The Mega Millions jackpot is up to $586 million. I bought two tickets at the gas station where I buy sodas every morning.
“I hope I don’t have to split it,” I said to the guy. “I want the whole $500 million.”
“What are you going to do with all that money?” he asked.
“First of all, I’m going to buy a new cup for my sodas every morning, instead of bringing the old cups back in for the refill price.”
“That’s it?”
“I’ll also be a lot harder to get along with at the office. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
The New York Times has been editorializing recently on the nation’s need to enlarge our pool of science and math students, with a particular focus on girls and minorities, and to encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive.
Here’s a list of the members of the NYT editorial board, including academic major(s), which I obtained from their online bios. See if you notice anything unusual.
- Andrew Rosenthal, Editor
- (American History)
- Terry Tang, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
- (Economics, Law)
- Robert B. Semple Jr., Associate Editor
- (History)
- David Firestone, Projects Editor, National Politics, the White House and Congress
- (Journalism)
- Vikas Bajaj, Business, International Economics
- (Journalism)
- Philip M. Boffey, Science
- (History)
- Francis X. Clines, National Politics, Congress, Campaign Finance
- (none listed)
- Lawrence Downes, Immigration, Veterans Issues
- (English, Journalism)
- Carol Giacomo, Foreign Affairs
- (English Literature)
- Mira Kamdar, International Affairs
- (French Literature)
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, Agriculture, Environment, Culture
- (English Literature)
- Juliet Lapidos, Culture
- (Comparative Literature, English Literature)
- Eleanor Randolph, New York State, Northeast Region, Media
- (none listed)
- Dorothy Samuels, Law, Civil Rights, National Affairs
- (Law)
- Serge Schmemann, International Affairs
- (none listed)
- Brent Staples, Education, Criminal Justice, Economics
- (Psychology)
- Masaru Tamamoto, International Affairs
- (International Relations)
- Teresa Tritch, Economic Issues, Tax Policy
- (German, Journalism)
- Jesse Wegman, The Supreme Court, Legal Affairs
- (Law)
Did you notice that no one on that list, including the science editor, has a degree in anything related to math or science?
Now you might say, “Well, I’ve never heard of any of these people so why should I care what they think?” That’s a fair point.
But still, one has to give them credit for having made it in the big city, despite their lack of interest in math and science. So why encourage students to pursue educational goals that they themselves had no interest in, when this lack of interest has evidently not been a hindrance? Why is this a credible course of action?
Harvard Business Review: The Fine Art of Tough Love
He himself did not care what happened at the house during the day. There was no more reason for her to be curious about his work than for him to be concerned with the groceries, laundry, getting the children to school, and whatever else she did. Yet it would seem rude, almost brutal, to drop the pretense and admit that neither particularly cared what the other was doing. A display of interest, however shallow, made life easier.
You are afraid to face reality, oversensitive to the future and generally a poor mixer.
Wow, that’s frighteningly accurate . . .
Via LAist:
Do we try to make our life exciting so it looks good for our friends or do we really get to live our life?
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
From a Jeff Sutherland Scrum deck:
You can maximize the value delivered per unit of time or cost by shipping when the value curve starts to flatten out.
A few months back, we outlined the prediction ineptitude of baseball pundits, who went 0-for-63 on predicting either the Red Sox or Cardinals to make the World Series. In fact, not one pundit picked the Red Sox to win even their division.
Well, the MLB pundits now have some company, as none of the 30 college pundits we tracked (from ESPN, CBS, and NFL.com) picked either Florida State or Auburn to make the BCS Title game.
Almost all of the projects of social reformers of these days are really liberticide.
Unconstrained thinkers either do not recognize, or refuse to come to grips with, the fact that not everything that is good is worth the cost of its achievement — and that not everything that is bad is worth the cost of its obliteration. Unconstrained thinkers are also typically gripped by romantically unrealistic notions of the abilities of people wielding power, as well as of the trustworthiness of such people. Unconstrained thinkers, because they can imagine people with power exercising that power for the greater good and only for the greater good, are unwilling to suffer any imperfections in reality –- for why suffer such imperfections if a Great and Good Leader (or Great and Good Council) can possibly make the world a better place?
Today I took and passed the Cloudera Certified Developer for Apache Hadoop (CCDH) exam. Two resources were helpful to me in this successful endeavor:
Bettie Page Reveals All
The world's greatest pinup model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to help launch America's sexual revolution.Director: Mark Mori
Cast: Bettie Page, Hugh Hefner, Olivia de Berardinis
IMDb rating: 7.0 (1705 votes)
My family and I are enjoying a meal at a Japanese restaurant. In the booth behind me are a husband and wife and five kids, the oldest of whom looks to be about 12.
One of the kids, a boy of about 5, is standing up and running a toy car back and forth along the divider between his booth and our booth. He gets bored with that after a while and starts drumming on the divider with a pair of chopsticks.
The boy’s activities don’t bother me much . . . what bothers me is that it takes 15 minutes for one of the parents to tell him to stop it and sit down. He doesn’t do either and nothing else is said or done about the matter.
In the near future, this boy’s inability to sit still and follow directions will get him “diagnosed” by a schoolteacher as an ADHD kid, even though the real reason he can’t sit still and follow directions is that his parents never taught him to sit still and follow directions.
And folks, don’t have five kids. Raising a kid requires more than 20 percent of your attention.
The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend. — Aristotle
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. — Friedrich Nietzsche
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 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 Americans. Our smartest people are smarter than the smartest people in other lands.
You don’t think so? I’m looking at the list of winners of the 2013 Nobel Prizes . . . out of 11 recipients (I’m omitting the winners of the literature and peace prizes because those aren’t academic awards), eight are from the U.S. The other three are from Belgium, the UK and France, and the Frenchman is affiliated with Harvard University.
No one in Asian countries is winning any Nobel Prizes. Q.E.D.
Fast food workers staged a one-day strike for “living wages.” More specifically, they want the federal minimum wage to be raised from $7.25 an hour to $15.
You want to make a living wage? I’ll tell you how to make a living wage. I’ve had a lot of jobs and this method has never failed me.
Here it is: Before accepting a job offer, you always ask yourself, “Does this job pay enough for me to live on?” And if the answer is no, then you don’t take that job.
If you want to earn $15 an hour, do what I do: get a job that pays $15 an hour. Who’s stopping you?
If no one’s willing to pay you $15 an hour, it’s because the skills, intelligence and motivation that you bring to the table don’t allow you to do anything that’s worth $15 an hour. You need to do something about that. You need to be able to deliver $15 of value to an employer. Figure that out.
Setting the minimum wage at $15 is not going to help you. If you set the price of something at more than it’s worth, people are not going to buy it.
Imagine this: My friend Paul Epps is a programmer. Let’s say we passed a Minimum Wage for Programmers law that says that programmers must be paid at least $200,000 a year. Is that good news for Epps?
No, it isn’t.
His boss calls all the programmers into a meeting and says, “Well, according to the new Minimum Wage for Programmers law, I can’t hire any of you for less than $200,000 per year. You know what that means?”
“We all get a big raise?” Epps suggests hopefully.
“No, it means you’re all fired. Get out of here.”
Or imagine this: We pass a Minimum Price for Restaurants law that says you can’t get a meal in restaurant unless you pay at least $15 for it. What will that do to sales of Quarter Pounders and Jumbo Jacks?
People will stop buying those things. Many restaurants serve meals for which customers are willing to pay $15, but a fast food burger isn’t worth $15, even with fries and a drink, so people will stop buying those things.
