Paul M. Jones

Brilliance –- even genius -- is no guarantee that consequential factors have not been left out or misconceived. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all–the ability to combine intellect,  knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding…Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of high intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.

Emphasis mine. Via PJ Lifestyle » “Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect.”.

One source of data that people often use is median household income. It’s a good idea to use the median rather than the mean -– the mean can be very misleading. For example, the mean income of Harvard graduates who studied economics is going to be very high in the year that Jeremy Lin graduated. John Elway, another econ grad, pulled up the mean dramatically for Stanford grads that year.

But there is a problem with median household income and those who use it relentlessly to grind their policy axes never mention it. The problem is that when household structure is unstable, comparing medians over time is a very poor way of assessing the progress of the typical person.

As I have written many times, rising divorce rates in the 1970?s for example, meant that the number of households in the US grew 26.7%. Population grew only 11.5%. There was an increase in the number of households as one household became two. If both people were working, that alone would likely decrease median household income. If only one of the spouses was working, it was usually the man. The former wife found herself in the labor force unexpectedly. Her income is likely to be below the median. Both of these effects create new households with incomes below the median, dragging down the median over time.

via Inequality and Stagnation.

The entire TSA paradigm is flawed. It requires an impossibility for it to succeed. For the TSA model to work, every single possible means of causing danger to an aircraft or its passengers must be eliminated. This is an impossibility. While passengers are being frisked and digitally strip-searched a few dozen yards away, cooks and dish washers at the local concourse “Chili’s” are using and cleaning butcher knives.

via gmancasefile: TSA: Fail.

This report is one of the main reasons I have swapped down from .40 to 9mm:

Conversely the 9mm can probably be fired fastest of the common calibers and it had the most rounds fired to get an incapacitation (2.45). The .40 (2.36) and the .45 (2.08) split the difference. ... If a person takes an average of 5 seconds to stop after being hit, the defender who shoots a lighter recoiling gun can get more hits in that time period. It could be that fewer rounds would have stopped the attacker (given enough time) but the ability to fire more quickly resulted in more hits being put onto the attacker. It may not have anything to do with the stopping power of the round.

You can't shoot a fraction of a bullet; 2.45 rounds of 9mm and 2.36 rounds of .40 both round (ha!) up to 3 rounds. Might as well have 15 in the mag instead of 13, and get faster followup hits. Via An Alternate Look at Handgun Stopping Power.

One of my favourite sections of the book was Harford’s discussion of accidents. Most of the problems Harford examines in the book are complex and “loosely coupled”, which allows experimentation with failure. But what if the system is tightly coupled, meaning that failures threaten the survival of the entire system? This concept reminded me of work by Robert May, which undermined the belief that increased network complexity led to stability.

The concept of “normal accidents”, taken from a book of that title by Charles Perrow, is compelling. If a system is complex, things will go wrong. Safety measures that increase complexity can increase the potential for problems. As such, the question changes from “how do we stop accidents” to how do we mitigate their damage when they inevitably occur? This takes us to the concept of decoupling. When applied to the financial system, can financial institutions be decoupled from the broader system so that we can let them fail?

(Emphasis mine.) via Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

Considering the situation we are in today, the size of government, the level of our debt, the continuous violations of our economic and personal freedoms, free-market advocates should be breathing fire everyday and fight for truly smaller government. This plan isn’t enough.

It doesn’t balance the budget in the next ten years. ...

It will spend $4.9 trillion in 2022. ... That’s only 13 percent less than the president’s plan.

It focuses on a few villains like high-speed rail and the president’s healthcare law but it fails to propose the elimination of programs, agencies, or departments that should be terminated either because they are the responsibility of the state and local governments or the private sector.

It once again fails to reform Social Security. ...

It reneges on sequestration-induced reductions in military spending (it finds the “savings” elsewhere). I think a serious plan would put everything on the table. ...

This plan doesn’t close the emergency loopholes. This means that spending cuts brought about by the BCA caps or the Ryan budget can be easily restored by claiming that the spending is an emergency.

On Medicare reform: Why push off urgent reforms for a decade? ...

This is a good example of dessert-now-spinach-later policy. In this case, however, older people are the only ones eating desert and younger people are left with the spinach and little prospect of any dessert at all.

The proposal includes no credible plan to force future Congresses to implement its reforms.

... Considering the level of compromises and the amount of watering down that Congress will do once they put their hands on this or any budget, the original document should have been much stronger.

via A Critical Look at the Ryan Plan - By Veronique de Rugy - The Corner - National Review Online.

March 8 was International Women’s Day. On what was suposed to be a celebration of the brilliance, beauty and achievement of the female sex, we [American women] were complaining about our entitlement to insurance coverage for contraception. We let our newly anointed spokesperson Sandra Fluke tell the world that there is a malicious war on women in the United States of America.

In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive or use public facilities when men are present. If their bodies are not completely covered, they face verbal and physical harassment from the religious police. Jordanian women live in fear of honor killings from their husbands. In Egypt today, women wonder if they will see their hard-fought rights removed when the new constitution is drafted by an Islamist-majority parliament.

On International Women’s Day, these people were victims of the real war on women.

via PLOTT: The real war on women | Yale Daily News.

If the job description does not mention "Framework X," you should probably avoid answering that you use "Framework X" to solve the problem presented to you by the interviewer. If I ask you to perform a simple task, such as parsing a string in a well-known format, saying "Framework X does that for me" is likely to be seen as a negative.

You should be able to do the simple things in PHP itself (e.g. parsing strings). As interviewers, we generally care about your proficiency with the language, not with how much you like the framework of your individual choosing.

Saying that you use a feature of "Framework X" for simple things is a negative. It sounds like you're dependent on that framework for basic tasks. That means we (the employers) will need to train you how to do it without that framework, and that's a hassle for us.

One caveat here is that if the employer has already specified that they use "Framework X" then they probably do want to see that you're familiar with it. Alternatively, if you are going to be the only person on the team, you're also probably fine. But in collaborative, team environments, it is unlikely that the employer is already using the framework you, individually, prefer.

On this page about Visual Presentation, under "Related Resources," the authors note my article on Line Length, Volume, and Density. I'm surprised and pleased. :-)

War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.

War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.

War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.

In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.)  Women live longer than men.  Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men.  Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays.  (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.)  And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail.  Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly.  Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.

If this is war it is war on men.  And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.

Sarah Hoyt, War Is Hell | According To Hoyt.