Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away. — Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain. — Plato
Indian Givers
Via Best of the Web Today: Read more →
Enough of the Mealy-Mouthed Obamacare Excuses!
I’d have a lot more respect for the president if he just came out and said, “As Otter so cogently observed in Animal House, ‘You fucked up … You trusted us!’” Read more →
Great Moments in Presidential Prevarication
“I am not a crook.” — Richard Nixon “Read my lips: no new taxes.” — George H.W. Bush “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” — Bill Clinton “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” — Barack Obama Read more →
World Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit
Heredity
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and neither does the nut. Read more →
Clifford Nass, 1958-2013
One of his most publicized research projects was a 2009 study on multitasking. He and his colleagues presumed that people who frequently juggle computer, phone or television screens, or just different applications, would display some special skill at ignoring irrelevant information, or efficiently switching between tasks, or that they would prove to have a particularly orderly memory. “We all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something,” he said in an interview with the PBS program “Frontline” after the paper he and his colleagues wrote, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” was published in 2009. “We were absolutely shocked,” he said. “We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.” He added, “One would… Read more →
How to Save a Lot of Time in Interviews
There used to be a book titled The Top 2800 Interview Questions…And Answers. I have this fantasy: You walk into an employer’s office, shake hands, and say, “I know you have a lot of questions for me. So let’s save us both a lot of time.” You slide that baby across the desk toward the manager… “So here they are, along with all the answers. Now can we cut the crap and talk about the job and how I’ll do it for you, okay?” — Nick Corcodilos Read more →
Obama Did Not Lie
When President Obama said that he could provide health care to millions without taking any health care away from people who have already got it, he had no chance of being believed. The statement was absurd on its face. This is a law of arithmetic: If you invite a bunch of friends to share your lunch, there’s going to be less lunch for you. Everybody understands that. . . . So when the President said he could expand the availability of medical care while allowing everyone else to keep the care they’ve got, it was like saying he’d take us for a tour of England in his rocket ship. It had absolutely no chance of being believed, and therefore, it seems to me, does not count as a lie. It counts instead as an expression of contempt for the many entirely reasonable people who tried to point out that it… Read more →
Both Sides of the Case
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion . . .” — John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” Read more →
The Best-Laid Plans . . .
As if any more evidence was needed that smoking is bad for your health. Should I ever happen to kill myself while trying to perform a simple task — I’m trying not to, but if it does happen — please don’t publish a photo of me in a college hoodie. Au revoir, professor! Read more →
EppsNet Book Reviews: The Big Short by Michael Lewis
I worked in the information technology department of a mortgage bank in the run-up to the 2007 implosion of the subprime mortgage market . . . Given that it was fairly evident at the time that complicated financial instruments were being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it, it’s remarkable that very few people foresaw the catastrophe and that even fewer actually had the nerve to bet on it to happen. Long story short, the major rating agencies — Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s — were incompetent in their rating of subprime mortgage bonds, giving investment-grade and, in some cases, triple-A ratings to high-risk instruments. A lot of people took the ratings — which implied that subprime mortgage derivatives were no riskier than U.S. Treasury bonds — at face value and acted accordingly. But there were also some interesting psychological factors in play, not… Read more →
Six Drucker Questions that Simplify a Complex Age
Via Harvard Business Review. My personal favorite is “What would happen if this were not done at all?” Read more →
Thank You for Smoking
According to the American Cancer Society, smoking kills about 1 in 5 people in the United States. Is that bad? If so, why? You’ve got to die somehow. Would it be better if those people died from some other cause? How would you prefer to see them die? Also: Some percentage of Americans would rather be dead than alive anyway. I don’t know what that number is, but I’d bet it’s higher than 1 in 5. (If you Google “percentage of people who would rather be dead,” the top results all point to a 2008 survey in which 52 percent of respondents said they would rather be dead than disabled. If you change the search to “percentage of people who would rather be dead than alive,” you get a mishmash of links, including a few more links to the “dead vs. disabled” survey, but you still don’t get the number… Read more →
Politics: The Profession of Scoundrels
Some of the president’s most central and important claims about Obamacare are revealed now – and widely admitted – to be wrong. If he were the CEO of a private company he would be sued, publicly lambasted by all the major media, perhaps hauled before an admittedly grandstanding Congressional committee, and possibly prosecuted, convicted, fined, or even imprisoned for fraudulent misrepresentation. But because Obama is a politician, his misrepresentations are excused as simplifying descriptions aimed at persuading the doofus public to fall for legislation that they would not have fallen for had the president described that legislation honestly and accurately. Politics is the profession of scoundrels. — I Ask Again: Can We Sue for Fraudulent Misrepresentation? Read more →
Some Links
HealthCare.gov’s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines McKayla Maroney Was Doing The “Not Impressed” Face At Age 8 Most Popular Paintings & Photos From Getty’s Online Art Collection The Tweeting Bra Versus Breast Cancer Read more →
The Most Spectacular Libraries in the World
Via The Telegraph: Architectural Digest also had a library slideshow — not as spectacular because unlike the Telegraph slideshow, these libraries are in people’s homes — but a couple of great ones nonetheless. Read more →
Mates and Dates
Which Experts Predicted a Red Sox-Cardinals World Series?
With two storied franchises making the 2013 Fall Classic, let’s take a look at which of the 63 experts we tracked this year (from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CBS, Yahoo, and Fox) pegged the series correctly. (… Calculating …) (… Calculating …) Well, how’s this for embarassing: 0 of the 63 so-called experts had both the Red Sox and Cardinals in the World Series. Perhaps this is not a huge surprise, as Vegas gave each team less than a 10% probability of making the Series. So let’s lower the bar considerably and look at the pundits who picked either the Red Sox OR the Cardinals to make it. (… Calculating …) You guessed it — zero. Not one. — PunditTracker Read more →