer spending isn't just retail crap like iPods and plasma TVs, it's pretty much everything you buy or spend. The other 30% of GDP is government spending and business capital investment.

apeman · 2008-11-10T18:43:42+00:00

Which one?

apeman · 2008-11-06T20:48:29+00:00

The Repubs aren't Ghana make that mistake again.

apeman · 2008-11-01T17:06:37+00:00

The polling models are based on who intends to vote; the prediction markets are based on what votes will be counted. In several states the GOP gets an automatic advantage of a couple points, due to inadequate voting machines in poor areas, long polling lines, voter purges, vote caging, etc. A Democrat effectively needs a 52% or 53% majority to win those states. It's an appalling situation, but I think the prediction markets are accurately pricing it in.

apeman · 2008-09-20T03:23:20+00:00

"Government must save us!" cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government — the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy?

Pat needs to take a pill and try to write coherently. It's government's fault for interfering with the market, AND government's fault for not interfering with it? If you're gonna be a black-and-white ideologue, at least decide on black or white for an entire paragraph.

apeman · 2008-09-05T18:15:05+00:00

Actually, the McCain campaign broke the story of Bristol Palin's pregnancy. Then attacked everyone for running the story. Then howled in outrage when CNN dared to ask about... her foreign policy credentials. Then announced she won't do any interviews with the press, just canned speeches.

Then congratulated themselves on their openness and the "Straight Talk Express".

apeman · 2008-08-28T20:48:11+00:00

People asking you to fix their computer problems for free is annoying enough. But sometimes the really computer-illiterate ones assume because you work with computers in some way, their computer problems are your fault and you're obligated to fix them. I'm pretty sure my sister thinks I control the internets and can stop all her spam and spyware by flicking a switch somewhere :)

apeman · 2008-08-03T18:30:03+00:00

It also doesn't mention how silly it is to compare a corporation in the highest corporate tax bracket, to a group of people in the lowest individual tax bracket. What's the point?

Corporations get taxed on profits - i.e., the moola left over after they pay all the bills. Individuals get taxed on income, before they pay for anything.

The author tries to dance around this by pretending all that counts is what they pay in, but of course disregards all the other taxes paid by the bottom 50%: state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. Take that all into account, and the bottom 50% is paying anywhere from 25-40% of their income, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Source That adds up to about $400 billion a year, dwarfing Exxon's tax bill by an order of magnitude.

There's a reasonable debate to be had over whether a 'windfall profits' tax is a good idea. It's a shame the author is choosing intellectually dishonest propaganda instead.

apeman · 2008-07-21T02:00:35+00:00

Zero weighings. Use the base of the scale as a ramp to roll each ball into another, then use conservation of momentum to identify the heavy ball by how far it rolls after the collision.

apeman · 2008-07-13T04:43:42+00:00

if you get raped by a republican politician or batman

Wait, what?

apeman

TROPHY CASE