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Deficit spending is taxing future citizens without their consent:

Not to go all 1776 on you, but: You want to talk about taxation without representation? That’s exactly what we’re engaging in: taxing the future to meet present wants, without ever having the common courtesy to ask the future whether it wants to accept a social contract that is radically different from the one we inherited. Picture a bunch of angry babies with muskets and tri-corner hats: You think the tea-party protesters are overflowing with high dudgeon, just wait until you see the poor people who actually get the bill. They don’t get a vote, which is why we have to look after the interests of the future today. And looking after the interests of the future in the present is one possible working definition of conservatism, is it not?

I'm not sure if I completely buy the argument, but it's interesting to consider Bruce Charlton's thesis that human capability is declining.

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability. ...

The fact is that human no longer do - *can* no longer do many things we used to be able to do: land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover ‘breakthrough’ medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, block an undersea oil leak...

But... I'm not sure we could drill for oil 5000 feet below the surface 40 years ago. Still, Charlton's point isn't directly about technology as much as it's about will and bureaucracy.

But since the 1970s there has been a decline in the quality of people in the key jobs in NASA, and elsewhere – because organizations no longer seek to find and use the best people as their ideal but instead try to be ‘diverse’ in various ways (age, sex, race, nationality etc). And also the people in the key jobs are no longer able to decide and command, due to the expansion of committees and the erosion of individual responsibility and autonomy.

By 1986, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, it was clear that humans had declined in capability – since the disaster was fundamentally caused by managers and committees being in control of NASA rather than individual experts.

It was around the 1970s that the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy (although the trend had been growing for many decades).

I agree that we've lost the capability to go to the moon, largely because of bureaucracy. However, even if our maximum capability as a civilization has dropped, I'd still argue that the advance of technology has led to an increase in our median individual capability.

Will this increase in individual capability eventually defeat the forces of bureaucratization? I sure hope so. I'd love to live in a civilization that is constantly reaching new heights.

(HT: The Corner.)

Brilliant explanation of why geeks are so irritating: reversed tact filters.

All people have a "tact filter", which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!"

"Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "They're just saying those mean things because they're jealous. They don't really mean it."

When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one's feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one's feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people's feelings often get hurt because the nerds don't apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

(HT: MG.)

Paul Hsieh apty describes how ObamaCare will destroy health care:

ObamaCare thus places a noose around private insurers' necks. Insurance companies will be required to offer numerous benefits determined by politicians and lobbyists. But they will be allowed to charge only what government bureaucrats permit. No business can survive long if it must offer $2,000 worth of services to customers but can charge only $1,000.

Although it is tempting to take delight at the insurance industry's self-caused plight, the inevitable collapse of the private insurance market would also leave millions of Americans without coverage. Even though this crisis would be caused by government policies, liberals would gleefully portray it as a "failure of the free market" and demand that the government "rescue" health care. The end result would be a "single payer" socialized medical system like Canada's or Great Britain's, with rationing and long waits for medical care.

Instead of making their Faustian bargain with the government, insurance companies should have advocated for free-market reforms such as allowing customers to purchase policies across state lines, repealing existing mandatory benefits, and allowing patients to use Health Savings Accounts for routine expenses and low-cost "catastrophic-only" insurance to cover rare expensive events. Such free-market reforms could reduce insurance costs up to 50%, while preserving quality of medical care.

He also rightly points out that destroying health care isn't a bug in ObamaCare -- it's the underlying purpose! The point is to destroy the market for health care and force the American people into a completely government-run system. Why? Because it will give the elites more control of our lives and reduce our liberty. They think we're too dumb to be free, so they're trying to help us out.

Idiotic college students pour vodka into their eyes to get drunk faster, go blind.

Even as drunken student antics go, it was, by any stretch of the imagination, a disturbing scene. Surrounded by cheering rugby players, applauded by fellow members of the university netball team, 19-year-old Melissa Fontaine tipped back her head and giggled as fellow drinkers in the Students' Union bar pulled apart her eyelids and allowed them to pour a shot of vodka into her left eye.

'Vodka eyeballing', as it is known in student circles, is the latest drinking craze to sweep through Britain's universities.

Those who do it claim that it induces feelings of drunkenness at break-neck speeds, providing an instant high.

Maybe these morons need to drink more vodka and kill of some brain cells just to protect themselves from their own stupid ideas.

It's hard to comprehend how some paint on canvas can be worth more fifty times what an average person will earn over a lifetime of work. Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust sells for $106 million.

Last month The Classicist broke the news that a rarely-seen Picasso was expected to fetch up to $90 million at Christie's landmark Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art, which took place yesterday in New York. Now the results are in and the painting, Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust (above) dated 1932, from the Collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody, was sold for a staggering $106.5 million to an unidentified telephone bidder, breaking the previous world record for any work of art sold at auction (set back in February when a Giacometti sculpture brought in $104.3 million).

I guess that's the point of "luxury" items though, right? Their value isn't fungible and largely derives from the psycho-social benefits perceived by their owners and admirers.

Despite having heard of Benedict Arnold in grade school, I only this morning learned of the traitor General James Wilkinson (thanks to NPR). Perhaps most nefariously (for a St. Louis resident) he betrayed explorers Lewis and Clark to the Spanish.

"As a spy, his tradecraft was excellent. Wilkinson sent his information in a code — just rows of numbers in groups of four," Linklater says. "It was never broken."

Through these coded messages, Wilkinson informed the Spanish of the Lewis and Clark expedition and its secret goal of finding a land route through the Western mountains and to the Pacific Ocean. He suggested that his paymasters send armed patrols to intercept the expedition — which the Spanish did.

"Only by the grace of God did they fail to find them," Linklater says. If the Spanish patrols had been luckier or more skillful, we might remember Lewis and Clark — if we remembered them at all — as two explorers who vanished in the West. And the course of American history might well have been dramatically altered.

Massachusetts is unique among the states (as far as I know) in that it allows taxpayers to choose between two tax income tax rates: 5.3% or 5.85%. Surprisingly, even people who were against the tax cut that created the 5.3% rate don't seem eager to pay the higher rate when given a choice!

Of 1,840,000 state tax filers, exactly 931 have opted to pay taxes at the higher rate. That works out to one-twentieth of one percent. Think of it this way: In 2000, only 60 percent of the Massachusetts electorate voted to cut the income tax, but a decade later 99.95 percent of the population has decided to take advantage of the tax cut a lot of them claimed they didn’t want or need.

The moonbat motto is: Do as I say, not as I do. Consider the charitable deductions (or lack thereof) of the most sanctimonious liberal politicians: Obama, Biden, Kerry. They throw around quarters - their own, anyway - like they were manhole covers. But they would gladly give you the shirt off somebody else’s back.

Here's a reminder of how much of their own money the Obamas give to charity. Notice how the figures start to rise along with Barack's political aspirations.

Leftists hate charity because they don't want to give away their own money, and they love government because they want to give away your money.

(HT: TaxProfBlog and TaxProfBlog.)

The wife, daughter, and I attended the Saint Charles Tea Party Express rally this afternoon for a couple of hours. We didn't feel that it wasn't as well-organized or attended as the Tax Day Tea Party we attended last year downtown. It was good to see a bunch of small-government types willing to come out, but most of the attendees were older folks, with a few children scattered about.

Below are some pictures, and at the bottom of this post is a short video of the crowd I took from the stage.

Here's the back of the crowd as we approached.


Don't tread on the baby!








A few crowd shots.


Uh oh, now you've really pissed her off!


A few pro-Obama protesters appeared, and brought Teh Funny.

And finally, a short video of the crowd from the stage.

The Speculist writes that despite the burgeoning economic recovery many jobs may not ever come back thanks to automation.

The efficiencies that can allow a company to get by with 10% fewer staff or an economy to get by with a 10% smaller employment base are many -- better management practices, longer work hours, more highly motivated or better trained staff. But the big one has got to be automation. Historically, automation boosts productivity and reduces the need for human workers. Over the past four decades, our economy has made a massive shift to a highly automated, digitized substrate. As recently as a decade and a half or so ago, economists were still scratching their heads over when the big productivity gains would emerge from this shift. Then about five or six years ago, those productivity numbers started showing up. Some of us took this to be unambiguously good news. And, in fact, I still think it's excellent news. But it may have something to say about the future of employment, and the need for our thinking around employment to change.

Phil Bowermaster goes on to talk about how our economy will have to shift to accommodate the growing mass of ex-workers who are no longer capable of contributing anything of value to an increasingly automated workforce. Today, in 2010, anyone with an IQ of 70 or higher can do something of value, but what happens as that threshold rises? As automation "IQ equivalent" increases, the number of people displaced will grow quickly until the IQ 100 median hump is surpassed. When robots can do the work of any human with an IQ of 100, how will society adapt?

One thing I can say for sure: women will be the big winners. Why? Because they can carry babies more cheaply, efficiently, and reliably that any conceivable robot. Men who are of sub-robot capability will be worthless to society, but womens ability to produce children take much longer to displace.

The effect of this is obvious: women leaving the workforce more rapidly than men and turning their energies to producing and raising children. As robots become more and more capable, the predominance of males over females at the high end of the IQ curve will lead to an ever-shrinking male-dominated aristocracy consisting of the few humans who are able to contribute something of value to an economy run by robots. It's no feminist paradise, but childbearing women will be far better off than men of sub-robot intelligence who will be unable to do anything a robot can't.

Apparently women "still" feel the stigma of singleness.

About 40 percent of adults were single in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Researchers interviewed 32 of these middle-class, never-married women over age 30. They found that these women perceive themselves as caught in a double bind: Their single status made them both highly visible and invisible.

"We found that never-married women's social environments are characterized by pressure to conform to the conventional life pathway," said Larry Ganong, co-chair of Human Development and Family at the University of Missouri. "Heightened visibility came from feelings of exposure, and invisibility came from assumptions made by others."

Well, that's biology. From a biological perspective, these women are failures. They may not want to measure themselves with that yardstick, but the biological imperative "still" tugs mightily on the human species.

While one might think these annoyances become worse with age, the researchers actually found that dealing with single stigma is the worst for women in their mid-20's through mid-30's, while women older than age 35 tend to be more content with being single and don't express as much dissatisfaction as do younger women.

Before age 25, being single is considered more acceptable for women, the study indicates, but after reaching that age, women felt scrutinized by friends, family members and others for their singlehood.

Wow... and neither the scientists nor the reporter can think of any reason why singleness might be stigmatized most heavily, by the women themselves and by society, up through the age of 35? I'll go out on a limb here and speculate that it might be because female fertility drops like a rock in the late 30s. Basically, the stigma evaporates when the cause has been lost.

Beta males being not quite passive enough, now we have the Omega Male.

In the social hierarchy of a wolf pack in captivity, the omega ranks below the alpha and beta wolves. In human terms, if an executive or a warrior is an alpha male and a nice-guy middle manager like The Office's Jim Halpert is a beta male, then Greenberg and his brethren are omega males. While the alpha male wants to dominate and the beta male just wants to get by, the omega male has either opted out or, if he used to try, given up. Greenberg says of his somewhat stunted best friend, "We call each other 'man,' but it's a joke. It's like imitating other people." The omega male is not experiencing the tired trope of the midlife crisis. A midlife crisis implies agency, a man who has the job and the family and chooses to reject it. The omega male doesn't have the power to reject anything—he's the one who has been brushed off. He's generally unemployed, and his romantic relationships are in shambles—he's either single or, if he's married, not happy about it. "I'm doing nothing and I'm tied to no one," Greenberg boasts.

This is our future! The more Omega Males the government can create, the easier it will be to control the country. There are a host of culprits who bear responsibility for the decimation of the traditional male archetype, but primary blame rests with men themselves. Just because we're told we should be like women doesn't mean we have to believe it and do it.

Apparently I am the perfect man. I always suspected it.

Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons.

Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women.

A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. ...

The poll of 2,500 women also revealed that 91 per cent would actually prefer a guy who had a few flaws over someone who is perfect.

And more than half would rather a guy who was soft and cuddly instead of toned and muscly.

Sorry ladies, I'm taken!

Many people unfortunate enough to have been born in third world countries (and I know quite a few) would give their left arm to live in America. Since we can't take everyone who would want to come, the next best option is to bring slices of America to the third world. A couple of hundred years ago that would have been accomplished by British/Roman-like colonization, but these days that's just too uncouth: some third-worlders may prefer their present form of government to ours. Fine! Enter charter cities.

The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new “charter cities,” where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.

How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under. ...

There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country—residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice—a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.

Author Paul Romer cites Hong Kong as the archetype and compares its success under British rules to the decades of failure experienced by mainland China.

Why won't this happen? Despite the billions of average people who would benefit, consider the long list of powerful interests who would end up losers if charter cities took off: existing despots and their inner circles; the United Nations; zillions of Non-Governmental Organizations who parasitically exploit aid streams; socialists; nationalists; and probably many more. These loser groups would all band together to prevent the average people of the world from moving en masse into charter cities with better rules.

The inevitable collapse of Social Security has always been a problem for "the future" that "someone else" could deal with, but apparently the future of Social Security is now.

No one has officially announced that Social Security will be cash-negative this year. But you can figure it out for yourself, as I did, by comparing two numbers in the recent federal budget update that the nonpartisan CBO issued last week.

The first number is $120 billion, the interest that Social Security will earn on its trust fund in fiscal 2010 (see page 74 of the CBO report). The second is $92 billion, the overall Social Security surplus for fiscal 2010 (see page 116).

This means that without the interest income, Social Security will be $28 billion in the hole this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

Why disregard the interest? Because as people like me have said repeatedly over the years, the interest, which consists of Treasury IOUs that the Social Security trust fund gets on its holdings of government securities, doesn't provide Social Security with any cash that it can use to pay its bills. The interest is merely an accounting entry with no economic significance.

To elaborate on the last sentence, the Social Security fund has been earning huge amounts of interest for decades, but that interest hasn't been put back into the fund, it has been spent by Congress to pay for other things. Instead of that cash being put into the fund, Congress has put IOUs into the fund, and when Social Security goes cash-negative those IOUs will have to be repaid out of current taxes.

The net effect of this is that not only is my generation paying the payroll tax to fund Social Security for current retirees, we're also paying BACK the interest those retirees spent on themselves decades ago. It's a double-whammy of generational theft, and the retiree generation should be ashamed by the debt they're imposing on their children and grandchildren.

Focus on the Family is going airing a pro-life ad during the Super Bowl and some pro-abortion groups aren't happy about it. Well, they can pay for their own counter-ad if they want, so I don't see a problem. What's most interesting to me is Reuters' concluding characterization of the political climate surrounding abortion.

Abortion is one of the most divisive issues in America and a spate of recent opinion polls have suggested growing opposition to women's right to terminate pregnancy.

That sentence betrays an obvious bias in favor of legalized abortion on the part of the news agency. If Reuters had written "... and a spate of recent opinion polls have suggested growing support for the right of babies to not be murdered by their mothers in utero" the reverse bias would have been equally obvious.

The question over whether or not abortion is a "right" is the heart of the division over abortion, and a large majority of Americans disagree with Reuters' editorial position on the matter. Reuters would be wise to stick to hard news rather than injecting their opinions into their reporting.

The highest South Korean court has ruled that "virtual" money can be exchanged for "real" money (as long as the "virtual" money isn't the result of gambling).

(I use quotes because the distinction between "virtual" and "real" money is a psychological artifact and has no substantial meaning. Isk issued by Eve Online developer CCP are no different in character from gift certificates issued by Wal-Mart or dollar bills issued by the Federal Reserve.)

As reported in the Korea Times, the ruling came when the court acquitted two gamers who had been indicted for selling 234 million Won (around US$206000) worth of “Aden”, the cyber money used in the online game Lineage. Aden can be used to buy in-game accessories, weapons, and so on to enhance a player’s character in the game. The newspaper reports that the two gamers traded the money at an exchange rate of about 1 million Aden for 8000 Won. ...

The ruling only applies in South Korea, but its effects may be felt well beyond that country’s borders. Industry observers are expecting the decision to stimulate the online gaming market – as well as the associated markets that surround the gaming market. And cyber money is big business. The Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute says that more than 830 billion Won (US$732 million) worth of cyber money was exchanged online in South Korea in 2006, and that amount might have exceeded 1 trillion Won (US$882 million)in 2008. With so much currency flying around, it is no wonder that South Korean courts have also ruled that the proceeds from trading cyber money are subject to a 10 percent value added tax (VAT).

I see no reason why virtual earnings shouldn't be taxed at some point, and I'd rather that point be when/if it is exchanged for "real" money than when it is earned or spent in-game.

(HT: RB.)

Eric Schmidt believes that in the future work will look like play.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made news at the recent G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, suggesting that multiplayer video games provide good career training — particularly in technology — where workplace collaboration stimulates innovation. “The game world is good training for a career in tech,” he said. “It teaches players to build a network, to use interactive skills and thinking.”

“Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game,” said Schmidt to this international audience. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now.”

What is it about online games that makes leaders? For one thing, there are many opportunities to lead. “Online games are very iterative,” states a recent IBM report entitled “Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders.” “Leadership happens quickly and easily in online games, often undertaken by otherwise reserved players, who surprise even themselves with their capabilities.” Online games such as World of Warcraft can involve an overriding goal for a team of players — there are a series of raids or missions that make up the journey, each of which requires leadership of player groups of varying size. This gives many players the opportunity to “try on” leadership roles. The study asserts that there is no reason to think that the same cannot be done in corporate settings of various sizes, missions, and markets.

Related: The person who will be elected President in 2036 is probably in their teens or twenties right now, probably has a blog, and is probably a gamer.

Thanks to Google's auto-complete functionality we can glean all sorts of insight into human psychology.

You know how Google sometimes “predicts” what you might be searching for by giving you a little drop down menu of suggested search queries? These suggestions, of course, are based on what other users frequently search. So I tried teasing out some gender differences. Look at the pictures below.

Got any suggestions for more searches to try?

Here's a fun video of Al Sharpton and Ann Coulter going head-to-head over Harry Reid's racial bungling.

And Saturday Night Live with a prescient (and hilarious) MacGruber video:

(HT: Jammie Wearing Fool.)