Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Kids on Computers is, I think, a great non-profit organization in terms of impact-per-dollar. If you have a working laptop that you need to replace with a Microsoft Surface Book, donate the machine now and get a tax deduction for 2015!

The 501(c)(3) charity also wants to redesign its web site. If you’ve got experience with WordPress and all of the modern client-side languages… perhaps this is your volunteer job for 2016! It is a great group of people and there are trips to Oaxaca. Combine Day of the Dead with Linux!

[Separately, when are they going to cut the price of the Surface Book? I don’t want a laptop where I will have to cry if I drop it. Does it actually need to cost $1900 with a feeble 8 GB/256 GB memory/SSD configuration? Lenovo does that in a Yoga 900 for $1200.]

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Tchaikovsky is nice, but what about a modern Christmas-season ballet?

Plot:

• Scene 1: Little Johnny walks over to the neighbor’s house wearing a T-shirt printed with “don’t feed me nuts” in 96-point type on both front and back.
• Scene 2: Little Johnny is on the sofa watching football on the big-screen TV. He absent-mindedly grabs a handful of cashews and peanuts from a bowl next to the couch.
• Scene 3: Dermatologist’s office equipped with a 12′-high spruce tree from which dangle pharmaceutical samples. Little Johnny is being treated for a nasty-looking skin condition.

Title: The Nutrasher.

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Christine Corbett Moran is a human oxymoron: cool physicist. She’s off to the South Pole for a year and offering readers the chance to subscribe to an email newsletter (form). Are you afraid of microwave ovens? Holding a mobile phone to your ear? Fortunately, physicists funded by your tax dollars are trying to get to the bottom of these hazards with the South Pole Telescope that looks for Cosmic Microwave background radiation (emphasis added). Dr. Moran is going to come back with the answers! In the meantime we’ll have her email updates on what it is like to live in the most extreme environment on the Earth’s surface.

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The New York Times has a story about President Obama’s speech on the NPR radio network that his government funds. It seems that the government-paid journalists are favorably impressed with the head of the government who ultimately signs their paychecks. Obama suggests that Republicans are hostile to him and his policies because of “who I am and my background.” I.e., people who disagree with him are racist. Consider the white entrepreneur whose company succeeds against all odds but now finds that she has to pay 50% more in federal capital gains taxes than under King Bush II (has gone from 15% of the gain to 24%, from a combination of higher rates plus the new Obamacare taxes). She is a racist because she would prefer to keep this money for herself or invest it in a new venture rather than give it to the federal government to spend.

I find that I can agree with President Obama. Anyone who disagrees with me is a racist!

[I have already put this to the test and discovered that racism is rampant in America. I called up an African-American friend and asked her to give me 10% of her income over and above the tax rates that she is already paying. Although I previously believed her to be well-disposed toward Caucasians, she refused to hand over 10% of her income without grumbling. She is apparently a racist.]

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I tried Mast Brothers chocolate once and concluded that a Lindt or Nestle (branded Cailler these days) bar from a gas station in Switzerland was vastly superior at roughly 1/10th the price. My Facebook friends have been posting stories about this company, the best of which seems to be from The Guardian:

despite their enormous price tag, the only great thing about these chocolate bars is their wrappers

All the Mast bars were far too chalky and bitter. The almond one tasted like bark. Or, I guess, the shells of cacao beans. The not-quite-finely-ground-enough shells of cacao beans? Is that what kept catching in my throat as I swallowed? Whatever it was, it kinda hurt.

Best of all, though? Honestly? Good ol’ Hershey’s.

A little too sweet, maybe? Sure. Especially compared to its company. A little plasticky tasting? Chemical-y? Also, guilty. But it was silky and soothing, a balm for a throat scraped raw by jagged shards of cacao bean shells. Whatever non-organic, non-bean-to-bar, probably poisonous ingredient those corporate monsters at Hershey’s HQ are putting into their chocolate that the artisans are not – “emulsifier”, I suppose – it turns to liquid deliciousness in a way that that the stuff of the artisans simply does not.

(The Guardian writer didn’t include any Swiss chocolate in his comparison.)

Readers: Who has tried Mast Brothers and wants to defend it?

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“The One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job” is a NYT article by a Wharton School professor. The young person who has never had a job is supposed to figure out the corporate culture and then decide on where to work based on which company has the best. Let’s assume that the 22-year-old can correctly make these judgment calls. Isn’t this still terrible advice? Wouldn’t the most important criterion for an ambitious young person be “How fast is the company growing?” It is pretty easy to get promoted if the company needs to promote half of the employees every year in order to accommodate growth. And perhaps a second criterion should be the extent to which the company is a leader in its industry. It is a lot easier to go from a perceived leader to the next job than from a perceived laggard.

What am I missing?

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My Facebook feed has turned into an all-vilification-of-Donald-Trump-all-the-time experience.

My friends’ current complaint is that Trump doesn’t recognize the massive economic boom that would result from accepting refugees from violence and poverty in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

It occurred to me that maybe there is an opportunity in the financial services industry here. For those who believe that the migrants Trump seeks to limit are an economic boon, why not offer them the ability to make infinite money by setting up a hedge fund? The “Refuboom Fund” will use maximum leverage to short the economies, such as Singapore, that won’t accept any of these folks while going long on the economies that accept the most (e.g., Sweden, Germany (at least get the dead cat bounce from VW)). (See Wikipedia then click “Natives per refugee” to sort; among countries with significant public equity markets and readily tradeable currencies, it looks as though China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, and Chile should also be shorted.)

As there seems to be a difference of opinion regarding the long-term economic effects of growing a country’s population in this manner, the Refuboom Fund can also collect fees on the other side, offering the opposite position to people who think that migrants will be a net burden.

What do readers think? It is possible to invest based on this historic migration from Arab and Muslim countries?

Related:

• Will Greece be rich soon?
• New Yorker magazine highlights career opportunities in Refugee Nation

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The Web started out life in 1990 with information that was untainted by commercial bias. There was no money to be made so people wrote whatever they believed. The Great Age of Internet Advertising, from the second half of the 1990s until around 2013, poured money into web publishing but in such a way that publishers could still write whatever they thought because advertising revenue tracked audience size. The anti-reader behavior of some publishers and advertisers has resulted in the current Age of the Ad Blocker. It is hard to imagine many readers taking the trouble to white-list favorite sites and/or sites that display relevant and unobtrusive advertising.

Publishers still want to get paid. Does this mean the advertising will increasingly be woven into the content in ways that are impossible for ad blockers to detect and thus perhaps impossible for humans to detect? Consider a car magazine. If they can’t make money from running ads, why not get paid by Toyota to write “the latest Camry is much better than the current Honda Accord” (or vice versa, of course)? In that case how will a reader ever be able to trust anything?

[Of course I recognize that the “good old days” weren’t so good, e.g., “A Whopping 20% Of Yelp Reviews Are Fake”]

 

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Having recently seen the movie Spotlight, I was surprised to come across the following in Goebbels:

A few days later, however, Hitler told him on the telephone that he now wanted “to take action against the Vatican.” He proposed to reopen on a grand scale the pedophile abuse cases that had been put on ice in summer 1936. They should start with a raft of charges already filed with the public prosecutor in Koblenz. Hitler envisaged as a “prelude” the “horrifying sexual murder of a boy in a Belgian monastery”; Goebbels immediately dispatched a “special rapporteur” to Brussels.26 Shortly afterward, Hitler ordered the judicial authorities to reopen the trials.27 There was no lack of suitable ammunition, as Goebbels wrote some days later: “We’ve still got 400 unresolved cases.”28 The series of trials in Koblenz began at the end of April. Goebbels was displeased by what he considered the inadequate reaction of the media, and he summoned a special press conference at which the papers were commanded to launch “a large-scale propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church.” The results were so impressive that Goebbels was moved to express his appreciation of the journalists at the press conference the next day.

On May 28 Goebbels gave a speech in the Berlin Deutschlandhalle condemning “the sex offenders and those behind them.” The key sentences of this speech (which is generally regarded as the high point of the regime’s campaign against the churches in 1937) were not his own, however, as the diary reveals: “Führer with me, dictating my declaration of war against the clergy today regarding the sexual abuse trials. Very stinging and drastic. I would not have gone that far.”

In his speech Goebbels made clear that the cases of sexual abuse by the clergy that had for some time been filling the courts of the National Socialist state were not “regrettable isolated incidents”; it was, rather, a matter of “general moral decay.

Even an older person like myself could wish that times would actually change…

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Harvard University distributed “A placemat guide for holiday discussions on race and justice with loved ones,” before its carefully-selected-for-diversity-yet-all-approximately-the-same-age undergraduates went home for Christmas.

What interests me most about the placemats is the language. Here’s an example of what Harvard undergraduates were instructed to say to the parents:

“When I hear students expressing their experiences of racism on campus I don’t hear complaining,” the placemat suggests as a response. “Instead I hear young people uplifting a situation that I may not experience. If non-Black students get the privilege of that safe environment, I believe that same privilege should be given to all students.”

Is this an entirely new use for the word “uplifting”? I don’t think that I have seen a similar construction.

The bottom right corner of the placemat:

“Do you think the response would be the same if it was a white person being pulled over?”

This was officially put out by full-time administrators at Harvard University. Is it therefore safe to declare that the subjunctive is dead in the English language? The Harvard Crimson article on the subject of the mats doesn’t note the apparent innovations in the English language.

[Separately, the student author of the Crimson article imagines that some sort of First Amendment paradise exists just beyond the university gates. He complains about “groupthink.” (I use the pronoun “he” because I Googled the author’s name and it appears that the undergraduate currently identifies as a male.) Assuming that he identifies with the male gender post-graduation and does not emigrate to a more freewheeling country, let’s see him try to hold onto a job in the U.S. if he truly speaks his mind on the issues covered by the placemats! Are the mats a reminder that even Americans who’ve had between $500,000 and $1 million in education (depending on whether they attended taxpayer-funded K-12 or a private school) need to be told what to think and say? Sure. But “diversity” is not a value when it comes to opinions on an increasingly wide range of topics! That’s a valuable lesson to learn as an undergraduate if the plan is ultimately to live in the U.S.]

Related: selected reader comments on the boston.com article on the subject:

• If you plan on bringing this stuff up during the holidays with your family, you have bigger issues.
• I can just picture the LGBTQ folks……What about US?
• “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. … ”  ― George Orwell, 1984

Also see First English lesson at Harvard: Don’t modify “unique”

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