The Mind of David Krider
Deftly bridging the gap between the technical and the spiritual for over 16 years
Scott Adams “Non-Believerdar”
0There’s a hypothesis that the ability to believe in God has a genetic basis. That hypothesis is far from proven, but the smart money says there is some truth to it because most mental capacities have a genetic component.
via Scott Adams Blog: Non-Believerdar 01/23/2012.
That’s cool, Scott. Make yourself feel better about the “inexplicable” number of people who believe in God by implying that they are all stupid.
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met are better Christians than I am.
Whatever you feel about Christianity, it doesn’t correlate with intelligence, and you cannot simply dismiss it by claiming that adherents are stupid. Now, I can hear you say, “But they’ve done studies!” Yes, they have. I’m sure he’s talking about this research on Religiosity and Intelligence, which made major waves when it was released. The problem is that the graph doesn’t show correlation! I’m not an expert on statistics, but I know that correlation looks like a straight line, and that graph looks nothing like one. There’s a statistical-significance-shattering horizontal spread of people at the top of the range, and an equally hypothesis-destroying vertical spread at the left. Just look at the article on Correlation and Dependence from the same place, and you can see that the results cannot mean what they say it means! There must be another factor (or several) involved, but that’s all the “proof” the typical liberal needs to justify his confirmation bias.
And this sort of supposedly-erudite-discussions-but-which-are-actually-laced-with-logical-fallacies that passes for “enlightenment” at his blog is why I’m finally just de-listing him.
Time to Find Another Microblogging Service
0It would seem that identi.ca has “gone black” to “support” the “SOPA protest.” As their service is down, they didn’t receive the post I wanted to push (from Gwibber) that would have said:
These “SOPA protests” are as narcissistic as they are futile.
As I’ve told others: I hope this legislation passes and that people get first-hand experience with how badly our federal Congress is incompetent, misguided, and corrupt. If people could really see just how bad SOPA and PIPA are, then maybe they can start to wrap their heads around how bad something as byzantine as “Obamacare” must be, and maybe — just maybe — they could start to glimpse just how disastrous it’s unintended consequences will be when it starts commanding one-sixth of the world’s largest enconomy.
Identi.ca’s actions don’t represent me. It’s all just a giant, internet circlejerk that means, and will accomplish, nothing, in the long run. I resent that they’ve taken down a service I was relying on. I guess it’s time to find a competitor or build microblogging into my own site.
Greece Bites the Big One
0So Greece will finally default, despite all the bailouts, handouts, and copouts. What? You mean all those “austerity measures” couldn’t save a country from decades of socialism? Hmm… Of course there are no lessons here for the United States. No, that’s completely different.
SOPA: Playing with fire
02 weeks ago
by David
in Technology
I made a post about this crazy SOPA thing for my company’s blog. I thought it was a little rough, and expected some editing from others weighing in, but they liked it as was.
Another PayPal Screwing
0Hello David Krider,
We’re writing to let you know about a change to your PayPal account.
Starting 1/9/2012, money from payments you receive will be placed in a pending balance for up to 21 days. By doing this, we’re making sure that there’s enough money in your account to cover potential refunds or claims.
Even though you can’t access the money right away, please ship orders quickly and communicate with your customers. After 21 days, you can withdraw money from each payment as long as the customer hasn’t filed a dispute, chargeback, claim, return, or reversal.
The money may be available sooner if:
- We can confirm that the item was delivered.
- Your buyer leaves positive feedback. (Applies only to eBay items)
This change isn’t necessarily permanent. We’ll review your account every 35 days and re-evaluate if we should continue to hold your payments. If we decide to stop holding payments, we’ll email you to let you know.
Why are my payments being held?
We reviewed your account and determined that there’s a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues (such as claims, or chargebacks, or payment reversals). We understand that it may be inconvenient to have your payments temporarily held but please know that we didn’t make this decision lightly.Before deciding to hold payments, we consider many factors. These factors include account and transaction activity, the rate of customer disputes, the type of business a seller runs, average delivery timeframes, customer satisfaction, performance and history.
Want to know what changed? I pulled my bank account off my profile. Why did I do that? Because eBay. That’s why. I have the worst luck with eBay. This last time around, I sent out the item that someone had won the very next day, to the address given to me on the eBay notification that the auction had ended. This was NOT the address on the PayPal invoice. I only realized this because the person who had won notified me that, although UPS said the package was delivered, he didn’t receive it. Five hours later, he figured out that it had been sent to the wrong address. I sent him a screenshot of the email I got from eBay with the address I used. I felt bad, but I just couldn’t see how it was incumbent on me to notice the discrepancy between the addresses that eBay and PayPal had. He told me that the address in eBay was correct, but the only way that would have jived is if he changed it after the fact.
The next day, I got an email from eBay notifying me that the winner of the auction had tried to open a case against me for not having received the item. I sent him an email letting me know that I didn’t appreciate that, and he replied that he was trying to hold UPS responsible somehow. Whatever. To be safe, I removed the bank account from my PayPal profile. I figured that I could much more easily fight it if they reached into my credit card balance rather than a bank account. And, after all the horror stories I had heard about PayPal, I wanted to do that anyway. Doing this made my account “unverified,” but I was willing to live with that.
Now, a week later, I get the message above. All this hassle has been flagged by PayPal’s system as possibly fraudulent. Great. I’ve always followed all their suggestions to avoid problems. I communicate clearly, ship quickly, add tracking numbers to the transaction… All that jazz. But, I guess having a dozen years of history with a company means nothing any more. Why should they care? They have no competition. At least, not on eBay. There’s no way to complain. There’s no one to argue with.
I’m just a guy, you know. My whopping 43 reputation on eBay is nothing. Apparently it counts for nothing, too. I may as well delete the account and start over. Truth is, I’ll probably re-open a checking account that I used to use for this specifically. And continue to play their game. It’s really the only one in town.
What Goes Around…
0Awhile back, Borders announced they were going out of business. I had a $100 gift card in my wallet that needed using. Surreptitiously, I came across this list of science fiction book recommendations on Reddit. I tried to go to a store, but by the time I got there, they were selling the shelving. So I got online, even though there would be no significant discount, and ordered some books.
I just finished reading Ender’s Game yesterday. I looked up the book on Wikipedia, and checked out the other books in the series. In the process, I discovered that the author, Orson Scott Card, is a Mormon, and a political advocate against gay marriage. It’s not often that you find someone so readily cited as a great artist with such public and strong counter-political-correctness positions. But, I thought, whatever.
Today I came across a comment on a Reddit discussion about XBLA game recommendations (of all things) that led me to this article: Daily Kos: Boycott Orson Scott Card. I just had to chuckle inside. How is this any different than Hollywood making movies that a conservative enjoys, when the writers, producers, directors, and especially the actors, are all politically-influential, globe-trotting, UN-credential-sporting liberal social engineers?
I had learn, a long time ago, to divorce my opinions about the people who make the creative work from the work itself. Otherwise, I would never turn on a TV or watch a movie or play a video game or listen to the radio or, basically, consume any type of entertainment, ever, at all. It’s pretty clear: liberals are more artistic, and they make the vast majority of popular entertainment. If I had to vet the creator of every media I came across before I could judge the creative work itself… well… I may as well throw away my computer, TV, radio, and phone right now.
So, while I’m almost ambivalent about gay marriage (almost), I think the turnabout for a liberal is funny. Welcome to the world, buddy. Free speech — when you don’t like it — is a real bear, isn’t it? Now you know how I feel when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie start talking about AGW.
Maybe it was Hardware
0My old computer has been swapped to the kids’ computer. It was giving me double reboots under Linux. I don’t know if they’ve done something strange to it, but it looks like the machine just did the same thing from under Windows. So maybe the hardware’s going bad, and it wasn’t Linux’s fault? I’d like to believe that, for my love-for-Linux’s sake, but I wasted so much time because of it, I really don’t care any more.
Current State of Linux
0I’ve spent weeks fooling with my home computer. Even for me, this past chapter of problems has been notable. I’ve called both Windows and Linux everything but an operating system. I’ve installed Ubuntu at least 6 times, and Windows at least twice. Things are settling down now. From all my experimentation, here’s what I think:
- My old motherboard (nVidia 780i chipset) has a BIOS bug that interferes with current kernels, and causes it to crash (the BIOS!) on reboot. Windows is fine. I’ve swapped my computer with my kids’ (nVidia 750i chipset), and everything is fine.
- My super-duper Intel SSD is just bad. It hangs randomly for 60 seconds at a time. I’m getting it replaced under warranty. I will avoid the hassle of trying it again, and sell the unopened replacement on Ebay. I’m going to miss it terribly.
- I had my /home directory scrambled twice early on in this circus, but I’m going to blame it on my old mobo, and the fact that I was running fakeraid. I thought getting rid of fakeraid and going to the SSD was going to fix everything. Instead, that’s what started this cascade of failure.
- I discovered a bug in Ubuntu when installing to a btrfs filesystem. Who knows, at this point, if it was due to my motherboard or the SSD, though. It’s clear to me now that btrfs isn’t really considered production-ready anyway, so I’m kind of glad that didn’t work out.
- Lastly, with all this disk exercise, I lost one of my trusty-rusty Raptors that I’ve had for at least 12 years. I bought a reconditioned drive off Ebay to match another I had around, and have a new mirror set now.
I’m now running the latest Ubuntu, using the Gnome 2 “fallback” desktop environment. It’s quite nice. I’m thinking this is a good place to wait on 12.04, and I really hope they wind up leaving us a fallback option in the coming version.
Now on to buying a new — or building a custom — desk, and getting a bigger monitor. As part of this process, I also tried a 23″ LCD. After over a dozen years of using a 19″ CRT, it was gorgeous, but, alas, too small. I’m going to get a 27″, but I have to have a new desk. It won’t fit in this one. If I build what I have in my head, I’ll have enough room for 3 of them.
Bailouts – At Least the Liberals are Getting Honest
0The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect.
via The Book of Jobs | Politics | Vanity Fair.
You know, there were a lot of people who tried to tell the idiots — on both sides of the isle — that the bailouts were a bad idea, and wouldn’t work. But they ignored the copious amount of evidence from past failures around the world, and did it anyway. Now that money is gone, we’ve gotten no benefit for it, and we’re stuck with the bill. At least some liberals are starting to wake up and admit it.
The programs were too small, and many were soon abandoned. By 1937, F.D.R., giving way to the deficit hawks, had cut back on stimulus efforts—a disastrous error.
…
But it was not until government spending soared in preparation for global war that America started to emerge from the Depression. It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery.
But wait. So… this whole article is a paean to government spending after all, this time done the right way: in “education” and research.
Can we actually bring ourselves to do this, in the absence of mobilization for global war? Maybe not. The good news (in a sense) is that the United States has under-invested in infrastructure, technology, and education for decades, …
Who says? Compared to what? We’re spending more on education today than ever, and still getting decreasing returns. It’s quite clear to objective people that just spending more will not improve eduction. (I can’t help but point out that higher education costs have risen at 3 times inflation for the past 20 years. Where has this money gone!?) We must return to teaching the material, and not a load of politically-correct malarkey. When our schools once again become primarily about educating kids instead of raising them to be proper, mindless liberal voters, we will get the sort of results we would like to achieve. Until then, the liberals in our government are getting exactly what they want, notwithstanding the lip service paid to testing scores.
And “research?” Who’s going to be more motivated to find the next breakthrough in some field of technology than someone who can make the profit from it? It’s inefficient to spend money on pure grant work. The system of patents and copyrights was supposed to be established to promote exactly the sort of creative activity that the author of this article is seeking, but both of those systems are morally and legally bankrupt. Our current patent and copyright laws have created an almost insurmountable impediment to starting a company based on a novel invention. I posit that rebuilding those systems will achieve better results than giving money away to university professors and just hoping for the best.
Finally, don’t worry, though, we’ll be “mobilizing for global war” any minute now. Unfortunately, the author has overlooked something. There’s a problem with this method of economic revitalization this time around. Last time, we needed the sort of economy that war development provided: hard manufacturing. At this time, I agree with Mr. Stiglitz, we need intellectual capital and service. However, that’s not the sort of thing that powers today’s militaries. So, even when we finally go to war with Iran, and Iran drags Israel into it by lobbing some bombs her way, causing everyone to get in on the action, it’s not going to drive the sort of changes to our economy that will lift the majority of our populace out of recession.