News Roundup

Here is a list of interesting articles or blog posts I’ve aggregated over the past weeks. I’ll do more of this (a la Naked Capitalism) rather than feature extensive comments on individual posts so I can share the increasing number of links without waiting for time to write detailed comments on each.

Gavin Newsom plans to tax soft drinks in San Francisco

As I wrote in the comments section: “This is actually good policy. To discourage unhealthy or harmful behaviour, it is sound economics to put a monetary penalty on it. Most European countries already have “sin taxes” and the US has been behind the curve for some time. It would be better for the tax to be imposed nationwide accompanied by an *offsetting* reduction in less efficient taxes such as income taxes.” Mankiw would call this Pigovian taxes. I’d like to seem them implemented on a wide scale on a variety of “sins” that impose externalities on society or the environment.

Women and risk-taking

To summarize, women seem to take a back seat to men when it comes to taking risks, but this social pressure doesn’t happen when they’re competing against women. What is the decision parents should make based on this information? Is it to insulate their daughters from social pressures or to send them to all-girls’ schools?

Report on education

No, this isn’t another complaint about how the US has fallen behind other nations when it comes to achievement, though that is well-known. I’ve always thought that the US has a unique environment that makes averages not as useful in comparison. The US is characterized by a high spread in terms of ability and achievement that parallels the sharp divisions between rich and poor. The overall conclusions from the research is for students to aim high and work hard. Classes are better indicators of scholastic achievement than tests, but only if classes are standardized, like APs. Going to a highly-ranked school and being surrounded by motivated peers is better than going to a community college.

The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA)

When following up on an old acquaintance, I found that she was involved with the SCA. Apparently, a group of people have been reenacting medieval jousts in my backyard (Berkeley). To be honest, it’s such a quintessentially Berkeley thing to do that I’m hardly surprised that I missed it in the noise of other equally nontraditional activities.

Steven Harms’s Blog

Here is an interesting blog I encountered. Steven’s interests are similar to mine, though we differ in our views on some of the issues. Anyways, a good read for anyone interested in Linux or politics.

Lindsey Evans on Mormon boys

Mao recommended this blog to me. This post is hilarious, and if she is serious about some of the conditions, she might have a problem finding someone who lives up to those expectations. The problem is not the list, it’s that there is such a detailed list in the first place. Men in the US are stymied because they don’t know each woman’s individual’s set of expectations. In the olden days (1950s), for all the faults in that time, at least the “rules” for men and women were more or less set. Expectations were more shared or consistent. I’m not passing a value judgement on that or on Lindsey, just pointing it out.

Epiphany of the Day

Illustrating the birth a new open-source developer:

Hmm… There’s this thing called Linux.
Ubuntu seems to be the distro everyone’s using.
What’s does Debian-based mean?
Gah! I’m fed up with my programs being out of date, let me switch to Fedora.
Fedora’s stability sucks. How about Arch/Gentoo?
Even with the latest program, ___ feature doesn’t exist/work properly.
Hey wait, the source code is available.

News Roundup – Square Root Day Special

It’s square root day! And that doesn’t come around very often.

To start us off, Ginny Brown-Waite, Republican congresswoman from Florida, had this to say about Tim Geithner, “Every time a statement is issued by you, the stock market plummets.” Yikes! We don’t know whether to call that “negative” or “depressin”.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of the presidential candidate, is having trouble finding boys. Not in attracting them, but in finding one who measures up to her own exacting standards. What are they? Well, you can’t have voted for Obama, and you can’t be a rabid Republican. Hm… That just about rules out everyone but the Nader or Barr voters.

Ladies, are you reevaluating your priorities on the dating market given the current economic downturn? Willing to settle for big bucks over a real personality? Well, Melinda Gates is here to tell you that marrying for money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She let slip: “Every now and then I look at my friends and say ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone.’” Ouch! Steve Jobs circa ‘95 doesn’t look too bad now, eh?

Joke of the Day

“If the worst comes to pass, and there’s now a slightly greater chance that it might, at least it might explain why we’ve never heard from extraterrestrial civilizations: Maybe they built Large Hadron Colliders of their own.”

Courtesy of Fox News.

Joke of the Day

Courtesy of Slashdot:

For those of you who don’t remember, Intel released a Pentium processor back in 1994 that had a bug or erratum which caused floating point division operations to produce the wrong result. After much denial, Intel recalled the chip en-masse. Now, recalling the humour and taglines from that time:

How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb? 1.94
Pentiums and Deodorants – When being close is all that matters
Highlander Pentium: There can be only 1.0101002913491!
Talking Barbie and the Pentium-90 agree! “Math is hard!”
“Go forth and multiply… divide only if not on a Pentium…”
“I am Pentium of Borg–prepare to be approximated”
Pentium: Making tomorrow’s mistakes today
Pentium slogan: Why Do You Think It’s Called *Floating* Point?
Pentium slogan: Nearly 300 correct opcodes!

Do Australian Chicks Bang on the First Date?

NSFW

Obama’s Transportation Secretary

is caught attempting to assassinate him.

Career Meltdown?

A friend and I had dinner together a while back, and midway through, we chanced upon the old adage: What’s a nice young Jewish boy got to do to make his grandmother proud? He needs to be a doctor, lawyer, or investment banker and marry a nice Jewish girl.

Well, so much for that. Investment bankers and finance-related fields are feeling the pinch. Law schools are so abundant and have such a low barrier to entry that many graduates have trouble finding jobs (or at least jobs that let them repay their tuition). What about medicine? Traditionally, medicine has been relatively stable in employment opportunities, lifestyle, and compensation. However, with burgeoning health care costs, doctors are being asked to do more with less.

Other attractive and high-status areas for brainiacs to work in include academia and venture capitalism. Well, the number of positions in academia that open up each year is far outstripped by the number of post-docs in search of them. Let’s not even talk about compensation working as a post-doc researcher for the rest of one’s life.

Entrepreneurship? Not here in the Bay Area at least. Venture capital firms are pinching pennies, and getting seed funding is harder than ever.

I guess we can still take consolation in that if everything does go to high hell, we can survive by penny-pinching like Paul Navone. Alternatively, if you live in California, consider becoming a prison warden. With the state of things, it’s going to be a job in high demand.

Waynisms Revisited

Me: I thought of the most romantic way ever to do it. First date at Chez Panisse, proposal on the banks of the Seine, and a honeymoon trip around the world.

Wayne: You know, Mr. Lee once said to us, “Don’t go with a one carat diamond until she says yes.”

Me: What does that mean?

Wayne: It means that you shouldn’t dig a hole until you’re sure you can get your buck’s worth.

Me: So what happens if we’re at the Seine and she says no?

Wayne: Then you can push her into the Seine.

Reactions to Jesse Helms’s Death

At age 86, Jesse Helms, the longtime senator from North Carolina, passed away on the 4th of July. Though we grieve for his family, we must also contend with his legacy. And what precisely is that? Many people in the media have thoughts:

Undoubtedly, Helms was a controversial figure, one who embodied along with Strom Thurmond the ideals and values of the Old South. This is in contrast to New South politicians like Robert Byrd who have moved on from overtly racist language (but not thought, as Trent Lott and George Allen demonstrated). Personally, I think the strong social conservative nature of the modern Republican Party is alienating to much of the populace. They should focus on publicizing and abiding by their fiscal conservativism if they want to win mainstream voters. The feeling of exclusion is offensive not only to the growing numbers of minorities in the US, but also to mainstream centrist whites.

Take the following quote from OTB:

I started calling myself a conservative because I was proud to be associated with the ideas and politics of people like Barry Goldwater. I stopped calling myself a conservative when the title became too closely associated with assholes like Helms. Good riddance.

- FanOfBarry

My favourite quote:

Jesse Helms’ legacy is one of hatred, homophobia and racism. Although not its intent, that legacy has made our community stronger and more able to forcefully respond to bigotry and prejudice. As a community, we are more committed than ever to securing full equality for all GLBT people.

— Joe Solmonese, president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign.