The Grumpy INTP

The good thing about a depression is that it is ruthless to the dumb, and critical of the corrupt. Finally, the media is starting to report that stock analysts are no better at picking stocks than a monkey:

• stocks with ‘buy’ ratings don’t outperform those with ‘hold’ or ’sell’ ratings. One analysis he conducted suggests the opposite is true

I will be glad when the endless, baseless, “confidence” in the market is gone, and replaced by cold calculating business sense.

As I said before, the Conservatives spend like drunken sailors:

• The Conservative government spent almost $1 billion on consultants in its first two years in office – nearly double what the Liberals spent in a similar time period, a Toronto Star investigation shows.

For me, the wild spending sprees in travel and expenses do not bother me much; I beleive our elected officials can have some benefits for winning thier elections. Anyway, the total bill for those expenses is a very small percentage of the overall government budget.
What bothers me are the order-of-magnitude larger speadning inititives that are purely wasteful. For example:

• …$270 million contract with Resolve Corporation, which was hired to manage the government’s national student loan program. … $6.8 billion, made up of roughly 1.6 million borrowers

This works out to over $84 per borrower, pre year*!! This is an incredible amount of money!! And remember, this is incredible because Resolve Corporation is not managing the loan: the borrower’s bank is.

I know that I solved all my student loan issues by talking to my bank directly. So it is reasonable to assume most other borrows do the same, and the Resolve Corporation is being paid for relatively no work. I call that a sweet deal!

* The previous Liberal government did the same work for $6.90 per borrower per year.

Steven Harper did ask for a prorougation of Parliament. In retrospect, the asking for prorougation does not necessarily conflict with my theory that Harper wants to loose government control during this economic crisis: Actually, he may use this time to keep running the government apparati into the ground so his soon-to-govern opponents have a much harder time dealing with the crisis.

Furthermore, I am dismayed that the GG would grant a prorougation, but that may be just my bias for Dion.

Stephen Harper was not forward looking enough to loose the recent election. But, now that the Neo Cons from the States are done making sure the GOP did not win, they are expanding to the satellite states and exporting their master plan: Do not be the government when the economy is tanking.

Last week, the Conservatives were in a bind: They did not want to be government, but they had won the election. Mr. Harper was smart to put forward a budget update that the opposition MUST reject, and MUST form the government to oppose. Mr. Harper does NOT want another election because he could win.

For these reasons I predict Stephen Harper to NOT prorogate parliament, he will NOT ask for an election from the Governor General. I also predict no-one will be blamed for Flaherty’s buget update ‘miscalculation’. The opposition parties will become government. They will take the needed, but expensive, action to help the economy, and the Conservatives will not be blamed for the costs. The Conservatives will all play “nicely” and they will have a polished image, ready to get a majority, in 3-5 years when the financial disaster is over.

Just like Ontario after the Bob Rae coalition: Canada will get a Mike Harris revolution: A fire-sale of government assets, and spending like drunken sailors, so there is a huge deficit when the Conservative popularity is spent.

It is not surprising that ’scoring’ of music depends on it s rating, although, it is good so see it measured. Some guy had an idea to improve it a little, but I found it naive.

I would suggest adding some randomization of rating scores; suitably weighted of course. Users should be exposed to some of the under-rated ideas, and sheltered from some of the over-rated ideas. This is done by assigning an altered score on a select few songs. Users that are exposed to fake scores are called “reference users”. By comparing the reference user’s music score with the altered score, and the real score, we can get an idea of how trustworthy the ‘real’ score is. Furthermore, using the reference user’s overall scoring history, we can measure the reference user’s “objectivity” along with personal preferences.

Anyway, I have no math for this, so I hope I was clear.

I stumbled upon a script that would change the 'SYS%' constraint names to something more reasonable.

My version requires some helper functions, but I think you can guess what they do:

PS: Special thanks to WordPress for:

1. having no code formatting ability,
2. treating <br> arbritarily, and
3. interpreting single quote (&#39) wrong

I have finally moved to WordPress!

The thing holding me back is the time and skill required to change one of the default layouts to something that resembles the rest of my site. Well, I am mostly done:

1. I must do a few more CSS improvements
2. I must convert all my old stuff over to this new database
3. I must find a way to backup the MySQL database so I do not loose it all

In other words, I have hours more work. At my current rate I should be done by 2011.

I do not understand why Joel demands so much from the literature meant for public consumption

This review captures what’s been driving me crazy over the last year… an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works.

Literature’s job is not to provide conclusive evidence; that is the job of research and science. Even disregarding the entertainment value of literature: Literature is meant to inject new ideas into our culture, and to provide a rich resource of potential hypotheses that others can explore.

Some may argue that particular pieces of literature are trying to present anecdotes as evidence, which is morally wrong. I do not agree:

1. The entertainment value comes from the convincing nature; qualifying every example as inconclusive, or negating the whole premise of the book with a qualifier at the beginning, destroys the suspension of believe required to be entertained. Joel has proven himself smart enough to see that the literature lacked proof, so we can expect others to also, despite the lack of disclaimers.
2. The issue of truth in literature, or truth in journalism, is a valid concern, but as long as news media can legally lie I see the immoral use of anecdotes in literature as a minor nuisance at most.

Art and entertainment are different than science, and it would be just as ridiculous to complain that a paper, titled “The toxicity of diethylhexylphthalate”, is a stunted and cold read.

P.S. - Thanks to the digital black hole for erasing all authoritative references to the Florida legal decision.