If you recognize the person on this next slide, please raise your hand. Don’t yell out the name, just raise your hand. About two-thirds of you recognize Derek Jeter. I thought everyone would recognize him, but still a clear majority. I’m not a Yankees fan or a Derek Jeter fan particularly but the Captain and I are on the same page on this topic. I have to admit I was pretty competitive as a student. I didn’t want anyone to do better than me and I especially didn’t want anyone to do better than me because they worked harder than me. This Jeter quote reminded me of a quote from another notable sports figure . . . This is Bob Knight, college basketball coach, most notably at the University of Indiana. He won 902 games, three NCAA championships, and he coached the 1984 Olympic basketball team to a gold medal.… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Stupidity
R.I.P. America
A Recipe for Confidence
If you know very little, and have a coherent story that explains the little that you know, you can be a very confident person . . . Read more →
Climate Change is Making People More Stupid
(HealthDay News) — Add another possible woe to the growing list of consequences of climate change: Kidney stones. A new study of American cities suggests that rising temperatures may increase the number of people who develop the painful urinary obstructions. — Will a warmer climate mean more kidney stones? – MSN Healthy Living You have to read all the way down to the second-to-last sentence of the article to find this: The study uncovered a connection between higher temperatures and risk of kidney stones, but didn’t prove cause-and-effect. The article implies cause and effect only to fess up right at the end and admit that there is no cause and effect. In the absence of cause and effect, what exactly is the point? In the epilogue of War and Peace, a peasant notices a “connection” between smoke and locomotives and infers cause and effect: the smoke causes the locomotive to… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Great West Retirement Services
Because I changed jobs recently, I want to roll over a 401k into an IRA. I filled out the form, mailed it in to Great West Retirement Services — they manage the 401k — and got this in return: The enclosed benefit request is being returned for additional and or missing information. We require the following item(s) be completed before processing can take place: Please have this request completed on the attached current version of the distribution form. The form this request was submitted on is now discontinued. OK, first of all, the form isn’t being returned for additional or missing information. I filled out the form I was given and you’re telling me it’s now discontinued. You can’t figure it out anyway? You really need me to fill out ANOTHER 6-PAGE FORM with EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION in a slightly different format?! And I love this part: “Please have… Read more →
That’s Why It’s Called the Opposition Party
Charlie Crist, former Republican and currently Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, on why he changed parties: I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president. I’ll just go there. I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me. It was so intolerable that Crist left the GOP in 2010 — four years ago — and he’s just bringing this up now? Has anyone asked this fool why Republicans have been unfriendly to all other Democratic presidents? Or why Democrats have been unfriendly to all GOP presidents? What is his theory on that? Is he really this stupid or is he counting on his target audience being this stupid? I suspect the latter . . . Read more →
Get Rich Making Dumb Decisions
The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side — the entire financial system, essentially — had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What’s strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich. . . . The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too. What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions — if they can get… Read more →
How to Answer Stupid Job Interview Questions
Via Liz Ryan Read more →
Income Inequality Explained
Via NPR: Read more →
We’re Still Smarter Than You Are
Teens from Asian nations dominated a global exam given to 15-year-olds, while U.S. students showed little improvement and failed to reach the top 20 in math, science or reading, according to test results released Tuesday. — Why Asian teens do better on tests than US teens – CSMonitor.com Why am I not shocked by that? Because Americans on the whole are dumb and lazy. We have lots of dumb, lazy parents raising dumb, lazy kids. The average American kid doesn’t compare well academically to the average kid in an Asian country where academics and hard work are valued, or to the average kid from a small, homogenous European country where it’s easier to get everyone pulling in the same educational direction. The U.S. is a big, diverse country and the average academic results are pulled down by a lot of dummkopfs. But still, the smartest people in the world are… Read more →
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of
How big was it? The go-to question for lazy sports media goofballs everywhere. How big was that game? How big was that performance? How big was that play? In case you hadn’t noticed, the word “big” doesn’t make sense in this context. How big was it? It was bigger than a breadbox. It was bigger than my dick. “Let me ask you about the most important play of the game. How important was it?” That’s just stupid. But it’s acceptable if you phrase it like this: “How big was the interception by Kozlowski?” Use of the word “big” is the agreed-upon protocol for asking stupid questions repeatedly. “Tell us something we already know about something we just saw” is okay if phrased as “How big was that performance tonight by Smithers?” Or “How big was this win?” If all you can do is ask stupid questions, at least phrase them… Read more →
Taco Warmer
Photo by supjchwa2 “Jack in the Box tacos have to be eaten when they’re hot, so when I buy them at the drive-thru, I also buy a bag of french fries, set the fries on top of the tacos and use them as a taco warmer to keep the tacos hot until I get them home and eat them.” “Do you eat the fries as well?” “No, I don’t eat the fries. I just use them to keep the tacos warm.” “The french fries keep the tacos warm?’ “Right.” “What keeps the french fries warm?” Read more →
We Need More Voter Suppression, Not Less
The latest update of the Pew Research Center’s News IQ quiz finds that while 79 percent of respondents correctly identified the Twitter logo, only 55 percent could identify Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General. The Holder question was not an open-ended question, which would have been more difficult, e.g., “Name the current U.S. Attorney General” or “Who is Eric Holder?” It was a multiple-choice question. The question (you can take the quiz yourself here) shows a photo of Holder and asks respondents to select his job from a list of four options. Results were even worse for other questions. Fifty percent correctly identified Syria as the highlighted country on a map, again from a list of four choices, and 43 percent were able to identify Elizabeth Warren from a set of four photos. And still there are some misfits who continue to insist that voter suppression is a bad thing. Read more →
You Say Anarchy, Sir, Like It’s a Bad Thing
Frankly, one of our political parties is insane, and we all know which one it is. They have descended from the realm of reasonableness that was the mark of conservatism. They dream of anarchy, of ending government. — Bruce Bartlett My fellow Americans — I’ll tell you who’s insane: anyone who’s not dreaming of anarchy at this moment in history is insane. People forget that this great nation was founded by anarchists, born out of an armed revolution against a corrupt government. As I said at the time, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” I assure you, though, that regrettably neither current political party dreams of anarchy. They both dream of exactly the same things: self-aggrandizement and rewarding their most powerful supporters with political spoils. The well-known liberal cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a book a couple… Read more →
Demonizing Bogeymen
From Salon, before the bombers were identified, captured and/or killed: Shame on everyone who assumed that the bombers were Muslims from a foreign land! Wait — what? They were Muslims from a foreign land? OK, never mind. Calling out “far-right extremists” for “demonizing bogeymen” is either hilariously ironic or depressingly symptomatic of American decline. Since Salon is not known for its satire, I have to go with the latter. Read more →
Manager
I’ve noticed a new trend in spam is to put the word “Manager” in front of the sender’s name, e.g., Manager Joe Schmuck instead of just plain Joe Schmuck. Are people really this stupid? Does anyone think to themselves, “I don’t know any Joe Schmuck, but if he’s come up through the ranks to the level of Manager, then I think I owe it to myself to see what he has to say”? Read more →
IT Recruiter of the Day
From an actual job ad: Killer, Profitable, Stable and cutting edge technology company looking for genious!!! It’s funny when someone misspells the word “genius”! Why are random words like “Profitable” and “Stable” capitalized? Because the recruiter wanted to highlight the adjectives? Then why isn’t “cutting edge” capitalized? Why isn’t “cutting edge” hyphenated? Read more →
Humans Evolving to Become Less Intelligent?
Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford University, suggests that humans are evolving to become less intelligent. Crabtree asserts that the safer life gets for humans, the less important it is for us to have good judgment for survival and mating. Thousands of years ago, human idiots were much more likely to be removed from the gene pool (i.e., die) as a result of their lack of intelligence and judgment. Nowadays, it’s rare for someone to die because they were unable to outwit a predator. Read more →
At Least He Went Out a Winner
Edward Archbold was, according to those who met him on Friday night, the life of the party – a bit of a showoff who was up for anything, even a giant cockroach-eating contest. He won. And then, tragically, he died. — Florida man dies after winning cockroach-eating contest – U.S. News Not every death is a tragedy. (We pause here for a moment to give Darwin a chance to spike the football.) Whenever I hear someone described as “a bit of a showoff who’s up for anything,” I find myself wondering how soon they can die in some bizarre attempt to attract attention. Given what we know about the deceased, how surprised are you — on a scale of zero to 10 — that a shirtless mug shot was available for use in his obituary? Read more →
Everyone in America Can Go to College
This morning I heard President Obama call for universities to lower their tuition rates so that “everybody in America can go to college.” I am virtually certain that the President is not stupid enough to think that if tuition rates fell to zero, there would magically be enough room in the colleges for everybody in America. So I’ve got to believe that he’s purposely saying stupid things in order to appeal to stupid voters — the sort of voters, in other words, who probably don’t belong in college. — Steven Landsburg Read more →