TIME magazine, whose left-wing editors and writers make no pretense of hiding their preference for Romney as their second-best favorite replacement for the man currently in the WhiteHouse, began the current salvo with a cover story praising Obama's foreign policy:
The reality is that, despite domestic challenges and limited resources, President Obama has pursued an effective foreign policy. in fact, over the past year, Obama's policies have come together in a particularly successful manner.WORLD magazine, whose politics are almost as far to the right as TIME is to the left and makes no pretense of hiding their contempt for both Obama and his wannabe clone (the one with an R), shot back with an op-ed piece by their heavyweight foreign correspondent:... even before the killing of Osama bin Laden, even before Lybia, most Americans gave Obama positive marks for his handling of foreign policy. [Jan.30, p24]
But a growing number of analysts who cheered Obama and criticized Bush are voicing alarm over what analyst Daniel Pletka calls a "rudderless" national foreign policy. Robert Kagan ... said Obama's failure to work out an agreement with Iraq to maintain U.S. troops there "may prove to be one of the gravest errors of Obama's first term, for which either he or his successor will pay a high price." [Feb.24, p32]It will be interesting to watch these two national magazines duke it out.
Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. [Psalm 37:4]It doesn't seem to be working for me.
Many years ago I was in a church seminar, and the speaker asked what is most important to people. In our affluent culture it's not food or shelter or even money, but significance. People want to do something that makes a difference. It resonated with me so profoundly that to this day I remember where I was sitting -- but curiously, not how the question related to the seminar topic.
The "desire of my heart" is to do something useful, preferably useful to God, but at least useful to people. The most reliable and objective measure of usefulness is how much people are willing to pay for it. There may be exceptions, but not many. It's also not easily fooled by liars (see "My BS Detector"). Our culture is full of liars, especially in the churches. With this robust way to measure usefulness, I can now investigate my success at attaining "the desires of my heart."
I was able to do a few things in the past that were slightly useful...
I spent maybe 15 years in the security industry, designing computerized burglar alarms. The security industry feeds on the combination of two kinds of human greed: You need greedy people seeking ways to take stuff they have not earned, and you need greedy people with that stuff and seeking to prevent the first group from taking it. The second group buys alarm systems. Obviously the company I worked with thought what I did was useful (to them) because they paid well. But it's not exactly something I could proudly point at in the presence of God.
I spent maybe 15 years producing and supporting programming language tools (TinyBasic and CompileIt) for amateur programmers. They loved it, and from time to time I still get occasional emails of appreciation. It was a leisure-time activity for most of them, but I suspect some got a career start out of it. Not particularly earth-changing, but I made some money at it, so I guess they thought it was useful.
Realizing that programmers seemed most productive in their younger years, I planned for a different kind of productivity when I grew older, and got a PhD so I could teach. I've spent a little over 5 years teaching, and now nobody wants me. I guess my teaching computer science is not that useful to people. The students mostly thought so, but they don't get to choose.
Somewhere in the middle of all that I spent maybe 15 years producing BibleTrans, the world's first and only machine translation tool that could within the next decade make the Bible available in every language that does not yet have it. I think it would be world-changing, but it needs the involvement of more people than myself to have that effect. Nobody wants it.
OK, God, now what?
Look at my blog posts (here) and my
essays. Not all of them, but a large part should count as "delighting
in the Lord." When does the "desires" part happen? Or is TinyBasic and
CompileIt and burglar alarms all I get? That would be disappointing.
So maybe these aging programmers aren't in it for the money -- according to this article, they never were. I wasn't. We did it for the fun. They still are, as one of them admitted in the last line of the article, "I would have done this for free." They are lucky that somebody still believes in them. I still am working for free, because today's age-ist culture doesn't really want people with gray hair reminding them of the brevity of life. Yeah, they have laws against age discrimination, but foolish laws like that only make it harder for us to find work.
Anyway, what caught my attention in an article no more attractive than (back page feature) "10 Questions" asked of some obscure comedienne I never heard of, was the description of the next game these guys are working on: a turns-based fighting game, played not in real itme, but each turn comes whenever the other player gets around to it. As the writer pointed out, chess by mail has been around for hundreds of years, but he seems not to have considered that chess requires deep concentration to determine your next move. Tournament chess is played by the clock, because otherwise the players could take a long time. The turn-around of mail delivery is not a hindrance.
A twitch game is different. If Relationshipism (mutual affirmation) is the true religion of "Christians" in America, instant gratification is the idolatry of the rest of the country -- probably not excluding the Christians. Making a two-second instant decision in a video game needs to be rewarded in less time than it took to make the choice. Waiting hours for the other player to notice that it's their turn may be tolerable for a 60-year-old geezer (like these programmers) whose reflexes are no longer up to the speed of a traditional shoot-em-up twitch game, but it won't sell to the cell-phone teens whose other choice is AngryBirds.
So it gives these old geezers something to do besides wishing the government
would pay for the "donut" cost of their escalating medications. I guess
that's worth something.
To understand what is going on here, you must first recognize that American churches are run by and for the exclusive benefit of MBTI Feelers, people whose highest value is affirmation, also known as being Nice. The other half of the population, the Thinkers who more highly value Truth and Justice, need not apply -- or at least they are expected to check their brains at the door.
Perhaps not the candidates themselves, but most certainly their election teams are primarily Thinkers. They need to analyze scientifically what wins elections, and then do those things if they want their guy to win. That's a Thinker activity. The more successful of them get to help elect Presidents. Attack ads work, because attack ads are (at least in principle) about truth, and people who care about truth will pay attention to them. I suppose they also work on the Feelers because the ads are disaffirming, which is the opposite of what the Feelers want to feel, thereby pulling their victim down in the public eye.
But the question placed before us by these "Christian" magazines is not whether the ads work to get their candidate elected, but are they virtuous? Is it a Good thing for a candidate to be doing? It's a good question, but with a surprising answer. Obviously the intentionally deceptive ads are lies, and lies are from the Father of Lies, the Devil himself. Those are evil and Wrong. But not all attack ads are dishonest. Most of them expose some true but little-known fact about their victim. They help educate the public. It's negative, but true. Is that good or bad?
I turn to the Bible for the answer. Jesus lived a life without sin, yet some of the things he said about politicians in his day sound a lot like attack ads from today: "Woe to you, Pharisees, hypocrites! You load heavy burdens on people, but don't lift a finger to help." Does that sound Nice? Is that civil? Hardly. The Apostles and the Prophets weren't any better. At least not Nice.
I conclude, therefore, that the discomfort these magazines and their colleagues in churches across America are feeling about the negativity in this campaign is misplaced.
Don't get me wrong. Nice is not a bad thing. It's just not the best
thing. Truth is more important than being Nice. Jesus never lied, but he
was not always Nice. There is a time and a place for Nice. When it comes
down to who will lead the most powerful country in the world, Nice is inappropriate.
Osama bin Laden was not Nice to us, and we want somebody up there who can
be not-Nice back to such people. And if somebody is not qualified to do
that very difficult job, we need to be not-Nice enough to make sure he
or she does not get elected. Or at least replaced in the next election.
It's called "democracy" and it mostly works.
They start by comparing the economic situation in 2012 to 1912 and finding a lot of similarities, notably the presence of three emerging technologies: electrification, telephony, and automobiles back then, as compared to big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution today. Let's grant them some correspondence.
Let's further grant them the observation that increased computer processing power leads to unforseeable changes in the economy, because we already have a half-century of experience seeing that happen. It's the other two emerging technologies in their list -- if you can consider them separate at all -- that look a little more iffy on closer examination.
Their whole paragraph on smart manufacturing smacks of buzzword mumbo-jumbo. "Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level," they tell us. It sounds good, but it's still sci-fi today, like space travel was in 1912. Sure, the space age was foreseen, and it happened, but it didn't amount to much. Communications satellites do today what underwater cables did (and still do) before we had stuff in the sky. Otherwise, space travel is still sci-fi for most of us. Predicting the future is rather harder than analyzing the past.
Then they tell us of "computationally engineered materials [like] novel metal alloys, graphene transistors, and invisible meta-materials." I don't know how these materials qualify as "computationally engineered" unless they really only have one emerging technology (namely computers, which is really 50 years old), and they needed to force something in to fill in the slots of their parallelism.
Wikipedia reports a lot of research in graphene, with high hopes for future electronic products and fancy manufacturing technologies -- how about making vodka without the heat of a still? Wow, what a technical break-through! I seem to recall similar high hopes for magnetic bubbles several decades ago. Predicting the future is still harder than analyzing the past. As for invisibility cloaking, physicist Chris Lee tells us "New meta-material doesn't actually render anything invisible". Economists can't really be expected to understand the physics, but anybody can read the hits from a simple Google search.
They reach a crescendo with the breathless hope for "the Holy Grail: 'desktop' printing of entire final products from wheels to even washing machines." 3-D printing (direct-digital manufacturing) is a cute toy today, but it is limited to materials that can be laid down incrementally by the printer, like certain kinds of plastics. We may devise more such materials, but they won't encompass the whole range of physical properties needed for wheels and washing machines. You might also give the "3-D printing" label to a computer-driven milling machine, but we've had those for decades; they can hardly be described as "emerging". Calling it a "Holy Grail" perhaps accurately anticipates the success of their hope. But it gets more religious:
The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. And it will be defined by high talent not cheap labor.Pardon my immodesty here, but I suspect I qualify as "high talent" here. "Near-perfect" computational operation is achievable about the way sinless perfection is: true in principle, but exceedingly difficult in practice. I think I will wait this one out and see what really happens.
Finally, there is the unfolding communications revolution where soon most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. Never before have a billion people -- soon billions more -- been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.This is something of an exaggeration. A billion people today have access to both cars and cell phone technology, but most of them (read: Africa and other third-world locations where cell technology is available but landlines are not) cannot afford the high prices except for rare events; they walk a mile to a provider and pay a day's wage for a few minutes. Furthermore, unlike point-to-point wires and optical fibers, the airwaves are a limited resource. We can tolerate a few hundred simultaneous conversations in a single cell tower by digital compression, but there's a physics limit to what the frequencies will sustain. We are already seeing price structures designed to limit the bandwidth used by customers of hardwired net access such as offered on TV cable, where they are nowhere near the bandwith limitations inherent in the medium, but greater than what cell tower frequency allocations can sustain. There is no room for unlimited growth here, not here in the USA, and not in the 3rd world. It's physics.The implications of the radical collapse in the cost of wireless connectivity are as big as those following the dawn of telegraphy/telephony. Coupled with the cloud, the wireless world provides cheap connectivity, information and processing power to nearly everyone, everywhere.
Think of it as like cars. Everybody in the USA has a car, but not everybody drives their car all day every day. There isn't enough space on the streets and highways for them, and they can't afford the gas to do it. Cars cost more than cell phones, but wireless will necessarily still have those same kinds of limitations.
Then Mills & Ottino turn to why they believe America is poised to lead their vision of the future: "our youthful demographics, dynamic culture and diverse educational system." The farther they get from (measurable) technology, the harder it is for them to stick to hard reality. "By 2020," they tell us, "America will be younger than both China and the euro zone, if the latter still exists."
That's an interesting demographic, but it bears a closer look. China and Europe have aging populations because they are (in China's case, intentionally) killing off their children before they are born. We are, too. Fortunately, Darwinian "natural selection" applies, and the killers are being replaced in the demographic by the ("pro-life") breeders. We have more of the latter to start with than those other places, but Mills & Ottino seem not to notice. However, most of our youthful growth is coming in across porous borders; without them we'd be shrinking like Europe. Nobody in Washington (nor their wannabe replacements in the other party) is proposing a just and viable solution to the situation, nor are the immigrants likely to participate in any continued youthful high-tech supremacy of the USA, because they are being denied access to technological leadership.
Mills & Ottino tell us,
Culture cannot be changed or copied overnight... Ours is distinguished by ... open-mindedness, risk-taking, hard work, playfulness, and, critical for nascent new ideas, a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking. Where else could an Apple or a Steve Jobs have emerged?This is an important insight, but it ignores the elephant in the room. The American culture is the most innovative in the world because it is built on the Protestant work ethic, which everybody -- especially the "diverse" educational system -- is vigorously trying to tear down. The Protestant work ethic is based on the Christian value of self-sacrifice and serving others; modern educated thinking promotes greed and selfishness. It's not the same. Fortunately, as the authors observed, culture doesn't change quickly. We are still running on the fumes in the gas tank, and it may yet be good for another few decades. The reference to Steve Jobs is particularly poignant, because he was an unwanted pregnancy adopted out; today potential Steve Jobses are killed before they can be born.
It's that "diverse educational system" which adds a long nose and tramples everything in the Mills & Ottino house. The American educational system worked to sustain the American culture of "open-mindedness, risk-taking, hard work, [and] playfulness" so long as it encouraged the Protestant ethic values; now that those values are largely gone from the system, forbidden by the government-funded established religion of atheism, the American educational system is churning out only greedy self-indulgent drones designed to vote for the left-wing bigots who made the system so bad, but nothing like the "open-minded, risk-taking, hard work[ing]" innovators who made this country great. It's the wrong kind of diversity being taught in the schools, and it's already starting to show its effect.
It may be that more than half of the world's top 100 universities are in America, with soaring foreign enrollments, but those foreign students don't come to take "diversity" programs like "Women's Studies" and "History of Human Consciousness". They come for science. And then they go home and build nukes for Iran and North Korea, leaving us with the drones sitting in downtown malls chanting "Occupy America" instead of occupying themselves to build new and better things in America.
"What should our politicians do to help usher in this new era of entrepreneurial growth?" the authors ask, and conclude with nice political answers. I think the biggest thing the government can do to promote the next century of American growth is to GET OUT OF THE WAY. Stop killing children. Stop the monopoly of underperforming schools. A sensible immigration policy wouldn't hurt, but the right-wing bigots don't have any better ideas than the left-wing bigots. I would encourage some bipartisanship, but the education factories have already instilled too much selfishness (in everybody) for anything like that to hope to succeed, as we saw in the recent budget fiasco, and the health care fiasco before that.
I agree with Mills & Ottino that the USA is way ahead of whoever
is in second place, but after watching the elephant stamp around a while,
I'm convinced that everybody -- not excluding Mills & Ottino -- is
trying hard to close the gap. Maybe we'll see another 100 years of American
world supremacy, and maybe we won't. I'm less optimistic than the authors
of this essay, mostly for reasons they are ignoring. But they are writing
for the Wall Street Journal, and American business doesn't give a rip about
25 years in the future, let alone 100. I suspect the Koreans might have
a better balance of religious values and long-term vision. It's going to
be a bumpy ride.
I think if I had children, I would insist on sitting through the film with them, explaining the moral problems as they come up, and why they are wrong. In other contexts I'm more likely to explain the scientific problems -- like MacGyver picking a lock with his Swiss army knife.
K-PAX had a theological problem that it took me a couple days to identify. The guy Prot is presented as a visitor from a distant planet who gets locked up in a looney bin, and the plot centers on his interaction with the resident shrink, who represents science and truth, and with the other patients, who view Prot with religious awe. It is meant to be a subtle parable on Christianity, where "science" proves religion is false, even despite small hints (read: miracles, unexplained by science) that the religionist/alien story might be true. The climax comes [spoiler alert] on the morning when Prot is scheduled to return to his home planet K-PAX, and he's still there in the hospital after the announced time but in a catatonic vegetative state (proving the shrink was right); one of the other patients, however, whom Prot had promised to take with him, has disappeared from the locked facility, and we are left wondering if maybe she went to K-PAX after all. Prot himself had previously disappeared and returned suddenly, with no visible means. The implication is that since science is mostly right, these are just minor problems that science will eventually solve.
It's fiction, of course. Perhaps there truly are no such thing as aliens (not counting Jesus, we have never seen any), but people also don't pop in and out of existence. The miracles in the Bible were not gratuitous, they were attached to particular events and persons to give those persons authority. Most (but perhaps not all) modern claims of "miracle" are hyperbole or wishful thinking. We should not be credulous, but we should also not be dismissive. Rather we should be a little like the shrink in K-PAX, examining the evidence, then remaining convinced by it. In his case the (fictional) evidence came down soundly against Prot's story as an alien, but the shrink actually went out and found it. If you try to do that in the science-vs-religion conflict, there is no primary evidence from the (Darwinist) "scientists", so the truth actually leans the other way.
Don't confuse the parable with the facts. They are different.
So what is it they are willing to spend big bucks on? They want your cookies. They are even willing to lie to get them.
The function of cookies in your web browser is so the web site you are visiting can keep a record of your visit on your computer. That makes cookies something like a virus, which is anything you don't want that some other other computer puts on your computer for the purpose of doing something you don't want done. That last part is important. If people wanted their privacy invaded, Google would not need to pay for a back-cover TIME ad.
I said they lied about it. The ad deceptively implies that the function of the cookie is so that Google doesn't need to ask your name. That's a lie. Google doesn't need to ask your name anyway. I never let cookies go through and I use Google all the time. It works fine without knowing my name. What Google wants to do -- which they cannot do without cookies -- is collect private information to sell targeted ads. OK, they make money on their ads, and they wouldn't exist if they couldn't sell ads. Fine, let them sell ads. But I don't want to see my name on anybody's ad. If I do, it means somebody has access to my private information -- more than my name! -- and I don't want that, and neither do you.
A few years ago some untrained income tax official in the State of Misery misappropriated my tax payment and sent it off to some other state, which refused to give it back. If that isn't bad enough, I started getting letters from some company in a third state offering to get it back for me -- for a fee, of course. How did they know my name and address? My private information got out. I don't want that happening, and neither do you. The government did it, and there's not much you or I can do about the government, especially the unelected bureaucrats who steal citizen's money and won't give it back.
But we don't have to make it easy for private companies like Google.
They don't get any cookies from me, and apparently not from a lot of other
people too. So they buy expensive ads on the back cover of TIME
to try to convince us otherwise. It didn't work with me.
Then last Sunday, the fellow who writes the songs for our Scripture memorization, and who is himself something of a joker, handed me a CD titled "Ken Davis: Seriously Funny." God wants you to have fun, according to Davis, and the whole sermon (except for a tiny personal note at the end) was one joke after another, mostly poking fun at his wife and teen or pre-teen daughters, who are now grown up with their own children and not nearly so funny. Or maybe it's safe to joke about the past, and not the present. His jokes were funny, although not in the same league as McManus, but I felt badly for his wife and daughters. Maybe they put up with the abuse because it's his (and their) source of income.
Never once did Ken Davis cite a single Bible verse in support of his thesis. If God wants you and me to have fun, why can't I find any Bible verse saying so? Or at least giving an example of God or Jesus or one of the Prophets or Apostles having fun. OK, there are a couple:
Psalm 2:4 -- The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them. [NIV]At whom? "The kings of the earth [and] the rulers [who] gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One." God laughs at His enemies, not His family and friends. "Then he rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath..." In 1Kings 18:27 the prophet Elijah taunts the (false) prophets of Ba'al and jokes about the impotence of their god. It's even funny. Again, it's the enemies of God who are the butt of his joking.
There is one other verse, Eph.5:4, "Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving." Jesus promised his disciples trouble in this world [John 16:33] not fun.
So I have this problem. If joking and laughter are such a good thing, why is the Bible, which is arguably our source of all Truth and Wisdom and knowledge of Virtue -- at least I would argue as much -- why is the Bible so negative about it? Am I so "joyless" (as one of my critics accused me)? Or is laughter like alcohol and recreational drugs, which God made for the helpless and the hopeless, so they can "drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more."
It is not for kings to drink wine, not for rulers to crave beer, lest they drink and forget what the law decrees, and deprive all the oppressed of their rights. [Prov.31:6,7]We are kings and priests in God's economy, we don't need mind-bending drugs to smother despair.
I suspect that joking, like booze, does indeed "deprive all the oppressed of their rights." OK, the wicked deserve it, they chose to oppose the Creator and Ruler of the universe. But think about what makes a joke funny. There are two kinds of jokes, puns -- for which the proper response to a really good one is a groan -- and ridicule. Davis ridiculed his wife and daughters. McManus poked fun at his wife a few times, but mostly he ridiculed his own teenage blunders, and those of a few (obviously fictitious) accomplices like Retch Sweeney and Rancid Crabtree. Many of his jokes build an expectation of folly in another person, then it turns out to be McManus himself, before he gets to telling about the other person, which is sort of like the way a pun works.
Does anyone enjoy being the butt of somebody else's joke? I don't. We put up with it, especially if the joke is really funny, the way we put up with a hangover after a good drunk, but it's not fun. Alcoholics obviously are willing to accept the hangover, and drug addicts are willing to suffer the downer, or they wouldn't injest those substances in the first place, but we usually don't get the choice to be the butt of somebody's joke.
So I try not to tell jokes that ridicule other people. Well, I slipped up a few months ago. A 20-something young lady was telling about getting calls for some "Tim Turner" on her new cell phone, and then dreaming that he was actually me and that I was with the CIA. I couldn't resist: I disguised my voice and called her cell, "This is Tim Turner, do you have any messages for me?" If I'd been more skillful, I would have added that it was a matter of national security, and that I would be right over to make the arrest, and that she would recognize "my little blue car." But everybody had a good laugh anyway -- including Mary, after she recovered from the adrenaline rush. It was a good joke, but was it a Good thing to do? I don't know, at least not if Scripture is to be my guide.
The article didn't say it, but it's obvious that Buffett's religion is money, not God. Nevertheless, God's moral laws make success in all sorts of places. In money+politics (Buffett) as in God+politics (many Christians), there are both overlaps and contrasts. The socialists in Washington like it when Buffett calls for "higher taxes on the rich and more government spending," but less cheerful when he opposes "regulation as a curb for corporate excess." That's not the whole story, and I suspect Buffett had (or would have) more to say on exactly what kinds of taxes and spending and regulation. He evidently doesn't think much of what Obama did to health care, calling it "a tapeworm in America." Buffett, like Japanese business leaders, is looking at the long-term prospects for business in America, not so much the short-term quarterly bottom line most popular among his competitors. And much of what he says makes sense. But not all.
As a very rich man, Buffet is famous for saying the rich should pay more taxes. He's right. It should not be possible for very rich people like Buffett to get away with paying half the tax rate of middle-class people. But Buffett is not asking for punitive taxes on wealth, which the socialists want. He just wants everybody to share the burden. It's only just. The article hints that Buffett might support overtaxing the rich, but without actual quotes; I suspect the writer could be injecting her own left-wing politics, instead of accurately presenting Buffett's own thinking. This article goes on to quote Buffet against allowing foreign investment profits to be repatriated tax-free: "It'll just encourage more investment to flow overseas." Which is true. Tax policy should carefully consider what social policies it encourages and discourages. Neither political party (nor the politicized MSM like TIME) is doing a good job of that, but the current administration is just plain ignorant. I'd bet Buffett knows that. He certainly has given more thought to the problem than any politician I ever heard.
"Get rid of public schools," the sidebar reads, "so that rich families would be forced to invest in the public K-12 system." The main article goes on to say that "No Buffett in Omaha has ever gone to a private school." That looks suspiciously misleading. The qualifier "in Omaha" suggests that although when Buffett's children in Omaha were school age, he may not have been rich enough yet to justify private school, but he himself might have gone to private school in Washington when his father was Congressman. The DC schools are so bad, no politician sends his kids to public school there. More investment wouldn't help, because per student, the Omaha schools cost only 31% of what the DC schools cost . Private schools cost even less, and teach better. Figures don't lie, but liars figure. Although education has a better correlation with personal wealth than any other indicator, Buffett does not "think education will entirely close the gap" between the rich and the poor. He does not mention that Jesus supports this insight. The socialists in Washington also know it, but they aren't saying so, because they want to be the rich that the poor will never rise up to become.
The writer continues her left-wing editorializing by quoting "another Nebraskan, Democrat William Jennings Bryan," without actually saying that Buffett approves of his statement: "If you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." That only works in a capitalistic economy, where prosperous people buy goods and services from independent businesses, who then become prosperous -- and also hire more people to make more goods and services to sell. In a socialist economy, the goods and services are owned by the government, so there is no spread of the prosperity, and the government only takes more of it away in taxes.
"Buffet believes that once the housing market recovers, the U.S. economy will be back on track." The article neglects to tell us which is cause and which is effect, nor if Buffett even knows. More construction certainly means more employment for construction workers, but nobody is going to build more houses when so many people are unemployed and can't even afford the house they lost to the bank last year.
Buffett offers a curious insight on investing in technology, by comparing it to the automobile 100 years ago. Some 2000 automobile companies back then are survived by only three today. As a long-term investment, it was a lousy risk. The article did not go on to explain why, but I'd bet Buffett knows. He looks for long-term value, the companies that will be worth more in ten years than they are today. High-flying sizzle stocks tend to be over-priced because the market is (mostly, except in the very long term that Buffett looks at) a zero-sum game, and high demand drives the stock price up without increasing the corporate value. Naturally, he's in favor of taxing the income of day-traders, he's not one of them. Buffett's company, Berkshire-Hathaway is buying up solid (but underpriced) companies in the present down market. "I am 100% sure that people in this country will be doing more business 10 years from now than they are today." Of course they will! Obama will no longer be President, so his policies will no longer be inducing fear and trembling in business owners. Even if Obama wins again, he and his influence will be gone by 2022; if a Republican wins this year and is replaced by another Democrat in the next or following elections, no left-wing Democrat as ignorant and foolish as Obama will be elected again while his memory is fresh. So Buffet is right: the environment for business has to be better ten years from now. Today is "the Great Depression" our children will talk about fifty years from now. A Republican started it (both this one and also in 1929) and the Democrat who replaced him made it far worse. Both times.
The TIME cover proudly announces that "Warren Buffett
is bullish on America." He's not worried about social unrest. "The classic
test of that was actually the 2000 election. If you think about it, half
the people in America felt they were screwed, and the next day they all
went to work." He's reluctant to admit it, but the same thing happened
in 2008, except that it was the other half, and some of us didn't go to
work the next day. Obamanomics does not cure unemployment -- it also didn't
work in 1932 when FDR tried it -- and maybe next year we will get to see
some other ideas tested. It's not really so much what the government does,
but rather what the business owners and the consumers think the
government is doing to them that matters. When the business owners are
optimistic, they will hire and make wealth and people will be employed
and buying; when the consumers are optimistic, they will buy and businesses
will ramp up and make wealth and so on. When either or both are fearful,
the economy goes south. Businesses fear Obama. Whether that will translate
into votes for one of the buffoons running in the other party remains to
be seen.
The problem is, like McCain in 2008, Romney is just another Obama clone spelled differently. When he was governor he gave us our first taste of ObamaCare. I didn't like it then, and I still don't like it. The American people prefer their politicians honest (is there such a thing?) so they voted for the real Obama instead of Obama-with-an-M McCain in 2008, and I suspect -- and TIME obviously hopes -- they will prefer the real Obama instead of Obama-with-an-R Romney in 2012.
But I don't think it will get that far. As TIME
pointed out, only 8 more people preferred Romney to the second-place runner-up,
which hardly counts as a landslide, and only 122,255 people voted (less
than 0.01% of the nation's registered voters). More than 75% of them wanted
somebody else. Somehow that doesn't look like Romney is a shoo-in for (defeat
in) November, nevermind what the left-wing bigots might hope.
Jurassic Park (both the novel and the movie) used credible science -- reconstructed DNA -- to explain the dinosaurs in the story. Michael Crichton had a science education, and most of his novels reflected scientific accuracy. Prehistoric Park doesn't have that limitation. They go get their dinosaurs by time-travel, which shows up from time to time in science fiction, but less often now after Einstein essentially debunked it. DNA reconstruction is still credible science, but time travel is not. Most TV is done by "artists" and not scientists.
The animation in Prehistoric Park also leaves something to be desired. Their T-rexes scream and lunge, but rarely make violent contact. Credible interaction between animated 3D characters is very difficult, because of the physics. There it is, science again. Americans scored dead last in math and science education around the world, but you don't need to understand Newtonian physics to see the difference between dogs fighting (they are all over each other) and an animation of something which should look the same. Come to think of it, there wasn't much interaction between the animated animals in Jurassic Park (the movie) also, but I don't recall noticing. The screen writer there left fewer occasions where it was needed. Movie writers tend to have more skill than in TV. There is one scene in Prehistoric Park where the triceratops lunges at the camera through a wooden palisade; the top pair of horns slide clean through between the poles and back out leaving no visible damage, despite that the horn tips are far too wide to fit in the pole spacing. According to the documentary, the poles are real; the digital animal was added by the animators. You can jiggle the camera in post-production to make the contact look violent, but adding damage or flexing to the wood was apparently beyond their capability.
Similarly, a giant 10-foot centipede rears up into a threatening position as tall as Nigel Marven, leaving less than half its length on the ground to support that altitude. The physics of such a position is impossible, because more than half its weight is forward of its most forward support legs, and there are no claws to keep the other half pinned to the ground. The Steve Irwin-like character Marven goes on to say that he can't tell if it's centipede or a millipede, while the many full-front views of the reared-up creature clearly show single feet per segment. I see now that's not the only distinction, but it's the most anatomically distinct of them. Less obvious, but if the centipede is the largest of the land animals in that environment as claimed, why would it need to rise up at all? It's not going to catch giant dragonflies flying by, they are too fast -- never mind that they are not nearly so agile animated (nearly ran into Marven and other obstacles) as real-life insects. But the show needs some faux-danger for Marven to encounter, and this is it.
I guess the thing that really turned me off was the patter by Nigel Marven (apparently that's his real name, off-screen as well as on). He gives you these Irwin-esque tidbits about how great the T-rex sense of smell is, in the same tone of voice that he's telling you things that could reasonably be inferred from the fossils, like that they could run fast. So it's fiction. I like my fiction to be at least credible. This made me wonder if the real Steve Irwin fabricated his facts too. Like I said, it's no wonder the estate shut down the series (if that's what happened).
I like to try and guess where the location shots are filmed, or at least
see it in the credits. TV shows tend to be skimpy on the credits, but usually
you can get it from the "Making Of" documentary. In this case they said
they went all over the world for location shots (the Wiki
article lists the places) but they did not clearly tell us where the
park itself was located nor filmed, other than one aside reference to the
heat in South Africa. A secondary
link in Wiki finally confirmed the South Africa site.
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