Category: Society

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Economic Education: Mac vs. PC

Sometimes tough economic times do wake folks up a bit:

Mac Sales Growth Falls Below PCs

At U.S. retail, Windows PC unit sales were up 16.6 percent year over year in January, while Mac sales fell 5.5 percent. In October, when Apple launched snazzy, new MacBooks, Mac unit sales rose 27.2 percent compared with 5.7 percent for Windows. The major difference for the two months between: a rapidly eroding U.S. economy.

The article includes Mac apologist comments about folks fleeing “value” over the issue of “price,” but that’s a bogus argument. Sure, there are times when a luxury Mercedes is the right car for the job, but if all you’re doing is getting to work and back, trips to the grocery store, etc., then a MOR Toyota or even Saturn is just as good.

But the quality difference between a $500 PC and a $1,000 (or usually more) Mac just isn’t as big as the Macultists argue. And the PC platform is still much, much more flexible and has apps that are just as good–even sometimes better–than the Mac platform has available, no matter what phanbois may say.

Personally, I’d rather have the difference in price to spend on more software and peripherals, but that’s just me. Folks who’d rather spend more to use a Mac can still do so, and that’s fine with me too. But apparently, more buyers of computers are seeing the value in having more money in their pocket for other things at the end of their computer purchase.

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Disturbing Details in “Chimp Attack” Report

OK, so chimp goes wild, acts like a typical gangbanger (or illegal alien/Mexican drug dealer2, or “moderate” Muslim only tamer). Sad for the woman he attacked but otherwise, not all that significant.

What is really disturbing is this caption under a pic of the chimp:

A 200-pound chimpanzee named Travis attacked and critically injured a 55-year-old woman in Stamford, Conn., on Monday. This is an image of the monkey when it escaped in 2003.

Chimp=monkey? I don’t think so. Illiterate boob captioned the pic. That’s the quality of Hivemind reporting. Even when it has plain old ordinary news, it screws that up with dumbass stuff like “chimp=monkey”.

Ya just can’t make this stuff up, folks. These people are illiterate boobs, and it’s illiterate boobs like these who “inform” a vast majority of the other illiterate boobs who make up the electorate.

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Playing Ostrich

I’ve been emulating the phony meme, “Ostrich Hiding Head in Sand,” this week, mostly avoiding news (it’s all bad) and just getting on with life. It occurred to me that one of the biggest problems in our society today is that we’ve placed far, far too much power in the hands of folks who are far, far removed from our lives, power to directly affect our lives that the “feddle gimmint” (“feddle” rhymes with “meddle” you notice) ought not have and was never meant–at least by the Founders–to have.

WE, the People, have ceded our rights to liberty–freedom from governmental meddling–to people who do not have our best interests at heart. Let me repeat that: anyone who says, “I’m from the government; I’m here to help,” is lying–to you at the very least, and, if they’re stupid enough to be sincere, to themselves as well. Our political masters do NOT sincerely want to solve the problems they’ve created (with our help–we elected these bastards, didn’t we?), because any problem genuinely solved equals less power for the politicians *spit* and bureaucraps *puke* to exercise over us.

So, I’ve been hiding out this week. But that hasn’t stopped the little wheels from turning (be they ever so slowly turning). What if… what if just 10% of taxpayers said, “Enough! No more!” and simply… opted out. What if… just 100 people in every major city banded together and (after first purchasing body armor *heh*) simply drove V E R Y S L O W L Y on their city’s major arteries during rush hour. Every day for as long as they still had a car, in protest against civil governments doing everything possible to screw us blue. (Yeh, pay the tickets, but keep up the Good Work.) What if… people of good conscience (and at least half a brain–100% more than the average Mass Media Podperson) simply banded together and said, “No!” loudly, consistently, without fail, every time politicians lied to us, stole from us, lined their own pockets at our expense?

What if?

I suspect it’d look something like this.

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Innumeracy

With insincere apologies to Mark Twain, a society that doesn’t count is no better than one that can’t. Consider the wisdom of the internet:

Over 3 in 2 people in the world are completely innumerate.

Eh? Come again? *heh*

Or better yet, consider this:

I don’t even know where to begin… *sigh*

One cent=$0.01

$0.01X0.002=$0.00002

$0.00002X35893 (the kb use cited in the video above)=$0.71786

It’s very, very, very simple arithmetic. “Do-it-in-your-head” arithmetic. Doesn’t even qualify as “math,” IMO.

Why did the two Verizon reps just not get it? Well, not only is adult literacy on the decline in these (dis)United States, but a growing number of folks just can’t count… largely because they’ve not been compelled by education and experience to do so. Heck, even this otherwise thoughtful article at Money Instructor.com uses a model that is part of the problem, a big part.

There is nothing wrong with using a calculator, of course. Calculators are useful in that they save time on arithmetical computations. But in a modern society where most citizens have graduated from an advanced system of formal education, one would expect that educated people would have an understanding of what the calculator is doing. To be sure, the four basic operations are well understood by people who consider themselves educated, but recent studies show that a majority begin to have difficulty when faced with such concepts as square roots, simple algebraic terms, and grade school geometry.

Did you catch that? “To be sure, the four basic operations are well understood by people who consider themselves educated… ”

It doesn’t matter one bit whether people “consider themselves educated” or not. Those who cannot tell the difference between $0.002 and $0.00002 can’t perform “the four basic operations” and indeed do NOT understand them. They are innumerate. And their numbers are legion. And it is they who combine their illiteracy (“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”–Twain) with their innumeracy and thus allow the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind, politicians, illiterate and innumerate Academia Nut Fruitcakes, so-called educators and all their ilk to fill their minds with illiterate, innumerate, toxic sludge.

When a people cannot measure the impacts of public policies in clear and meaningful ways, then that people can fall prey to all kinds of flim-flammery. And such is the American public becoming.

Millions of Americans engage the services of income tax accountants every year because they are unable to perform the simple calculations themselves. Many others have difficulty interpreting statistical information, percentages, or any kind of information expressed in terms of graphs and charts. When it comes to calculating areas, capacity, or weights and measures, the average North American is not sure where to begin. For a modern society, this should be an intolerable situation, yet it seems that for most people it is quite normal and acceptable.

In short, millions of Americans are enstupiated sheeple, ripe for shearing. Worse, these same people cannot really blame the failures of “public education” (AKA “prisons for kids”), because almost anyone who wants to, who puts in a little effort, can become literate and numerate. Well more than half the population of enstupiated American sheeple are self-made enstupiated American sheeple.

In a representative republic, such is a recipe for disaster. In an ever more democratic (rule by mob) representative republic, we are beginning to reap many of the ills feared by the Founders, largely because a lazy, illiterate, innumerate electorate enables the obscene autoeriticism of politicians who gain almost orgasmic pleasure from misusing tax monies as yet uncollected from future generations.

I met a woman in her 60s the other day who declaimed that “We older people will lose all our benefits if the Republicans gain power.” *huh*?!? What benefits? Social Security has long been bankrupt, stealing from younger generations to buy older folks’ votes. Medicare and other “benefits” are likewise nothing but Ponzi schemes writ large. “Benefits” that steal from my children and grandchildren (and yours) to pay me are beyond obscene; they are simply wrong. Dhimmicraps/Repugnican’ts: makes not one bit of difference. The Ponzi scheme remains. And people who can’t or won’t do the math to see behind the smokescreen are the problem–or at least a large part of it–that keeps the government’s shameful Ponzi schemes going. For now. But someday, numbers will force an accounting, and when that happens, katie bar the door.

“There are three kinds of people in the world: those who count and those who don’t.”

*heh* Which are you?

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Wingless – Belgium Says Israel Uses Child Soldiers, Refuses to Sell Weapons, Democrat=Socialist, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Annual “Illiterate Boobs” Month

This month I have to once again suffer through a month filled with people who either cannot or refuse to pronounce “February,” preferring the illiterate “Feb-YOU-ary” mispronunciation because, I suppose, they are simply too stupid or too butt lazy–or both–to pronounce the first “r”.

Stupid, butt lazy, illiterate dolts. Gives me a rash, chaps my gizzard and makes me wish for a “Magic Dope Stick” to whack ’em all upside the head with. Unfortunately, it seems all of ’em who deseve a swift whack upside the head have already performed their own self-lobotomies and so even were such a magic stick available, I doubt it would do any good.

*grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Wingless – American Teen Killed By Released Guantanamo Detainees, Nuke Gingrich, Wingless – Belgium Says Israel Uses Child Soldiers, Refuses to Sell Weapons, and Wingless – Hamas Steals Aid Meant For People of Gaza, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Certifiably Loony

Certification madness. Once upon a time, a college degree meant something: the holder had at least a minimal literacy (no, not mere functional literacy but knowledge and awareness of the richness of Western culture and history, at least minimal ability to do critical analysis, a comfortable numeracy, etc.) and a known knowledge base. Now? notsomuch.

Trades used to have apprentices, journeymen and masters, and some still do, but the practice is falling away in preference to certifications by both private associations and quasi (or actual) government agencies. And certifications of that sort do serve useful functions.

But a plumbing or mechanic or teaching or computer certification doesn’t measure anything beyond a specific knowledge set. It does not measure what the certification holder can and does do. There are many certified and licensed plumbers, teachers, mechanics, computer techs, etc., who passed a certification exam and/or acquired class hours for that certification who are worthless in their fields. But employers want the certs to demonstrate their hiring standards are… standard.

A couple of innocuous examples from a wealth of material:

Here in America’s Third World County, there are few certified computer techs. I am fairly frequently called upon to correct issues not addressed by or caused by one (or more) of the other certified techs. In almost every case, the cause of the lapses have been twofold: greed and laziness, not a lack of knowledge.

Son&Heir’s car was inspected by an ACE Certified Mechanics’ shop before we purchased it, nevertheless, I–a reasonably intelligent amateur–have corrected several obvious mechanical problems that popped out to my eyeball inspection (and were confirmed by a trip through the car’s manual), problems that boded well to cause serious issues down the road. Why didn’t the ACE shop catch these plain to see mechanical problems? I suspect the common “laziness and greed” factor were at the root of the poor inspection.

Certification madness–shopping to the certification rather than to demonstrated competence–among employers and consumers is a recipe for mediocrity at best. A certification should be one among other more important criteria folks should look at when seeking specialized skills work. The single best criterion for measuring a certified person’s skillset and work habits is, of course, examples of their work that you can see for yourself. Whether it’s a few cars a mechanic’s worked on, some networks a tech has installed or configured, past students taught ot untaught, examples of the certified person’s work are better meaures of what they may do for you than their certification. Of course, this kind of measurement requires you do your own homework on what good examples of work in their field are, and that’s just too hard for some folks to tackle (“too hard” as in requiring some effort, any effort).

The next best criterion is the experience others have had with their work. Ask around. Find out how the prospective skilled worker’s work has held up over time. This isn’t a sure check. Some folks may not know, for example, that adding a wireless network card to a desktop computer whose wired connection is already working, more reliably and at a higher speed than the wireless connection, is just a way for a tech to add an unnecessary $100 padding to an already padded bill. So, when using this criterion, you have to weigh the user’s knowledge and experience as well as their comments about the work done for them. That’s more work for you, work some folks are simply unwilling (or feel unable) to do.

But HR people who rely strictly on certifications (and PC hiring quotas) have no excuse for hiring certified incompetents or lazy bums. It is (ought to be, but really isn’t) their job after all to hire the best candidate for the job. That often they do not speaks volumes to their own (lack of) committment to excellence. We, as consumers, have a responsibility to our own pocketbooks, to our children and grandchildren (and not just for immediate financial reasons) and to society as a whole to seek the best–not just best paper-qualified–candidates for work we pay to have done.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Nuke Gingrich, Woman Honor Thyself, Democrat=Socialist, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Why I Didn’t Answer Your Email

It was lost in a sewer backup, according to eWeek’s report on a Panda Security finding.

…according to a new study issued by researchers at AV specialists Panda, the astonishing amounts of spam and malware attacks that arrive at companies electronic doorsteps each day is shockingly over 90 percent.

Yes, that’s right, according to Panda’s survey of 430 million e-mail messages received by its customers during the last year, only 8.4 percent were legitimate.

So, while you may or may not have missed an email from me because of toxic sludge clogging your inbox, I imagine a lot of email is lost in this clutter, no matter how–or perhaps because–email server admins may labor to block SPAM. How much legitimate email is accidentally blocked by legitimate attempts to block spam we may never know. It’s part of the price we pay for not being civilized enough to track spammers down and burn them alive, sell their children into slavery and eradicate their names from the face of the earth. Instead, we all pay the price of our limp-wristed approach to this evil scum.

Oh. Well. You’ll never know if I missed your email because I filter my accounts through my hosting service’s spam blocker, or if I simply ignored it (surely not!)… or if my answer was filtered by YOUR spam filtration. *heh* All I know is that my inbox is now down to a few spam emails a week, where once I was receiving 1,000s. Since I don’t have the cojones to track spammers down, burn them alive, etc., I guess I will just have to live with that.

Trackposted to Nuke’s, Political Byline, Faultline USA, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, and Democrat=Socialist, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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One Reason Why We Have a Crappy Federal Government

Crappy voters. Seriously. Perri Nelson referred recently to an online civics quiz that’s simply an online form of the quiz given to a random sampling of Americans last Spring. Here’s the report card:

americas-report-card

Now, folks, having taken the quiz myself and having scored considerably better than the average, I’m prepared to say that the ONLY reasons for any citizens of these (dis)United States to fail this lil quiz are laziness, wilfull stupidity or both. Seriously. And the fact that,

Among the 2,508 respondents, 164 say they have been elected to a government office at least once. This sub-sample of officeholders yields a startling result: elected officials score lower than the general public. Those who have held elective office earn an average score of 44% on the civic literacy test, which is five percentage points lower than the average score of 49% for those who have never been elected... 1[emphasis added]

…leads me to assert that holders of political office who can’t do better than that should be put out of our misery forever. But that can only be accomplished by voters who know which end of a boot to pour piss out of… and even then they’d probably have to buy a clue to know they’d wet themselves, given the performance on this lil survey, and given the economy nowadays, I doubt any of ’em would spend the money on a cluebat to hit themselves over the head with.

(Am I livid? Absolutely. NO ONE who fails such a simple exam ought to be let within a mile of a voting booth, let alone be allowed to “serve” as an elected [addendum: or even UNelected] official in ANY capacity.)

Look, people, it’s just a silly little multiple choice quiz that’s not even as detailed as a citizenship exam for someone from another country seeking citizenship in this country, and yet 71% of the survey participants couldn’t pass the thing even with an extremely lenient 60% passing grade!

*feh* If that’s all Americans know about their own country then we deserve to be tossed in the ash heap of history. “It was a noble experiment, but The People proved they didn’t deserve the liberties generations of their forefathers bled and died to give them. Tough. Next?”

Lazy-assed bums. Don’t tell me the education system failed them. The “education system” sucks dead bunnies through a straw, slowly, laboriously and poorly, but only lazy-assed bums would be satisfied to KNOW NOTHING about their country’s history and forms of civil government, or worse, be satisfied with the horse manure illiterate boobs who “teach” civics and history in our schools dump in the black holes that are their vacuous heads.

And historical literacy in more than just American history and government is critical for voters nowadays given the outright lies of Mass Media Podpeople and politicians on issues of importance. One of the most serious issues facing our society today is the attempt to wreck (even further) our economy and way of life via the lie of anthropogenic global warming/climate change. One of the central arguments of the warmists/changists is made by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph showing the latter 20th Century to be the warmest period in more than a thousand years. Heck, simple historical literacy is all it would take to have Mann and his ilk run out of town on a rail (after a good tarring and feathering)–no need for elaborate mathematical analyses proving Mann cooked the books (although that has been done). Why? Just ask Mann and his disciples why, if the latter part of the 20th Century was the hottest in 1,000 years, didn’t Greenland have as big a net export of dairy products then as it did during the Medieval Climate Optimum from 800-1300 AD, when temperatures were higher than at ANY time during the 20th Century? (Apparently, Mann just couldn’t be bothered to do his homework–or else his math skills are considerably worse than one might imagine. 20th Century-14th Century is 600 years, Mike, not 1,000.)

OK, maybe even if folks knew that Leif Erikson Erik the Red (that’s a persistent braine pharte of mine) didn’t scam folks into moving to a bitterly cold Greenland (because it really WAS warm and green–dairy exports, remember? From farms that are NOW under glacial ice… ) that wouldn’t have helped combat Mann’s lies. They’d have to be numerate enough to be able to do simple subtraction.

So, yes, either we begin telling the illiterate boobs that are our fellow voters that they ARE illiterate boobs (and then do everything in our power to convert them to minimal historical literacy) or we will fall as a nation.

Note well the quote in the header of this blog:

“In a democracy (”rule by mob”), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

That’s just one of the reasons that, historically, democracies fail (and one of the reasons the Founders designed our federal government to NOT be a democracy!). As this country regresses ever more steadily into democratic rule, we begin to see the results of democraticization (mob rule): illiterate, lazy-assed boobs decide how the country will go.

Down the toilet.

Trackposted to Nuke’s, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Pink Flamingo, Woman Honor Thyself, Democrat=Socialist, Adam’s Blog, Right Voices, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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“Money, Money, Money… it’s a rich man’s world…”

Yeh, yeh. Well, it’s not “a rich man’s world” as far as I’m concerned. America’s Third World County has a different model of “rich” than the media, I’m sure, but even at that, very few of our “rich” have a disproportionate impact on our daily lives here*, which is why I’ve not posted much here about the Wall Street/banking brouhaha.

One thing I’ve been waiting for has finally peeped its head over the wall of silence, though. Michelle Malkin is flagging the elephant in the boardrooms: the impact of alien invaders on the banking bust of 08.

Regional reports across the country have decried the subprime meltdown’s impact on illegal immigrant “victims.” A July report showed that in seven of the 10 metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, Hispanics represented at least one-third of the population; in two of those areas – Merced and Salinas-Monterey, Calif. – Hispanics comprised half the population. The amnesty-promoting National Council of La Raza and its Development Fund have received millions in federal funds to “counsel” their constituents on obtaining mortgages with little to no money down; the group almost succeeded in attaching a $10 million earmark for itself in one of the housing bills past this spring.

For the last five years, I’ve reported on the rapidly expanding illegal alien home loan racket. The top banks clamoring for their handouts as their profits plummet, led by Wachovia and Bank of America, launched aggressive campaigns to woo illegal alien homebuyers.

(See the article for links embedded in it.)

Yep. On top of the billions upon billions of dollars siphoned off our economy in remittance money sent back to Mexico, the impact on health and education services of 20million alien invaders, the resurgence of diseases once virtually eliminated in the U.S. and a alien invader crime wave that annually surpasses in deaths the cumulative totals of servicemen killed in both Iraq and Afganistan from all causes, we have alien invaders defaulting on subprime loans.

And these loan defaults are the fault of politicians and bureaucrats of both parties dragging their heels over (or engaging in deliberate sabotage of) enforcement of already existing immigration law, compelling loans to subprime markets–including illegal aliens–and failing to oversee the quasi-governmental bodies the politicians are responsible for creating.

To his (very minimal) credit, McCain did at least push for stronger oversight of Fannie and Freddie, though he has done nothing to stem the tide of alien invaders. The Obamassiah, of course, was too busy accepting “pocket lining” from Freddie and Fannie lobbyists to look into what those organs were doing up his posterior.

So, just remember when The One attacks his opponents on the economy, he is the number two piggie at the trough sucking up money from the slop that started the cascade of failures on Wall Street.

But neither candidate–The Obamassiah or Juan Mexicain–have clean hands on the alien invader issue, although Juan has lately come around to admitting we need serious border/immigration enforcement before we can even consider any other steps to address the alien invader problems.

I just hope it’s more than electioneering bushwah.

*There is one family that does still exercise disproportionate power in the county, because they own a small telco that serves several communities comprising a majority of the population. Fortunately, cable providers and cell phone use are cutting their influence down to size.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, Democrat=Socialist, Dumb Ox Daily News, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Bill Whittle on Sarah Palin: Go. Read.

One excerpt then you’d better click through to read the whole thing or I’ll disown you.

🙂

Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama: not a victim, not a poser, not riding a wave but rather swimming upstream — and most of all, not having run for president her entire life. She is the first politician I have ever seen — and I include Ronnie in this, God bless him — who strikes everyone who sees her as an actual, real, ordinary person. Immediately came T-shirts saying I AM SARAH PALIN. HER STORY IS MY STORY. There is a lot of Obama swag out there, too, but none of it says HIS STORY IS MY STORY. Hold that thought till November 5.

She is so absolutely, remarkably, spectacularly ordinary. I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)

(Yes, I am serious about reading the whole thing; that’s why I made the whole of the blockquoted material clickable. Go!)

h.t. BeldarBlog

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Democrat=Socialist, The World According to Carl, and Shadowscope, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.