Money for Brains?

There's a teaser survey over at the Guardian that's a little tougher than the advertising-oriented BS surveys you normally see on the web. The salaries are in British Pounds, so divide your salary by 1.75 to convert if you decide to try it.

My results were rather complimentary, and (given my sample IQ of 135) reasonably accurate. It's too bad the whole premise is moronic!

What's not only inaccurate about the quiz, but dead wrong is the notion that we're paid based on our intelligence, or, more precisely, that our employment value and our intelligence should correspond. This is so wrong as to be stupid. Once you factor out supply vs. demand, we're paid based on our effectiveness. It doesn't take a Ramanujan to collect trash for a living, but Simple Simon the Pie Man might not be up to the task. There are many other virtues, such as education, integrity, diligence, ability to schmooze & negotiate, &c., that help determine our effectiveness. Most importantly, it's how hard one's willing to work that really matters.

The corresponding challenge, which needs human interaction of course, would be not how many you get correct, but how many you guessed on. So far as I can see, if you've got a hard problem, and you throw up your hands and guess, that's where the problem comes in. Far too many people just throw things to the wind. But if you try to solve the problem & don't know the right answer, but have a theory as to why your answer might be the right one, now that's important. If your theory is wrong, you can probably be shown how to correct it and get the right answers with enough practice.

Brains? Yeah, they're nice. But ability comes from focus and determination, not mere genetic endowment. Brains are some of what you deploy to get the job done, not the job. Hiring based partially on intelligence makes sense, but pay-scales?! Paying someone based on intelligence is no less stupid than paying a carpenter based on the number of hammers in his truck.

(Followup: SuperBiff scored 25!)

How to be an expert

Any of you aspiring to be teachers should be aware of this blog, run by the guy who published the "Head First ___" books. It's a great read and if I ever end up teaching algebra, I'll be following what he has to say like gospel.

However, this particular article is relevent to all of my "hitting people's fun" friends -- worth a little read.

The Return of Patriarchy

I'm not usually a fan of Foreign Affairs, as I think they're a little too fluffy, but that such an article is appearing there means that maybe reality is beginning to enter the ZeitGeist, namely, that the "family valued", aka the patriarchal, will inherit the Earth. I'm not sure why "inclined to breed" and "Patriarchal" are necessarily entwined, unless it's simply that rearing children properly takes so feminine attention compared to other activities. Believing as I do that people should aim for three children so as to err on the right side of 2.1 children, I still can't quite make the leap that this means "patriarchy" and traditional religion as such, but the dual theses are interesting:

1. In any region, cultural conservatives literally inherit the region by default, as they outbreed their liberal contemporaries.
2. Socialism inevitably causes demographic collapse, due to the State taking on the role normally played by the Family and thereby reducing marginal incentives to breed.

What's funny is that the second thesis, which is at once the more striking and the more important, is buried within an article supposedly about the first. Memetic engineering?

90% of US men over 60 now overweight

As the title link says, if you're over 60 and male, it's almost guaranteed you're overweight. The article goes on further to state that the average body mass index for women is 30 -- which means obese, and that's at all age groups. For men, 65% of folks over 20 years old are overweight (yours truly included) with 30% being obese. With modern health advances, we could lead happy productive lives until 80 on average, but with the weight problem besieging America, it's likely we'll spend our declining years miserable, sweaty and tired, with all the advances that medicine should be making being tied up in research for care of chronic conditions that we could wholly avoid. It's great that we've gotten a civilization in which the common man or woman can be so well fed relative to his or her exertions that obesity is common, but just because we can be so doesn't mean any of us want to be so. With more and more of our exertions being mental in nature rather than physical, what are we as a whole to do? We can try to get more exercise, which's realistic for those of us who enjoy some sort of sport, or who work as dishwashers (now that's exercise!), but for the rest of us, maybe the solution is poorer, less caloric food. We can put out incredibly calorly-laden food for cheap; if you haul sacks for a living, you should eat the double-cheeseburger and enjoy the high calorie to dollar ratio, but for us desk jockeys, perhaps the irony is that we should be paying more for less.

US gov't $25 mln from debt ceiling

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - The U.S. government has moved to within $25 million of its $8.184 trillion debt ceiling, the Treasury said on Friday, but it expects to stay below the limit for up to another month through stop-gap cash flow measures. The Treasury said its total public debt subject to the statutory debt limit rose $10.03 billion on Thursday to $8,183,975,000,000. Treasury Secretary John Snow, who has urged Congress to raise the debt limit, has said stop-gap measures could keep the government from defaulting on its financial obligations until mid-March. On Thursday, the Treasury said it would dip into a federal pension system fund by curbing daily reinvestments of the fund's assets in order to stay below the debt limit. Each day, the Treasury will retain a sufficient amount of the Government Securities Investment Fund, known as the "G-Fund," to keep below the debt limit, Treasury spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin said on Friday. She added that once the debt limit is raised, the Treasury will return the funds to the G-Fund and provide reimbursement for any lost interest earnings. The G-Fund, which had $65.27 billion in it as of the end of January, is typically reinvested daily by the Treasury. The Treasury also this week suspended sales of state and local government non-marketable securities, or SLGS, as a means of limiting its cash outflows. SLGS are sold to municipal bond issuers for the reinvestment of bond proceeds. McLaughlin declined to say when the Treasury may take other actions to keep below the debt limit. The Treasury also has said it could tap into the federal government's Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Civil Service Retirement Fund. The government's debt ceiling has been at its present level since November 2004, when Congress lifted it by $800 billion. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassely, an Iowa Republican, said on Tuesday that the Senate might wait until mid-March to raise the debt ceiling.

Just to put this in perspective, with the population of the US at 295,734,134 (last CIA factbook), this means that every man, woman and child in this country owes China, Japan, et. al. $27,673.42! Now, the debt-ceiling could be a short-term cashflow issue, and I'm sure the Dems will jump all over it as an example of Bush's financial mismanagement in order to keep their constituents righteous, but the debt-ceiling issue is small potatos compared to the real issue of the magnitude of the debt. With a median liquid net-worth (aka, home equity not included -- you gotta live somewhere!) of $18,000 or less ($10,000 and $5,000 for blacks and latinos, respectively), can anyone see why I'm so worried about foreign central banks' USD holdings? If China decides to stick it to us or the petrodollar regime collapses (either will do), you'll be seeing US Prime Rates of 15%, the retail sector (and retail-sector employment) imploding due to credit standards tightening like a noose, and the "wealth affect" of all that home equity evaporating as foreclosures of mortgages over the magic "80% of equity" begin.

We won the cold war because we forced Russia to spend as much as we did when Russia didn't have the petrodollar advantage to tamp down the real cost of their money. We must return to pre-Cold War spending habits before the vultures come home to roost, or we're screwed.

In the interim, boys and girls, pay down those mortgages!