CapitalistImperialistPig

It seems that psychological studies have revealed that even people who hate bigotry and consider themselves open minded have a lot of implicit biases. They have even developed a test for it. I took it, as you may if you follow the link, and discovered that yes, I do have a lot of implicit biases. This disappointed but did not surprise me. It's not like I didn't have a lot of clues. ESPN or somebody has experimented with letting a woman call football games. I listened and hated it. Why? No clue. If she was bad at it I certainly couldn't identify how. Implicit bias seems like a good guess though. Today while riding the campus shuttle bus a young woman in traditional Muslim head scarf got on, and I felt a small twinge of antipathy - quickly squelched but there, lurking evilly in my subconscious. There is lots of evidence that we all have such prejudices, even if we work to suppress and overcome them. Such, apparently, is human nature.

An Alabama mall had a shooter. A citizen with a concealed carry - apparently the proverbial good guy with a gun -drew his gun and tried to lead people away from the shooter. Police showed up and gunned down the good guy, who happened to be black. I have a hard time constructing a scenario where either the citizen with a gun or the police made an egregious mistake. So who should we blame? How about the NRA and idiots who constructed our absurd gun laws. The shooter has not been caught.

Having gotten a cooperation deal with the prosecutor, why would Paul Manafort lie? I can think of a few possibilities. a)Lying is so integral to his nature that he, like Trump, probably can't tell the difference. b)He fears something more than life in prison. The wrath of the oligarchs he cheated? c)He is counting on a pardon from Trump. d)He is so conceited that he thought he could get away with it. My guess is c? Anybody? Former Deputy Attorney General Harry Litman reads the tea leaves. He can't figure it out either. He thinks that a late pardon deal would be perilous for all concerned.

Perhaps some might guess that NY 2140 was not my cup of tea - and I don't drink tea. As a thriller it has lots of faults: slow pace, punch of suspense repeatedly pulled, characters not either well developed or interesting and a lot of dry exposition. There are a couple of villains in the book: finance and capitalism. I have my problems with both, but the author, I think, doesn't really understand what he is talking about. So what about the future world he created? It's wetter, sea level having risen 50 feet or so, but somehow, much of the drowned part of New York and other cities continues to be occupied. This is probably more interesting to those intimately familiar with the geography of the city than to me, a fairly infrequent visitor. It's a largely post carbon burning world, but I didn't find that especially interesting either.

Scenario - 6-10 cops show up at a finance firm, with a warrant, and demand record. CEO summons security, and cops leave. WTF? That's ridiculous. Even if they were outnumbered 100 to 1 cops would point guns at CEO and summon backup. CEO and security guys would be arrested for obstruction.

I think my SF novels should try to get basic numbers right. Without major spoilers I think I can say that two chests of gold coins figure in the plot. Small heavy chests, but still something a couple of people could pick up. The gold allegedly in each of the chests is supposed to be worth about two billion dollars. Right now, a kilogram of gold is worth about $40,000 dollars. At that rate, $2 billion would weigh 50,000 kilograms. I don't think two people could pick that up. Hundred dollar bills pack more buck per kilo. At 1 gram per bill, a million bucks is 10 Kilograms, but a billion is still ten metric tons = tonnes. You will need a super-duty pickup to pull the trailer. A semi for $4 billion, and a small fleet if it's in gold.

What capitalism is good at allocating capital to exploit market opportunities. In particular, it has done a good job at exploiting the technological opportunities opened by the scientific revolutions of the past centuries. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the big profit center was using the African slave trade to staff the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, and the cotton plantations of the American South. Europe's taste for sugar and rum was sated, but this was not a rising tide that lifted all boats. Sugar productivity was increased but millions of slaves were worked to death in abysmal conditions. The narrowly economic minded, especially libertarians, think that a productivity increase that distributes 99% to the few and 1% to the many is a good deal all around, but is it? The clearest evidence against that is assessment of the effect on social capital. Wikipedia: Social capital broadly refers to those factors of effectively functioning social gr...