Shaky Danny

Samuelson’s Economics has an entire chapter worrying over wage rates and the efficient allocation of labor. Why do people change jobs? Samuelson would like to tie it to capital allocation, work duration…he doesn’t mention the insult factor. I know a guy who loved his job. He was proud of the job and the work he did. When he learned that someone else made more than him, it was too much. He quit even without another job to go to. Nothing else had changed. It was simply that he felt insulted. Managers fail to understand the insult factor. Headhunters understand it. Unions understand it. Customers understand it. Why go through the folderol of a manufacturer’s rebate? If you are getting points, then someone else is getting ripped off. When the price at the aisle doesn’t match the register, you feel insulted. Bombing me with ads texts and emails after I have bought the product is discouraging. When a headhunter offers a better deal, it feels like your own company doesn’t value you. Co...

The Supreme Court functions as a safety valve. When the court fails, it is a big mess, we have had a civil war. In 1974 people were voting with their feet. Illegal abortion was so prevalent that the court had to act. The prisoner’s dilemma underlies our concept of justice. Say a juror is fixed. How does the juror know that they will be paid? If they are paid ahead of time, how does the fixer know the juror will stick? At this time, it has been announced that there are five judges who will rule against abortion. The early decision is a blatant loud fart. As Biden explained, it ignores the ninth amendment. The ninth amendment is intended to prevent this argument. As Pogo said: -I got rights I ain’t even used yet! If privacy or women’s equality are rights, then abortion should be legal. Buttigieg explained why abortion, whatever the term, should be a private family, not an arbitrary government decision.  It is a difficult medical and personal decision made in hard circumstance...

  Next time you see some little darling tormented with multiplication tables, have them make up a grid and fill it in themselves. It is easier to remember with context and seeing the relations between numbers. Be sure to point out the square’s diagonal. They can also build grids for the other operations, just for fun.

  One of the questions of mathematics is are we uncovering the ideal structure of reality or creating language. Yes. [i] I think of mathematics as a collection of tools or techniques. Socrates argued that all knowledge is innate. He took a young slave boy and interrogated him as to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Since the boy kept agreeing with Socrates, he must have known of this proof already. Socrates described a right triangle, then showed a square constructed from 4 of these identical triangles, then set the area of the square to the areas of the 4 triangles and the square contained in them. Then he solved for the Pythagorean theorem. Socrates was in the impossible position of arguing for ethics and logic in a polytheistic world, surrounded by the arbitrary gods. By proving that a slave had the same innate knowledge as the rest of us he was calling into question slavery. Euclid hated this proof of the Pythagorean theorem. The proof requires that you already know w...

  After Awoken , Lindsay Ellis will always be suspect. Alien romance has been done. It is a common theme on Star Trek : -Dr. Bashir we have discovered a new life form. -Does it fuck? Dr. Bashir is a slut. There are vampire romances, werewolf romances, zombie romances… In Awoken the love interest is Cthulhu. -As she fell into his arms, arms, arms. -There were tentacles where no tentacle should ever go. In Axiom’s End , the protagonist Cora, recovering from a malignant narcissist father, falls for a manipulative extraterrestrial war refugee, Asterisk. Asterisk confuses her squeamishness over killing him with kindness. Get very nervous if someone regards you as kind or nice. Asterisk resembles a grass hopper Dr. Seuss character. Asterisk’s appeal is kind of a cuddly networked dildo, not much privacy, almost as good as a lesbian. The couple overcommit right away. Cora keeps assuming that Asterisk regards us as savage. She doesn’t consider that he is projecting. I had dif...

  It is a cruel twist of technology that librarians have become one of the most computerized professions.   Whether transporting their bibliographic files across platforms or navigating all the varieties of text processing and information retrieval the technical expertise expected of them seems totally disjointed from the personalities that this profession should attract. Like Amazon, librarians rarely touch books. What librarians want to do, and are rewarded for, is party: events and fund raisers.   The only people in the stacks anymore are kids playing and making out.   Similarly, authors are now plunging the depths of HTML to properly format their works.   Books have become video graphic experiences.   I fully expect hypertext markup language to be taught in Humanities. Professors make use of services to check for plagiarism, grammar and composition. Except perhaps for Prince, who cut all his own tracks, most people work with others. Authors have const...

  I have just finished The Counter-Revolution Of 1776 , New York University Press, 2014. It is a fire hose of facts. Horne, as most of us, could use an editor. There is occasional awkwardness and redundancy. But the facts. Nearly a quarter of the book is notes. I have seen some criticism to the effect that there was an abolitionist in Massachusetts or some such. There are dismissals of slave owners reports as hysteria, which Horne acknowledges by the way.   Just put your head in this fire hose of facts. In the US of Usn’s we are taught history starting from our “revolution”. Nothing comes from nowhere. In England they at least know there was the Seven Years War.   The Seven Years war was nine years. The English don’t want to acknowledge that it was the colonial tail wagging the empire dog. I had attributed English opposition to slavery to their experience with Barbary pirates. Horne mentions this on page 39 as part of a larger argument and it doesn’t merit an index en...