Sunday, July 22, 2012

It's more like Trickle Out...

I've always strongly believe "trickle down" never made any sense. More recently the rhetoric is about the wealth as the "job creators". I'm not sure this is any more justified. For me it seems much more likely the money spent by the wealthy mostly just circulates amongst the wealthy.

If you had a sudden windfall of over $10M what would you do with it? Start a risky new venture where you could very easily lose it all (job creation)? Spend it all right away on your friends and family within the local economy (trickle down)? Or would you buy a nice mansion and luxury car, hire an expensive accountant/lawyer/estate planner and park your money in investments and tax havens?

It seems the reality is very much the latter.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Hitler wasn't an Atheist

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."[1]

"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."[2]

  1. Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1942). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 19.
  2. Adolf Hitler. (1941). My New Order. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 144.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Praise the Job Creators

The [...] study found attitudes about greed to be the most significant predictor of unethical behavior.

"These findings have very clear implications for how increased wealth and status in society shapes patterns of ethical behavior, and suggest that the different social values among the haves and the have-nots help drive these tendencies,"

Monday, February 6, 2012

Calgary



Don't you cherish me to sleep
Never keep your eyelids clipped
Hold me for the pops and clicks
I was only for the father's crib

Hair, old, long along
Your neck onto your shoulder blades
Always keep that message taped
Cross your breasts you won't erase
I was only for your very space

Hip, under nothing
Propped up by your other one, face 'way from the sun
Just have to keep a dialogue
Teach our bodies: haunt the cause
I was only trying to spell a loss

Joy, it's all founded
Pincher with the skin inside
You pinned me with your black sphere eyes
You know that all the rope's untied
I was only for to die beside

So itʼs storming on the lake
Little waves our bodies break

There's a fire going out,
But there's really nothing to the south

Swollen orange and light let through
Your one piece swimmer stuck to you

Sold, I'm Ever
Open ears and open eyes
Wake up to your starboard bride
Who goes in and then stays inside
Oh the demons come, they can subside

Monday, January 23, 2012

Creationism


Taken from a facebook argument where a religious person took affront to the comparison, and claimed evolution was just another theory people believed in.


The major disconnect in discussions like this is how the two side use words like "belief" and "theory" entirely differently: for the religious "belief" means "faith" -- something I hold true without any evidence; for the scientific "belief" means "hunch" -- something that intuition tells you must be true and thus guides your search for evidence to dis/confirm. For the religious "theory" means "hypothesis" -- a guess about how things work needed to remove ambiguity only enough to get things done; for the scientific "theory" means "model" -- a way to think about what we observe that allows us to make predictions that are either falsifiable, or strengthen our confidence in the model's predictive power.

In this case we can say evolution is a theory which incorporates in its model all physical evidence ever accumulated, and has enormous predictive power in telling us how species change over multiple scales. We can also say scientists believe in this theory in the sense that based on all the evidence we have, and the predictive power of the model, our hunch is that evolution well never be disproven, and continue to help us understand our world and make technological progress (such as automobiles).

Creation fails on both counts as a Theory: either to incorporate all evidence, or to make predictions that are falsifiable; therefore the only belief possible in creation is one that disregards evidence and is simply faith in an idea that has no existential purpose. If we apply this idea more broadly, then technological progress steadily become more difficult. This is the danger of your definition of "belief" and "theory".

Friday, January 20, 2012

Java

: what is a "RequestMappingHandlerAdapter"?
: this is what's wrong with modern OOP
: nigh unreadable, despite the letters expended vainly in the effort
: might as well call it LeftBallCheesecakeWizard