Category Archives: Technology

The Dumb Generation’s Hand-Held Devotional

Education, Family, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Pseudo-intellectualism, Science, Technology

In “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” it was observed that, while “Hollywood and the rest of the glitterati and literati make abundantly clear in all their tired scripts and messages that the older generation has nothing on the youth, especially when it comes to technology smarts—this is manifestly false. The electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain-wave activity are made, for the most, by ‘older people’ with advanced engineering degrees.”

In my opinion, the reason highly creative individuals in hi-tech are able to create for The Kids is that they have enjoyed the benefits of a less laissez faire, more traditional education, involving a core curriculum—and if lucky a literary canon—the hardest of sciences, discipline, all coupled with parental moral instruction and guidance.

Now it appears that these hi-tech elites are designing gadgets that stunt an already stunted generation.

WARNING. This NYT article about the effects of time spent interacting with electronics on socialization and intellectual development is itself a product of a disorganized mind. The writer seems incapable of deciding—and developing a systematic argument—as to whether a child’s focus on these passive, quick-fix electronic stimuli detracts from overall healthy socialization or stunts the ability to be alone.

Missing is a line or two as to the two states-of-being—solitude vs. togetherness—being facets of a healthy psyche.

I live with an individual who is intimately involved in the design of some wonderful gadgets. Yet he himself hardly uses them in the little spare time he steals for himself. They frustrate him; they don’t seem to satisfy his creativity or sate his intellect. His greatest pleasure is found in composing and playing complex thematic pieces of music in his home studio. To do so he follows eternal, timeless rules of composition. Low-tech, if you like.

Myself, I have no interest in hand-held devices. I use my well-appointed PC for work. Away from the PC—during a jog, for instance—I think. Ideas flood my mind during physical exertion and solitude. On the rare occasions that we both go away on vacation, we do not take our work along.

More @:

“Your Brain on Computers.”

Balderdash From Berkeley: Taxing Email To Fund Your Local Post Office

Free Markets, Government, Regulation, Taxation, Technology

Given a choice, why would you want to fund the United States Postal Service?

CNN: “A city councilman in Berkeley [where else?], California, floated the idea of taxing emails as part of a broader Internet tax that could be used… to fund your local post office.”

MATT WELCH, of REASON MAGAZINE:

This is like taxing, you know, horse and buggies or taxing cars to keep horse and buggies business. Why are we taxing the great new thing so that we can prop up the bad old thing? It’s completely backwards.
It’s — I mean, the fact that it’s coming in Berkeley, which is not a punch line, it’s the home of the free speech movement 50 years ago, for crying out loud. And we’re going to put a punitive tax on one of the greatest free speech instruments in our lifetime. It’s absurd and sad.
…there’s a thing called an e-mail filter. I mean, I don’t know what you use, but I haven’t seen my cousin from Nigeria e- mail for more than a year simply because there is a spam filter that works, a spam filter that no government gave me, no tax created, no bureaucrat. …
The government is not a jobs program. It just isn’t. It shouldn’t be, rightfully so. And so, the fact that Congress won’t allow a single post office to shut down is part of the problem. If you lift the mandate and open everything up to competition, it would be a much different story.

REIHAN SALAM of National Review:

We have these amazing things called private companies that have actually mostly solved this problem. These days, most of unsolicited mail you get goes into a spam folder and those services are getting better and better over time. … Already people are migrating from one technology that becomes crappy and clogged with spam to another technology. …What the post service does now, the bulk of what they send is what I like to call physical spam which is actually worse for the environment. It’s rather unpleasant and now the postal service is saying the federal government has undermined them by saying they’re saying we have to adequately fund our pension, that’s crazy talk.
And so postal employees are funding ads on my television that are visual spam that are telling us this is some grave injustice they should fund these crazy pension obligations they have built up over years. …
But I don’t see every other industry should have to subsidize postal carries, because they are struggling [and can] use those resources to provide innovative new services.

Read “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You” for my “seven-year saga” with the local post office worker’s “sadistic displays of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive ‘customers’ are pinned down like butterflies by ‘service providers.’ The discretion left to these petty tyrants is wide; fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.”

Sen. Graham: ‘Not Fair to Let President Get Hit.’ But What About The Drone’s Victims?

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Justice, Law, Technology, The Courts, War, WMD

Bloodthirsty neoconservative Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican Senator, supports President Obama’s drone policy, which, as I noted on 02.05.13, is being debated only because of the very public confirmation hearings for John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Sen. Graham says it’s not fair to leave the president out there on his own while he’s getting hit from libertarians and the left,” reports MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

I guess it’s fair to leave kids like little Shakira to brave the cowardice of Uncle Sam’s Assassin. As you see, not much remains of the child’s small, charred face.

The Los Angeles Times concedes that it is time “to press the architect of the administration’s policy of targeted killings about its legal rationale and practical application.”

…the document espouses a “broader concept of imminence” in which a suspect can be killed even when the U.S. government lacks “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” Another passage suggests that the determination of whether there is an “imminent” threat can take account of the fact that certain Al Qaeda members are “continually plotting attacks against the United States.”

Despite the horror of the concept of “Targeted killings”—and the violation of 4th and 5h amendment safeguards—the LA Times posits the need only to “limit” rather than “eliminate” this barbarism.

BHO Urges Future Google and Yahoo Founders To Come Out Of The Shadows of Immigration Illegality

Barack Obama, China, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Reason, Russia, Technology

“The time is now, now’s the time, now’s the time, now’s the time,” President Barack Obama banged away, while pressing for “comprehensive immigration reform,” in Las Vegas today.

Appeals to emotion and feelings have always dominated in Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary, if to go by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

Today’s address in Nevada was no exception. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a logical argument in the Obama immigration address. For example: the president waxed about legalizing the “11 million undocumented immigrants [residing] in America,” while at the same time praising the contribution made by their kind to the founding of great “businesses like Google and Yahoo.”

The 11 million voting bloc being targeted (and their extended families and villagers, who’ll be joining them somehow under family reunification laws) originates mostly from Latin American.

By Wikipedia’s telling, they tend to be, “as a group,” “less educated than other sections of the U.S. population: 49 percent haven’t completed high school, compared with 9 percent of native-born Americans and 25 percent of legal immigrants.”

Sergey Brin of Google, known as The “Enlightenment Man,” happens to be a Russian who graduated from Stanford.

And what do you know? Yahoo’s Jerry Yang’s alma mater is Stanford University too. He is originally from Taipei, Taiwan.

If the founders of Google and Yahoo were as rigorous as Obama with their algorithms—they’d have come up short with their innovations.